Occasionally I'm asked by friends Not From Here, "New Orleans is better now, right? You had Mardi Gras!" or "Are you doing OK?" or some variation. Sometimes, particularly if they're contemplating a visit, I even try to reassure them: it's very possible to have a good, safe time here; the French Quarter is fine; lots of restaurants and bars are open. In truth, though, New Orleans and most of its inhabitants are very much Not OK. I present to you a baker's dozen facts about life in the city as of March 31, 2006, seven months after the federal levees failed. Some are large, some small. I think many of them will surprise you.

1. Most of the city is still officially uninhabitable. We and most other current New Orleanians live in what is sometimes known as The Sliver By The River, a section between the Mississippi River and St. Charles Avenue that didn't flood, as well as in the French Quarter and part of the Faubourg Marigny. In the "uninhabitable sections," there are hundreds of people living clandestinely in their homes with no lights, power, or (in many cases) drinkable water. They cannot afford generators or the gasoline it takes to run them, or if they have generators, they can only run them for part of the day. They cook on camp stoves and light their homes with candles or oil lamps at night.

2. There is a minimal police presence, and most of it is concentrated in the Sliver. Homes in other parts of the city are still being looted, vandalized, and burned.

3. Many parts of the city have had no trash pickup -- either FEMA or municipal -- for weeks. Things improved for a while, but now there are nearly as many piles of debris and stinking garbage as there were right after the storm.

4. There are no street lights in many of the "uninhabited" sections, which makes for very dark nights for their residents.

5. Many of the stoplights, including some at large, busy intersections, still don't work. They have become four-way stops (with small, hard-to-see stop signs propped up near the ground) and there are countless wrecks.

6. There is hardly any medical care in the city. As far as I know, only two hospitals and an emergency facility in the convention center are currently operating. Emergency room patients, even those having serious symptoms like chest pains, routinely wait eight hours or more to be seen by a doctor. We have, I believe, 600 hospital beds in a city whose population is approaching (and may have surpassed) 250,000.

7. Most grocery stores, many drugstores, and countless other important retail establishments are only open until 5, 6, or at best 8:00 PM because of the lack of staffing. This is only an inconvenience for me, but it's crippling for people who work "normal" hours.

8. The city's recycling program has been suspended indefinitely. We talk about restoring the wetlands that could buffer us from another storm surge, but every day we throw away tons of recyclables that will end up in the landfills that help poison our wetlands.

9. Cadaver dogs and youth volunteers gutting houses are still finding bodies in the Lower Ninth Ward. Of course these corpses are just skeletons by now -- the other day they found a six-year-old girl with an older person, possibly a grandmother, located near her -- and they may never be identified. The bodies are hidden under debris piles and collapsed houses. This is in the same section of town that some of the politicians are aching to bulldoze.

10. Thousands of people who lived in public housing were forcibly removed from their homes. It is now being suggested by much of the current power structure, including our very liberal Councilman at Large Oliver Thomas, that they not be allowed back into these homes unless they can prove they had jobs before the storm or are willing to sign up for job training. (Many of you may agree with this, and I did too, sort of, until I really thought about it. Hadn't they already qualified for the housing? What about the ones who had jobs that don't exist anymore? How can they find jobs in New Orleans if they don't live here?)

11. There are still flooded, wrecked, and abandoned cars all over the streets, parked in the neutral grounds, and in many cases partly submerged in the canals out East. Now that it's campaign time, Mayor Nagin is trying to come up with a solution for this, but he thinks maybe we should wait for FEMA to do it (!!!!!) and he claims the best removal offer he's gotten so far was "written on the back of a napkin."

12. Many of the FEMA trailers -- you know, the ones costing taxpayers $70,000 each -- have been delivered to homeless New Orleanians but cannot be lived in because the city doesn't have enough people to come out and do electrical inspections, and the trailers need a separate hookup instead of being hooked into the house's power supply, and a dozen other damn fool things. While these trailers sit empty, there is an easily constructed, far more attractive structure called a "Katrina cottage" that could easily be built all over south Louisiana. It costs about $25,000 less than the flimsy, uncomfortable trailers. FEMA refuses to use it because they're not allowed to provide permanent housing.

13. A large percentage -- I've heard figures ranging from 60 to 75% -- of current New Orleanians are on some form of antidepressant or anti-anxiety drug. The lines at the pharmacy windows have become a running joke. When a visiting "expert" gave a Power Point presentation on post-traumatic stress disorder recently, the entire audience dissolved into hysterical laughter.

I've already received a few comments and e-mails asking if they could repost the list of 13 reasons why "We Are Not OK" I posted last night. By all means, please repost it, forward it, and disseminate it. It's hard for those of us living here to realize that lots of people elsewhere have no idea of this shit.

Not sure what that earlier, incoherent post was all about. Some sort of LJ glitch. I hate and despise this new "Restore from saved draft?" feature.

Anyway, I killed my Flickr account today. Please don't e-mail asking me to reconsider; the decision is irrevocable and the pictures are irretrievable, though I still have a few on my hard drive. All the pictures of Shell Beach, the images of destruction in New Orleans, the celebration of Mardi Gras in spite of it all, the silly cat photos I so enjoyed sharing with you ... all are gone. Why? Because I was stupid enough to post a few seminude pictures (I think they showed a total of one boob), and because, once in a while, a few assholes really can ruin things for everybody.

A few weeks ago, the site Consumerist.com swiped two of my Flickr photos to use in an entry that made fun of my Amazon blog. (They also claimed that my Amazon blog linked directly to the "topless" photos, which was a lie and which they've since reworded.) When I politely asked them to remove my copyrighted material, Consumerist webmaster Ben Popken responded, and I quote, "We must respectfully deny your request for your photo and/or the post to be removed. That's not how we roll. Sorry. If you want to know why, look up hiphop, collage, remixing and duhn da dunnn.. free speech and freedom of the press."

Yup. I love the reference to "hiphop." I think someday I'll write a novel made up of random sentences from other books I admire and call it my "hiphop novel." That "duhn da dunnn" is pretty priceless too ... the mild-mannered Ben Popken is secretly Batman, I guess.

When you steal someone's copyrighted material, the question isn't, "Will I have to remove it?"; it's "Am I going to do the decent thing and just remove it, or am I going to force the copyright holder to spend money forcing me to do so?" Mr. Popken chose to do the latter. I consulted an Internet copyright lawyer, and Consumerist.com was ultimately forced to remove my images. Unfortunately, I wasted a lot of money I couldn't afford on this legal venture.

And motherfucking Flickr can't even answer simple questions about its own TOS.

This morning I discovered that another site had stolen the same images. So I just said, "Fuck it." I'm not a photographer. I enjoyed taking and sharing these pictures, but I can't afford to keep throwing money away protecting my copyrights. I'll save my cash and energy for the people who steal my prose, if such should come along -- at least my agent can handle that.

So I'm sorry. The assholes won this round, and I seriously regret that. But I don't need this crap, not when I'm trying to write something good that will pull me out of the morass I've been in since August 29th.

Harlan Ellison taught me a long time ago that there are tiny, shitty people in the world. They can't do anything on their own, and so they'll do anything within their power to tear down whatever you do. I understood him in a theoretical way then, but it has taken me 40 years of life on earth (and particularly online) to really understand what he was talking about. Fortunately, there are good, huge-hearted people too, and on my best days, I still think they outnumber the shitweasels.