Seven years to live the metaphor
New Orleans — Los Angeles
Someone says that it takes seven years to learn what it means to live in New Orleans. Some people talk about how rats come out before dawn.
Someone comments “creativity bubbles out of the grime.” Graveyards are set above ground, is that why? The whole town sits below sea level, a collectively persistent attachment to perpetual geological doom, une belle mélancolie, this is how New Orleans appears to me, I get to judge and build illusions as a passer-by. Those who chose to stay couldn’t care less about what I think of their town, they can sense how hungry I am, and if I’ll eat the whole thing, or if I’ll leave them some, and they would be right to feel that way because every time I hear the whispers of visitors telling each other dim little tales on how to unlock the code of Nola I seek more obscure references, sliding doors of my contemporary choices creep in - if I had jumped aboard The Beasts of the Southern Wild back then I might have stacked up seven years and some change in New Orleans, I eye the moss, street lamps, the fern in the brick, I sniff the…
