Goodbye and Good Luck

As most folks who have read my blogs for any time are aware, I moved to New Orleans at the beginning of August 2005, just three weeks before Katrina.

For two years thereafter I lived a peripatetic life moving from place to place, part time in New Orleans, part time in San Francisco, a brief time in North Carolina, always semi-docked in Petaluma and anchored in New Orleans. Then, just over two years ago (almost exactly two years after The Thing), I gave up the basic struggle of bouncing back and forth between the Gulf Coast and The West Coast and came back to California. At the time, I made the assumption that at some point in the relatively near future I would regroup, fix the problems that I was still juggling like so many oddly sized balls, and find my way back to The Crescent.

What happened instead was that I found new love, and new life, right here in the place from which I had spent many previous years running. As I explained in several posts (including the one immediately prior to this one) I found myself surprisingly at home in the very place I thought I could never be at home.

But this didn't change one thing about my previous abbreviated grounding in New Orleans. I have for the past two years, despite living my life out in Petaluma, lived on the feeling - and the longing - that I would some day soon make it back home to NOLA.

For the last six months I've been building those old hopes on the enjoyable, and financially fortuitous, surprise job of Twittering (and blogging and facebooking) for The Hotel Monteleone and Carousel Bar on Royal Street in The French Quarter. There were significant frustrations in this process because the whole time I was doing it, I was sitting here in my little apartment 2500 miles away, sometimes pretending to be in The Quarter, sometimes pretending to be at Jazz Fest; always placing myself in those places that I know so well, and literally imagining myself into those locations.

It worked too! There were many times when the fact that I was communicating about and for New Orleans really placed me mentally right there. It was as if I was dreaming at my computer as I wrote to, and related with, people in the place I so longed to be. It was a great imaginary exploration.. and it was a lot of fun. At the same time, I worked to build up additional connections and relationships and I kept hanging on to the connections that still remained from that time when I first moved to the city, four years ago in another world... another life... another reality.

Not any more.

Earlier this week I was replaced in my Twitter job by the local PR firm and the in-house promo people at The Hotel Monteleone. As a friend of mine says, "without so much as a boo... hey... or kiss my ass" I was told in an email to stop immediately. I was then promptly locked out of the accounts that I created and that I had been dedicatedly relating from within. I had placed myself - however virtually - into the person I created (a sort of amalgamation of my every day self, but more my "New Orleans self" than "my California self") to represent the hotel and to relate both personally and professionally to folks with whom I interacted. Since being let go... the replacements at Hotel Monteleone have turned the interaction into an infrequent and impersonal interaction purely based on self-promotion, and in my opinion completely wrong for Twitter... but hey... that's another story.

What I'm trying to communicate right now is the combined sense of loss, grief, homesickness and new life that I am experiencing as a result of this interaction and outcome.

The simple fact is that I feel released.. I feel found... I feel free!

Four years ago next week I returned to New Orleans as people gradually began to move back into the ghost town laid bare by Katrina. I was determined to make life work. I was determined to go "home." I was determined to stay. This last six months has been the way out of the lock that my meteorologically aborted migration to The Big Easy has held me in for the past four years. I've gone round and round, back and forth only to find - like Dorothy returning from The Land of Oz - that home was right here with me all along.

There will be many days, and many moments when I still miss New Orleans. I hope to return there from time to time for rest, or work, or play, but it is not my home any more... maybe it never really was.

I live in Petaluma... in California... on the Western edge of the Continent and I am happy here.