“Not a single thing do I remember from the first trip but this: the sense of the place, the savor of the genie-soul of the place which every place has or else is not a place. I could have been wrong: it could have been nothing of the sort, not the memory of a place but the memory of being a child.”
—Walker Percey
New Orleans is a strange place to live: just enough left of Caribbean not-America to be tolerable. Things mostly work most of the time even if they’re not as cheap as they used to be. If they break, it takes a while to get fixed. Most here donct know the phrase Insha’Allah but live it every day. The odd hurricane or drowning downpour. Second Line traffic jams. And Carnival, a parade and a pastry for every occassion or none at all, unique food and music that defies the northern preference for the insipid, the community of the corner store and the corner bar.
The godsons of cotton who run the place regardless of elections try to erase what is uncomfortably alien, the lazy anti-Anglo, our insistence that we work to live and do not live to work, ask each other not “what do you do” but “where did you go to (high) school.” They would likd to contain the living city in an Epcot exhibit modeled on Disney’s New Orleans Square but what lies beneath the city’s facades is as persistent as mold and mildew, difficult to erase, like a persistently embarrassing and identifying accent.
New Orleans is a comfortable cotton t-shirt laundered within an inch of its life, stretched to my form, emblazoned with personal significance; the beat flip flops I put on next, molded perfectly to my feet; shorts of course and a hat, always a hat for the subtropical sun and, yes, to let my freak flag fly.
Forget what the U.S. calls “America.” This is where you want to be.
Well Bottom Blues 
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