PostSecret

Yo, I'm prolly a little late to the party on this one (I hear there's already been a bunch of news coverage), but somebody today showed me this dope website called:
http://postsecret.blogspot.com/

People send in their anonymous secrets on postcards and the dude puts 'em on this blog. Some funny shit. My personal favs thus far are

"Whenever I visit my elderly mother,
I steal something
because I know
when she dies
my siblings
will try to
screw me out of it"

and

"I don't
like wandering
through the middle
of clothing stores because I've
always been afraid of catching my eye
on the end of a clothing rack"

It's like this giant American subconscious on display. Love it!

P.S. Null, just make sure you got the Skynyrd all stocked up for the weekend. Guitarmaggedon 2: Rock happens at F-5, baby.

The First Annual Hurricane Marga-Rita Party!

Where: Bissonnet Village Apartments, 2nd Courtyard
When: When this bitch of a storm finally comes a-crashin' through
What: A fucking boozefest, you fools, because we'll have like 4 days off!
Who: Anybody and Everybody - we'll be rockin to the smooth sounds of Traffic
and ELO the whooooooooooole night!
Why: Because we're dumb as posts...

Bring your ice, your beer, and whatever type of alcohol (denatured ethyl especially) and we're gonna get bombed for this thing.

My City of Ruin

Excerpted from today's newspaper: "[Jean Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop], a piano bar, was supposedly the in-town headquarters of pirate John Lafitte, who owned more than 10 vessels and raided American, British and Spanish ships in the early 1800s. Located in the French Quarter, the area escaped flooding but remains closed."

A point of departure: I did not know that history on Lafitte's. But - like just about every other corner in NOLA - I suspected it had some kind of sordid and wonderfully charismatic story behind it. I find myself somewhere between Cory's hope and Colin's despair on this whole thing. I think the spirit of NOLA will survive, but as for its distinctiveness, I see Atlantis Lost.

I think 10 or 15 years down the road, we'll take our kids there and find a place Disneyized and sanitized. I wasn't alive to truly know the grit of Times Square in the 1980s, but the tales of it describe a very different place from the mall that it is today.

Which is okay, on one hand, because no one should ever fetishize poverty and NOLA was poor as all fuck. I was struck by this curious pattern: I heard no less than three newscasters stutter as they expressed surprise that we would ever refer to Americans as "refugees." What is THAT hubris? As though refugees are only brown people from hard-to-pronounce faraway countries? And have these newscasters ever heard that America has one or two blighted communities of her own?

Of all the idiocy that stands out in the aftermath of this tragedy, that Repent America pastor who said that NOLA had it coming because of the upcoming gay festival has to be tops on the list. Where do they get these morons? (A close second, from the other direction, are those jackass Germans who think that this is just deserts for the Kyoto Protocol walkaway. Good to see both the left and the right can be asinine at completely inappropriate times.)

What an unspeakable catastrophe. What an absolute meltdown. I can only imagine that the past six days in NOLA made John Carpenter's wildest visions look tame. What an appearance of absolute paralysis on the part of the government.

And how sad it is to have lost one of the last unique American cities. A city that was not simply the sum of track homes + Outback Steakhouse + Best Buy + Starbucks. I think what I'll remember most about New Orleans before the inevitable facelift arrives is this: few cities were more gorgeously, more hauntingly lit. That romantic dream of moving there for a year and being a degenerate drunk thrashing away at a novel... what is that Bruce said, "Is a dream alive that don't come true? Or is it something worse?"

Worse still - far worse still - is the dead and the homeless. Chances are NOLA was never that romantic dream for them, that mythic Atlantis.

- Serazio