Balaenius Rex!!

Some days I feel like this chap in the picture.  Other days, I feel like the whale.

I moved to New Orleans to live in a city that was the opposite of Boston.  Boy, I got what I wished for with that.  I feel like I went fishing and reeled in more than I can filet.  At least I have enough for a cook-out, a blubber boil, a stew pot, a trying out of the essence from the vast wealth of meat, there will be plenty left over for the sharks.  I find New Orleans overwhelming, not in a bad way.  I haven't had any bad days since I've moved here, just the impression that I have a lot to digest.

Sometimes I feel like the whale.  I am a wealth of experience and talents.  Isn't anyone.  I have made a satisfying life for myself wherever I have landed and planted.  There isn't any reason to think I can't make my mark here.  New Orleans is a city of opportunity, where chance marries fortune and they have beautiful babies full of promise.  ...and then they die, like we all do in the end.

New Orleans has been around a long time, for better and for worse.  Sometimes the city itself has been the whale and sometimes it has been the fisherman.  The name of this blog is Excelsior!  New Orleans!! for a reason.  From everything I see as I'm on patrol at all hours of the clock over all the calendar's pages, I see a city on the move, ever upward, one that doesn't cotton to shuteye.  I encounter a city where something is always happening and things are getting done, even if those things are not the most reputable.  New Orleans is not a technology-oriented metropolis.  It has little truck or traffic with notions of a new economy.  It is home to a creative class, heck, the whole city is nothing but a creative class.  Orleanians channel their energies not toward profit or dominating a niche market, unless that market is New Orleans itself.  Orleanians enjoy their surroundings, their lives, and their acquaintances.  This is a city in which no one is lonely and no one is bored.

I'm new here.  I may be wrong.  I may be the fisherman.  At least I can say I was here.  There's something to that.  Better a bad day spent on a New Orleans street than a good day of fishing.  You can put that in your pipe and smoke it.