Well Bottom Blues

I don’t think I going to watch the documentary on Hulu. I don’t need a documentary to tell me what happened, or how it happened. I watched closely from a distance until I returned home Memorial Day 2006 reoorting and editorialising the tens of thousands of words on my blogs for the next several years.

For starters Hurricane Katrina grazed Plaquemines Parish before leveling  the Mississippi Gulf Coast for the second time in living memory.  What New Orleans suffered I called The Federal Flood, which caught on as the term in the post-Flood blogosphere. The city was devastated because the levees we were told would protect us fail catastrophically.

The book excerpting that blog, Carry Me Home, is 48,712 words, and that was just a best-of of what I wrote on Wet Bank Guide from August 2005 until 2007. There are 41 chapters in Carry Me Home and 398 published blog posts on Wet Bank Guide. There are more posts on Toulouse Street – Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans.

I struggle to think what a documentary could tell me that I don’t already know. I know the answer to the journalist’s Five Questions because I was trained as a journalist, and recorded those three years as best I could.

Instead I just watched this as a tonic to how I am handling this anniversary. Maybe you need to be from here to appreciate it, but I’m no longer advocating for the city to the rest of the country. I’m only speaking to my people.