I was sitting on my couch when it happened. It was a normal weeknight and we had just finished a dinner of spaghetti with my boyfriend’s amazing homemade red sauce. I was in a pair of yoga pants and an old t-shirt, my hair sloppily thrown into a ball on top of my head and held there by a threadbare scrunchy. I found myself overcome with irritation, swallowing bile and going on a ten-minute rant about how I was so sick of reading this crap. You see, yet another article had popped up on my Facebook feed that was billed as a love letter to New Orleans.
I’ve seen a dozen permutations of the same piece in the last few years— temporary transplants writing jasmine- soaked odes to the cracked sidewalks and the rich chicory coffee and the mysterious winding of the deep, dark Mississippi River. They’re always so heartbroken to be saying goodbye to whiskey-fueled nights at their favorite Bywater bar or bike rides through the Quarter. Inevitably, the author has spent just a couple of years in our city before penning their grand farewell opus. Well-meaning friends share these pieces on their pages and toss in some “only in New Orleans” tripe for good measure. And frankly, I’m over it.
I’ve read all the stories about how we’re now a booming tech mecca and young professionals are flocking here for an “authentic” experience. It’s easy to romanticize life here. I could pack my house to the ceiling with the tomes that have been written about the magic of this place. And they’re all right, after a fashion. But to me, none of those flowery things are why New Orleans matters. In light of all these misplaced, cloying odes to our city by people who don’t seem to understand it, I can’t help but reflect on the tenth anniversary of the failure of the levee system and the near-destruction of our city and wonder what my love letter would say.
I came to New Orleans as a relatively innocent 18-year old kid. My mother had been bringing me to the city for annual visits since I was born, and something in me always knew I would find my way here. I felt undeniably and magnetically drawn to this place in the same way that many other transplants attest to. My college experience was fun—raucous in all the right spots. That was, until the summer of 2005. I was about to enter my senior year and had moved to my first off-campus apartment. Mother Nature and the Corps of Engineers had other plans for me, though. Life after the storm is a bit blurry, but I finished school. Almost everyone I loved and had grown attached to left the city. I can’t say I blame them; rebuilding is ugly business.
With time, the initial shine of this place seemed to dull for me. New Orleans is an extraordinarily violent place. Income inequality is staggering and race relations are at a constant boiling point. My chances of being a victim here are much higher than they would be elsewhere—all things I took into consideration when I decided to leave. Twice. I made good efforts, you know? Austin was booming, and what better place to set up shop as a music journalist? Then it was New York (or Brooklyn to be more specific). Bright lights, big city. Each time, something held me back. I stomped my feet and screamed at those picturesque oak trees, lamenting that I was never going to get out of this swampy hell full of man-eating potholes, and would spend my life playing the increasingly morbid game of “gunshots or fireworks?”
So I said fine, I’ll stay. That was seven years ago. My plans had collapsed, so I adopted a dog. He was this boxy golden thing with soft ears and a quiet, loyal disposition. I got my own place. I started writing for Antigravity. I gave up fighting my life here. I opened myself up to knowing my city in an unflinching and intimate way, beyond Mardi Gras and Saints fever and crawfish season. And that’s when I saw it, the whole big picture. Back in 2006, Dirty Coast released this shirt with a gorgeous piece of artwork on it. It was a skull, woven through with vining foliage and an upside down fleur-de-lis emblazoned on it. Below the skull was flowing French text that translates to “The beauty of entropy.” And that’s when it hit me. That’s really the single most important characteristic of New Orleans.
New Orleans is an old city. And from its founding, chaos has been in the soil. Life here is a delicate balance. It’s violent. The oppressive heat can snatch your breath away. Our politicians are crooked, inept buffoons. The grand homes of St. Charles, with their stately columns and manicured lawns, butt up to narrow, dilapidated shotguns with rickety porches and doors that don’t quite fit their frames. Even the education system is racist. There are so many things wrong with this place. But there are also so many people who love it and want to keep it afloat. New Orleans inspires a dedication that borders on insanity. It’s something I’ve never seen anywhere else.
I can admit freely that I am high strung and my ability to control things is literally paramount to my ability to deal with life. If that feeling is foreign to you, just know that it can be a real achilles heel. Chaos is my mortal enemy. You can’t color-code it and it won’t fit neatly into checkboxes on your to-do list. And the chaos that underpins life here can eat you if you let it. Face down in a puddle of your own sick isn’t the way you want to say goodbye, but that’s the fairytale ending some people find in this town. The party-every-night lifestyle can be sustained here like nowhere else, but all good things come to an end. If you plan to really make New Orleans your home, the first thing you have to master is where to draw that line. Because the city won’t do it for you. In fact, it will gladly erase all your lines if you don’t watch closely.
Every time I find myself standing in a stress desert of my own making, I walk out my front door and remember that I live in the middle of an ocean of madness. In measured doses, entropy can rescue you from yourself. My favorite thing about New Orleans is that it’s any other city, until I don’t want it to be. On a Tuesday night, I can eat baked chicken and watch Netflix just like someone in small town Oklahoma might be doing. But if I’d rather not? If my soul needs a bit of lightening? I can head off to any number of restaurants and have a meal so satisfying and expertly crafted that it will remind me what it means to be alive. Or I can slide on to a barstool in an appropriately dark bar and have an engrossing conversation with a total stranger. Or maybe I’ll go somewhere and dance until my mind becomes a blurry void, serenaded by a stunningly broad spectrum of musical genres. If my anxious mind won’t stop running in circles, I can go physically run in circles, under a canopy of sprawling oaks, alongside those 200 year-old mansions.
But all this can also be a devil’s bargain. Chaos, ultimately, is what makes our politics so rotten. Our mayor will show up and hold a press conference about graffiti on the walls of an artisanal food court shadily shoehorned into the ghetto, but children are unloading firearms at each other in broad daylight over a crumpled plastic bag of weed and he has nothing to say. Chaos is what has me sitting on my couch right now, unshowered and drinking bottled water because we have been under a boil advisory for more than a day. But it’s worth the fight. It’s worth the tears. It’s worth our dedication. And on this momentous anniversary of that closest of close calls, I choose to remember not just the idealized images and ideas that brought me here, but also the tough, beautiful reality that kept me here. In an effort to honor and keep the city that gifted me such a deep understanding of myself, I decided to have those words— La Beaute d’Entropie—permanently inscribed on my body as a pledge to myself that I will always let just a little bit of chaos in.
