monday, april 03, 2006
Beignet bandits and moldy molds
(Taken by my friend Ashley; I’m on the top left.)
So I skipped down Bourbon Street, wielded a crowbar or two, danced on the stage in a bar while quite sober, stared down black mold and fiberglass, felt aware of being an atheist among religious people, ate biscuits and canned pudding and little else, almost cried several times, slept in a gutted warehouse in the Ninth Ward, talked about boys, shoveled a million pounds of crumbled drywall, emptied floodwater out of a crab-boiling pot, staffed the coffee table at a free store, dragged muddy carpet out of a house, did not eat any meat, rode a free city bus while not sure where I was going, ate countless beignets, traipsed all over the French Quarter, listened to terrible country music, used a sledgehammer to smash walls, helped toss hundreds of cots into a semi, and took two very cold showers.
But mostly I was part of a group of twelve people who gutted two houses in New Orleans and gave some hope to a few people, and I had a crazy amount of fun with a few excellent friends (it would not have been a good trip without them). There were several hundred other people in Light City this week, and several thousand more over the past month or two. I think a lot of people had a good spring break this year.
I got used to the destruction very quickly — it didn’t bother me after a couple days, which was a little disturbing in itself. Looking for the right pictures on Flickr is difficult, though. The area looks like this; this seems somewhat similar to our trip. I may post more of my friends’ pictures later.
