Last night was a potentially lovely evening that somehow ended up being a bit horrible. We had a nice dinner at Clancy's, one of our favorite Uptown restaurants (where I shall soon become family of a sort -- my half-sister is marrying the maitre d's nephew), perfect in every respect except that the meunière sauce on my flounder was a touch too sweet. The shrimp remoulade made up for it, though. Having had a dreadful rendition of the dish earlier in the week by a once-great chef who has fallen far in the world -- the poor, pristine Gulf shrimp had virtually no remoulade sauce on them, and were forced to parade across the plate as naked as Bourbon Street strippers -- I appreciated having a version of the dish that actually contained remoulade sauce.

Unfortunately, the people at the next table -- restaurant people from New York, from the sound of it -- were talking about restaurants that were destroyed in the storm, and they mentioned the "three concrete steps" leading up to Sid-Mar's -- all that's left of this once-wonderful seafood restaurant on the Seventeenth Street Canal. Sid-Mar's will not be coming back, at least not in that unique and perfect location, as the Army Corps of Engineers has appropriated the land to build some floodgates. Floodgates are good, I suppose, but it's hard to know that I'll never again sit on that screened porch eating boiled crawfish and drinking Dixie. I didn't want to picture those three steps leading to nowhere, not just then.

After dinner we drove to the Quarter for coffee and beignets at Cafe du Monde, a place I hadn't been in maybe five or six years. It was nearly empty, though, and there was a sad, bleak feeling to the Quarter, and I realized it would be a long time before I could see St. Louis Cathedral lit up at night and not think of fucking Bush standing in front of it promising to "do whatever needs to be done." Then I realized I hadn't seen the river in ages, so we climbed up to the Moonwalk and went down the stairs to the dark, shining water, and it was beautiful and romantic, and yet somehow none of it was any good, not last night. I came home and cried and Nathan licked the tears off my face. He is shaping up to be the Nicky of my middle age (Nicky was the Siamese who got me through a rocky adolescence; he died a few years ago at 17).

Sometimes I catch myself thinking that we are in a time of war; if we are all very brave and endure the hardships, the enemy will go away and things will be just as they were before. Even worse, sometimes I find myself believing that it really is all still there, the Lower Ninth Ward and Lakeview and my house and everything; it's just that I've gone away for a while and can't go there. As if I've temporarily moved to Australia or something. I'm used to magical thinking; hell, I do it for a living, but these are dangerous forms of it and I want to expunge them from my consciousness. It's not going back to the way it was, and I am not in Australia; I am in Fourth World New Orleans and I'm going to be in a world of hurt if I forget that. I've been doing a lot of interviews lately, and will do more as Soul Kitchen's publication approaches, and of course they all want to know about it. It's not their fault. Why shouldn't they? But we used to live in a place that was the object of the world's wonder and envy, and now we are the object of pity when people care at all. We are solely defined by one thing we did not ask for and could not control, one thing that broke us, yet left some of us, like Ishmael, bobbing in the water to tell the tale. And we have to tell it, just as he did. But oh, it hurts.

Then this story on the front page this morning. Bad enough to read it, but without the accompanying photographs, you don't see the family pictures still hanging on the walls of the houses as they are bulldozed, the glimpses into people's ruined lives revealed as they come crashing down.

Anyway, I'm very tired today. I think I'm going to go check the PO box, then go back to bed and read until the sun goes down.

When watching your city's televised mayoral debate gives you alternate bouts of hysterical laughter and uncontrollable sobbing:

A. Your city is really, really fucked up.

B. You are going insane.

C. Both A and B.

The candidates' positions as far as I could determine them:

MITCH LANDRIEU: New Orleans needs leadership.

RON FORMAN: New Orleans needs to get some goddamn shit DONE.

C. RAY NAGIN (incumbent): Everything I say gets twisted by the media. It's not fair.

REV. TOM WATSON: Rosa Parks sat down, but I'm running.

PEGGY WILSON: African-Americans can come home if they have good jobs, but we need to keep those nasty niggers out.

JAMES AREY: I support the arts.

LEO WATERMEIER: We should gets whites involved in the Martin Luther King Day celebration.

ROB COUHIG: I can change this city by the sheer strength of my pissed-offedness!

VIRGINIA BOULET: I can do incomprehensible financial transactions that will make money for New Orleans, but I'm not saying where I'm going to spend it.

I mean, how can you not laugh, cry, puke, run screaming around the room, throw yourself out the window, etc? And those are only the "serious" candidates -- there are 14 other real wingnuts, one of whom is 23, one of whom is known primarily for her collection of cowboy hats (Greg Stillson!), and one of whom is currently in jail. A few days ago I said I'd probably vote for Mitch Landrieu. He is still the most palatable choice, but Ron Forman sounded like the only one who had any idea of what to do or how to do it. He has certainly transformed Aududon Zoo from a cruel, embarrassing disgrace into a top American zoo and built the excellent Aquarium of the Americas/IMAX. That may not sound like much, but in New Orleans, it's the equivalent of having built the Empire State Building. Perhaps I will put a Landrieu sticker on my car, then sneak out in the dead of night wearing a false mustache and vote for Forman.