A tree grows in Brooklyn. A willow weeps in Louisiana.
Let's allow our subject to broaden to growth and survival. Time and place. Let's speak of life's ephemeral moments and its indelible permanence. After all, we now face the onset of autumn, our annual changing of colors and the subsequent arboreal casts' shedding in preparation for frozen winter. A practice since long before Whitman, yet one that seems new each time around the bend. If you recall, Whitman did see a live-oak growing and I can't seem to remember just why I began writing about trees.
Ah, yes, Louisiana: that's where he saw it growing. That's also where last week's radar projected a giant windy cinnamon roll would reach this continent and wreak some serious shit on man and sedentary nature alike. There was some attention paid. We're talking multiple refreshments of The Weather Channel homepage, over-the-shoulder glimpses of televised weather reports in other people's homes, and a few attempts to see if Twitter had Isaac trending while I was relieving my bowels. It most certainly was and they most certainly were.
My first thought was for the health and well-being of all who lay in its path; their safety primarily, the preservation of their possessions and surrounding environs a not-insignificant, albeit distant, second.
As if.
I was thinking about me. True confession suggests noting that I wished Hurricane Isaac would not destroy New Orleans before I lived there. Bear in mind, never did it cross my mind that I hoped it would not destroy the crescent city while I lived there. After all, that would be a story. The hurricane leveling a great city before I could live there would be like talking about not seeing my favorite band because I couldn't swap my shift at the California Pizza Kitchen; like turning down sex with Dream Girl because I couldn't resist masturbating to a rerun of Silk Stalkings. It's describing something you would have done, but never did, and the whole moral of the story is that you'll seize any opportunity to tell a story.
I didn't want to be the guy who was going to move to New Orleans but then it got destroyed.
I didn't want to be the guy who thinks of another place to move just to keep in accordance with his calendar.
I didn't want to be the guy who gets lost any further.
I didn't want The Great Spirit to send me an additional, unequivocal semaphore that my lofty ambitions are entirely fucked.
But then, it didn't. And then, the clouds parted to reveal the post-storm landscape for what it was, and what it still remains. And we're not talking about a desire to wade through waist-high shitwater for its own sake, or for bragging rights as the experience's derivative. The point is that as I sat in air-conditioned coffee shops and condo-shaded wine bars, I saw a tree growing in Brooklyn. Several of them. For a few, their roots splintered the pavement at just that right distance between the curb and someone's front yard. For others, they were of middling height and undignified stature and placed as though they were the final answer of some coffee-addled Yale landscape architect's senior thesis. New York campaigns to plant one million trees. New York tells its dogs not to piss on this one here, that one there. New York sees a tree as an appreciable asset; something to dull the neon din of that goddamn Duane Reade across the way. In Louisiana, if it can remain through a Hurricane, so it shall remain.
And we're stepping back here. Projecting. Because there is the city where trees are a part of some vision for the next urban aesthetic, and there is the city that just wants a reminder that something can survive. The city that reinvents and the city that rebuilds. The city trying so hard to become that urban planner's wet dream, and the city that just wants to get back to what it was. Both are so desperate.
But then again, so am I.
And so I see a place where people live because it's close to the F train. And I see another where life must be so great that they would rather spend weeks bailing out the shitwater of dead neighbors than moving to higher ground.
Never eat in an empty restaurant. A teetotaler is not to be trusted. Aberrations abound, but show me the city nobody would ever struggle to live in, and I'll pull out the atlas and point out one million places that aren't New Orleans.
Bring on the shitwater; I see a Live-Oak growing.
Let's allow our subject to broaden to growth and survival. Time and place. Let's speak of life's ephemeral moments and its indelible permanence. After all, we now face the onset of autumn, our annual changing of colors and the subsequent arboreal casts' shedding in preparation for frozen winter. A practice since long before Whitman, yet one that seems new each time around the bend. If you recall, Whitman did see a live-oak growing and I can't seem to remember just why I began writing about trees.
Ah, yes, Louisiana: that's where he saw it growing. That's also where last week's radar projected a giant windy cinnamon roll would reach this continent and wreak some serious shit on man and sedentary nature alike. There was some attention paid. We're talking multiple refreshments of The Weather Channel homepage, over-the-shoulder glimpses of televised weather reports in other people's homes, and a few attempts to see if Twitter had Isaac trending while I was relieving my bowels. It most certainly was and they most certainly were.
My first thought was for the health and well-being of all who lay in its path; their safety primarily, the preservation of their possessions and surrounding environs a not-insignificant, albeit distant, second.
As if.
I was thinking about me. True confession suggests noting that I wished Hurricane Isaac would not destroy New Orleans before I lived there. Bear in mind, never did it cross my mind that I hoped it would not destroy the crescent city while I lived there. After all, that would be a story. The hurricane leveling a great city before I could live there would be like talking about not seeing my favorite band because I couldn't swap my shift at the California Pizza Kitchen; like turning down sex with Dream Girl because I couldn't resist masturbating to a rerun of Silk Stalkings. It's describing something you would have done, but never did, and the whole moral of the story is that you'll seize any opportunity to tell a story.
I didn't want to be the guy who was going to move to New Orleans but then it got destroyed.
I didn't want to be the guy who thinks of another place to move just to keep in accordance with his calendar.
I didn't want to be the guy who gets lost any further.
I didn't want The Great Spirit to send me an additional, unequivocal semaphore that my lofty ambitions are entirely fucked.
But then, it didn't. And then, the clouds parted to reveal the post-storm landscape for what it was, and what it still remains. And we're not talking about a desire to wade through waist-high shitwater for its own sake, or for bragging rights as the experience's derivative. The point is that as I sat in air-conditioned coffee shops and condo-shaded wine bars, I saw a tree growing in Brooklyn. Several of them. For a few, their roots splintered the pavement at just that right distance between the curb and someone's front yard. For others, they were of middling height and undignified stature and placed as though they were the final answer of some coffee-addled Yale landscape architect's senior thesis. New York campaigns to plant one million trees. New York tells its dogs not to piss on this one here, that one there. New York sees a tree as an appreciable asset; something to dull the neon din of that goddamn Duane Reade across the way. In Louisiana, if it can remain through a Hurricane, so it shall remain.
And we're stepping back here. Projecting. Because there is the city where trees are a part of some vision for the next urban aesthetic, and there is the city that just wants a reminder that something can survive. The city that reinvents and the city that rebuilds. The city trying so hard to become that urban planner's wet dream, and the city that just wants to get back to what it was. Both are so desperate.
But then again, so am I.
And so I see a place where people live because it's close to the F train. And I see another where life must be so great that they would rather spend weeks bailing out the shitwater of dead neighbors than moving to higher ground.
Never eat in an empty restaurant. A teetotaler is not to be trusted. Aberrations abound, but show me the city nobody would ever struggle to live in, and I'll pull out the atlas and point out one million places that aren't New Orleans.
Bring on the shitwater; I see a Live-Oak growing.
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