Where do you want to be

New Orleans is sinking. Will sink.

I remember the first time: I was in an internet cafe in Laos. It was 2005, the days of weekly emails home and transferring photos onto CDs – and I pulled up the NY Times and I saw these pictures…
It didn’t make sense.
It was the first time, perhaps, when something happened that I could not conceive of people allowing to happen. (Not the last.)

And I was in New Orleans, before that, the first time the world ended: December 31, 1999. The night the planes would fall from the sky because computers didn’t know tomorrow wasn’t 1900.
I don’t remember sleeping on that trip, except at the very beginning. We missed our flight (Jason’s fault; not mine) and couldn’t reach anyone when we arrived (after several quarters in the payphone at the back of the local dive), so we ended up sleeping on Eric’s porch until he got home from work. We’d brought sleeping bags because although he and his roommate, Feyde (not her real name; goth girls didn’t use their real names in those days), were renting an entire house, they had no furniture.
After that – the next day, or the next – it was New Year’s Eve, and we spent the night in Jackson Square and Pirate’s Alley, and were still awake the next morning when the fire department came and hosed the streets down at 6am.
(I don’t remember eating anything either, aside from pear cider and sugar cubes, both from Pirate’s Alley. I was only 19 but Eric and Jason were both 22. I assume the sugar cubes were for absinthe; it being New Orleans; there were bowls of them on the bar, like peanuts.)

Recipe: Pasta Puttanesca, in honor of the Baudelaire orphans, and because it's tasty.