New Orleans, LA :

A black bean burger and guitar advice from Marilyn Manson's original lead guitarist (or so his girlfriend told me). While drunk as he was, he accused the bartender of practicing voodoo, Mississippi John Hurt playing on the jukebox. Lay Me A Pallet On Your Floor. And could she have, or would she have. But who was she, or who was I? As she walked to the jukebox and playfully chose Heart's 'Magic Man'. As the guitarist began to argue with the delta bluesman beside him – white as he was, the both of them were – about Ozzy, and Zappa, and RL Burnside; the New Orleans night turning into morning, and people still surviving, flood waters still subsiding.

And only a cool night, a gray night, a winter's impossibility – in an open-eyed city, a bloodied city raging with murder and corruption, but friendly – she walks down the street talking on her cellphone and still says hello friendly, caught well up inside itself friendly, where histories of such diversity, of blues and jazz born sandwiched between a lake and the river's almost-delta might close themselves. Where enough is enough and no more. But more. And more.

How will we save this city? This impossible, below sea-level city – in which so much of us is implicated, wherein so many of us were born – of slavery and intermarriage, crossing border and language and any hope of achieving the blessings of the familiar, swollen into one another, pregnant with circumstance, with color, with death and life woven, hope-fear tied, tied to a past that's no more. And more. And more...