I went back to new orleans for the first time in three years last february. I got there just as the crush of mardi gras was rushing in and the puke was starting to flow into the streets. I got picked up by some friends at the airport on an overcast evening just after my plane had landed after encountering some nasty turbulence. I paid 90 bucks for the ticket and had to transfer twice, and after swaying side to side violently and then dropping fifty feet in the air over lake pontchartrain before gliding smooth again, the plane finally landed. I arrived to a pick-up truck filled with good friends and salvaged rotting produce.

The New Orleans that I encountered this time around was a far cry from the city I said goodbye to in November of 2004 as I barrelled north on a freight train out of the Norfolk Southern Yard across Lake Pontchartrain so many years back. This was a city that had been struck a blow. It was so quiet from what I remember, still holding it's stomach as it got back up from the ground. The mississippi river still lumbered by the casinos effortlessly and the New ORleans Public Belt Railroad still rumbled by Jackson Square with a late night growl in the tangerine midnight light, but everything now seemed so quiet, so sucker-punched and outta breath.

It had been so long since I'd been in that city,  living huddled up in the attic space of an abandoned jazz hall at the end of canal street for two months as the rain poured down around us and me and all of my friends tried to figure out ways to dodge warrants. It wasn't my city after all, but who can really say that that city is? It's love is fleeting, more fleeting and scattered than the love of any other city in the country. Nobody can OWN New Orleans. Other cities, they can own you. You can't escape their gaze and their effect on your perspective no matter how much you try. But Nobody can claim that about New Orleans, it's love is all over the place, like somebody you fall in love with who's spread themselves too thin.

The saturn bar on St. Claude wasn't the same anymore, either - the old man who owned the joint had died a few months after the hurricane, and now his cousin or son or some distant relative had taken over the place and put a flat-screen t.v. over the corner of the bar and cleared out all the wonderful clutter the previous owner had collected over the years and had stashed in amassed piles around the wooden balcony. THe place looked semi-clean now, even though the curled photographs of old friends from twenty years ago still adorned the walls as did the bad but charming paintings of palm trees and swamp shacks.

The next day I was riding down Urquhart Street in the ninth ward taking pictures of cypress trees and their cones. It was a bright and sunny day, and some young kids across the street in a shotgun house saw me with my camera and white skin and shouted out "Yo mothafucka, we know you the PO-LEECE!". I just looked at them as they slowly dragged themselves up the steps into the house, gradually taking their resentful looks with them.

The day after I came back to the same tree and seen one of the kids kicking it outside on the steps of the same shotgun house. "what're you doin?" he asked me, this time slightly more curious than angry at the idea of what I was doing. "These are cypress trees. They get big, and they get old. They're related to redwoods, the big-ass trees that grow in california, thats where I'm from. I'm just into this shit, that's why I take pictures of it." "Oh, word?" he said back, slightly interested.

A few nights later I  listened to the bar-tender at a gay bar in the marigny tell us about how his house flooded and the water wouldn't stop rising, even as the sun came out again and the weather once again came to resemble that of the tropical paradise of the gulf coast in the summer.

Out of an asshole One can only harvest a turd...

All the sudden it's a shock that major hollywood icons and music celebrities are doing and saying offensive, racist, homophobis, anti-semitic brutal things that wreak of a hint of subtle violence.

I don't understand how the public is blown away by learning that these people (Kramer from Seinfeld - i don't know the douchebag's real name-, Mel Gibson, etc.) are lousy nitwits with no spine and a plethora of fucked up, racist issues. What else can you expect from somebody's who's not only a. RICH but even worse, is also 2. A CELEBRITY.

Yes, you fucking hoodwinks, combine arrogance and wealth and you will get a piece of shit. You can't make a dog piss wine.

If you're around a computer with a fast connection I suggest you go to google video or youtube or some bullshit and look up the kramer video. It's basically footage of the piece of slime at some LA comedy club being heckled by some members of the audience who happen to be black. He's unable to take the (relatively harmless) affront to his ego, so he calls the heckler a "nigger" (while the audience gasps) and says "fifty years ago we'd have you hanging up side down from a tree with a fucking fork up your ass"...then he goes on to make an ass of himself and dig himself into a hole (not only by being an over racist, but also because he's acting like a butt-hurt ten year old and he's simply not funny). Maybe he was on coke or speed or some shit. He's literally acting crazy.

It's even funnier (in a laughing-at-the-douchebag kind of way) because the fucking jadrool apparently doesn't know he's being filmed - the footage came from somebody's cell-phone video recorder. Now he's forced to eat his foot.

Two weeks ago, somebody filmed two white LA pigs beating the shit out of a handcuffed man. The story made it on cnn, and though the officers probably didn't get reprimanded at all for it, somebody was still there to videotape it, from their FUCKING CELL PHONE.

 I'm finally beginning to see the beauty of technology. 

I've been lax in terms of posting any bullshit on here in a while. I must say that I will remain lax until the duration of my imprisonment in sacto is up.

I watched cnn today in the motel room this morning. The news consisted of reports about armed robberies for playstation 3's, o.j. simpson's new book, and the marriage of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, with a separate report expounding on the workings of scientologist wedding ceremonies (just in case we were curious).

Rememer when, five years ago, in the weeks before 9-11, all sorts of inane, completely irrelevant garbage-reports dominated the news and served as fluff headlines, and the stories played on repeat...that is, until 19 religious maniacs piloted airplanes loaded with passengers into large buildings on the east coast?

Suddenly, reports about britney spear's risque outfits, missing washington  floozies, and shark attacks dropped out of the news faster than a turd drops out of a dog's ass.

Of course, the coverage of inane, irrelevant bullshit is to be expected of the major networks and local newspapers. It's easy to remember the reason why it's better to, whenever possible, stick with BBC (available on PBS) or the New York Times.

But while we're on the subject of inane news coverage, I'd like to report that I heard on the radio today that a sea lion attacked and bit fourteen civilians at aquatic park back in SF. While irrelevant, it was definitely a pleasant thing to wake up to.