what’s it like?

People ask me what New Orleans is like these days. Well, this city is hard to take this time of year. It’s hot. Burn-your-bare-feet-on-the-porch hot. Eighty-five degrees at 8 a.m. hot. The onslaught of summer, legendary in these subtropic parts, arrived with a thunderous wallop about a week ago. You can practically hear the sidewalks cracking, the dirt baking in pots, leaves wilting, concrete gasping. The tension building.

Spring is officially Over.

And with the heat, crime rates spike. More murders, more robberies, more car theft. School’s out, or about to be, and that means lots of bored juveniles with time on their hands.

Hurricane season starts in a few days. The levees are stuffed with newspaper.

I don’t even read the local news any more.

The past few days, I’ve seen several people walk into oncoming traffic, clearly ripped out of their skulls. Homeless, wasted, drunk, tricking, scouting, high. People here are broken and it’s getting worse.

The air you could weigh on a digital scale. Five pounds per square inch of blistering yellow heat. Like someone dropping a rubber hammer on top of your head repeatedly as you walk down the street. Lifting one’s knees requires supreme effort; we stoop under the wet, steamy, sex-stained bed sheet draping the breasts and navel of uptown and downtown, the pelvis of the swamp. Everything sticks to everything else.

God help you if you’ve been drinking and have to catch a bus.

People are hiding, not answering their phones, staying tucked inside, away from the sweltering shimmers, from the hallucinations, from the unrelenting headaches and boredom turned bloody.

I feel a heavy dread this time of year, like something awful is about to happen. Waiting for the plane engine to come crashing through my roof. Waiting for the wave. For the bomb. For the heart attack. For silence.

New Orleans is a sweaty cess pool, don’t let anyone tell you different. It’s a gorgeous, dynamic, sexy, vivid cess pool, but a cess pool nonetheless. The edges fray. Roses smell best when they’re dying and all that noise.

Such is the source of inspiration.

I can’t imagine living anywhere else.