Wonderland

This has been an extraordinarily strange winter in New York, the lion-and-lamb effect of March having lasted the whole season, sometimes alternating from moment to moment within the same day. These photos were taken in one afternoon:

See what I mean?

Mark Twain once said, The coldest winter I've ever spent was summer in San Francisco. Having lived in San Fran, I know what he means. However, the coldest winter I've ever spent was winter in New York City. Ugh -- one in particular stands out when the bone-dampening chill matched my mood and lasted about as long. That was a very welcome spring.

Mark Twain also delivered one of my favorites, about one of my favorite cities:
New Orleans is a beautiful woman with dirty fingernails.

This was, of course, before 2005, before our fine government turned a blind eye to that beloved city, a place that is very close to my heart. About a year and a half after Katrina, I visited again, and my dear friend Keith took me for a drive around the lower 9th Ward. It was as if the storm had hit a month prior. It was incredible. We drove these once over-populated streets for 40 minutes before we saw a live human. I have some fairly disturbing photos from that trip -- not sure if this is the right forum for posting them. If you're curious, let me know, and I will post a few. Houses turned on their sides, crumpled on top of one another, plots of land where other houses once stood, still littered with Katrina's detritus, Water marks permanently etched onto buildings, abandoned businesses, graffiti offering salvation and, most disturbingly, the spray-painted notations from the searchers indicating how many bodies they expected to find, how many they did, how many dead, how many alive, etcetera.

As the song goes, Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?

I shall return.