Confessions of a Book Store Owner

We’re in the hotel in Harvey, outside New Orleans. We started our journey leaving Wichita at 9:45 last night. Within three hours, we’d almost crashed, had a horrifying encounter in Tulsa with a possessed psychopathic crackwhore, and had a run-in with the police that involved me having to sit in a patrol car for ten minutes. We got horribly lost from about 1:00 to 2:00 am, trying to figure out how to cross from Oklahoma in to Texas. Made it to Louisiana before 8 am… Yes, we got from Kansas to Louisiana in under 10 hours, an accomplishment no matter how you look at it. We had breakfast at Waffle House in Shreveport.

Spent the better part of the day navigating the sugar cane plantations, bayous, and dubiously functional gas stations of Louisiana. We were in New Orleans by 1pm, and somehow made it to our hotel before 2. 

May I add we did all of this with no directions, only an atlas of Texas and Louisiana, and an address for the hotel. Jordan negotiated communication with hillbilly sherpa locals to get us to New Orleans, and I navigated the freeway system to locate Harvey somewhere in the midst of West Bank.

Oh and might I add, I have been awake for 35 hours…. which was preceded by 4 hours of sleep.

I look like I’m dead.

Home of Cathedral de Saint Louis, Aunt Sally’s Pralines, the Audubon, Anne Rice, Allison Harvard, Reverend Zombie’s House of Voodoo, Tulane University, and Tabasco. 

We will see most if not all of these while on our journey. Anne Rice, Allison Harvard, and the Audubon are iffy, but at least Anne Rice has been invited to the wedding we’re going to, sooo….

(Jordan, you best be down with this shit, because I ain’t leavin till we get it all done)

• Meet Anne Rice (it’s cool,  we’re going to a wedding she’s supposedly attending) 
• Stock up on voodoo goods (for Jordan’s new job, and just for… welll… whenever you need to do some voodoo)
• Get blessed at the Cathedral de Saint-Louis
• Get blessed by a voodoo priestess, just for good measure (preferably in the back of a laundromat)
• Sit around Cafe du Monde, smoking, drinking coffee, reading, and writing (if you’re not down with the stereotypical artsy experience, well, fuck you. I bought like six Moleskines today SPECIFICALLY for this purpose)
• Shop(lift)ing spree down St Anne street
• Aunt Sally’s Praline Shop. Once again, you’re not allowed to say no
• Pay our respects at Marie Leaveau’s grave
• Find the Before I Die installation art thingywhatsit
• Go absolutely CRAZY on Halloween and sleep in our cars
• oh and also document it all with cameras so we can make a cutesy scrapbook when we get home

Electrophoresis is the process of moving particles through a fluid in response to an electric field. 

In a biology class once, we measured the frequency of certain combinations of nucleotides in strands of DNA by mixing samples of DNA with a blue dye and one of several different enzymes, each of which separated the strand of DNA in between two specific and known nucleotides. Each of the samples was injected into a well in a block of agar (basically, Jell-O made from seaweed), and then moved through the agar using electrophoresis. The shortest strands (those which had been broken many times by the enzyme, ie, had a large proportion of that particular pairing of nucleotides) of DNA could move much further in a given amount of time than the longer strands in a given amount of time, and we could track their progress because of the dye.

After the experiment, this one boy said he wanted to do that for a living, so we talked about the applications of electrophoresis. He could work in a laboratory, conducting electrophoresis for any number of industries. No, he said. he just wanted to do electrophoresis. 

The teacher was confused. There are lots of places where one could be employed conducting electrophoresis…

No, this guy didn’t want to be employed. he didn’t want to be doing electrophoresis FOR somebody. He just wanted to do electrophoresis as a career.

The teacher started again. Do you mean as a private contractor?

No, no, no, not FOR anyone. I just want to do electrophoresis.

How will you do that as a living, if you’re not doing it for anyone?

This kid thought for a moment. Finally, he said, “I could be a street performer.”

You don’t often consider that a person playing jazz on the street could just as easily be hired somewhere, but that they’d rather be doing it for themselves than ‘for’ anyone else. Or that the guy spray-painted silver pantomimes machinery not because he’s unemployable, but because he’d rather do this than be doing anything else ‘for’ somebody. New Orleans comes to mind because it’s got to be the highest concentration of people anywhere in the world who do things they want to for themselves and nobody else.

And every time I go to the French Quarter, I pray I see this kid, sitting on a bench in front of Jackson Square, scientific goggles on, conducting electrophoresis for an onlooking crowd. Because if he’s conducting electrophoresis in the basement of some laboratory, I think that’d break my heart. 

cajunboy:

defendneworleans:

H&M, the Swedish fast-fashion company, reportedly is eyeing former Borders bookstore locations for future stores. H&M doesn’t have any stores in Louisiana, and a move into this market would make young, budget-conscious fashionistas fall over with joy.

The Baton Rouge Business Report, quoting real estate consultants, reported this week that H&M and Best Buy are among companies looking at the former Borders locations.

Source: TP

I’ve been saying for some time that H&M would make a killing in Nola. If this happens, we’re another step closer to New Orleans becoming the new New York.

Cool, can this please happen before I return at the end of October? =D

When she was a little girl, her family was poor. Very, very poor. Their house du jour was on the same block of Salcedo as a bakery that made lemon pies. All she ever wanted was a lemon pie. Her family had a boarder, and finally her mother told her that the next he paid rent, she could have a lemon pie. His rent was due in three weeks. She counted down the days. On the twentieth day, Mr McCann was in the bathroom quite a while before someone went to check on him. He had drank carbolic acid and died.

Sometimes, life is like that.