To put out the raging oil fires in Iraq during the first Gulf War, firefighter soldiers dynamited the center of the fire, which in some way or another extinguished it.
Lately, my mind has not only been blown, it has been a raging oil fire that needs to be dynamited lest it burn forever, polluting everything around me with a slick cancerous fog.

For the past three months, I have worked twelve hours a day, six or seven days a week. I was not the only one doing this, and in fact, I worked less than some of the other volunteers. We ran a homeless shelter. The residents respected us because we worked hard but also knew that there is joy and love and fun in these situations sometimes. We stood around the kitchen and made fun of each other, watched laughing while kids fished toys out of the flooding backyard, and ate endless amounts of home-cooked fried and barbequed chicken. I have eaten my weight in red beans.

After three months of hard work, the shelter lost funding because apparently, providing shelter to New Orleanians returning home is not a part of the organization's vision. Relief, apparently, means building ponds and gardens in the Lower Ninth Ward, taking up space, money, and labor to create a middle-class alternative community rather than rebuilding the community that now exists. Relief means sacrificing a shelter that houses families--couples, men with children, women with children, single men, single women--and is the only one of its kind in the city. Men with children are forced to leave the parish, possibly giving up their jobs, their children's schools, and their families, to stay in a shelter that does not even feel like home. The Family Shelter felt like home, it felt like home to me, and to the residents seeking shelter. There was always food in the fridge, grits on the stove, and toys in the backyard. Volunteers to alternately play with the kids, talk to the adults, and make endless amounts of phone calls looking for health care, free eyeglasses and dentist appointments, and the ever-elusive affordable housing.

For the past week, the atmosphere has alternated between heavy rain and high humidity. Sticky or soaked, I haven't been dry for days. Within hours the streets fill with water, backyards flood six inches deep, small cars get stuck on huge boulevards. It didn't flood like this before, Ms. C told me, not before the storm. Everything from the lack of good drainage to the mosquitos can be traced to the storm, one storm, a few hours of rain and high winds, and an entire city is brought to its knees. A city that, mind you, has more dignity and small-town feel than any city in the United States. The rain, though, it is dramatic and has brought on fights between forty year-olds, a rage storm of criticism from organization leadership looking for scapegoats on whom to place the blame for the failing program, and run-of-the-mill childhood boredom.

This city is extreme in every way. All services are stretched to their limits, the residents are the most friendly in the most violent city in the United States, the potholes are bigger, the cops are soldiers who drive hum-vs, and the music is the best, just the best. I've had to call the cops on neighbors, escort drug-addled residents off the property, and break up fights. But yesterday, I was invited to watch a woman's ultrasound, a confusing gray and black anatomy lesson during which I saw a tiny heart, a tiny spine, and some kidneys. And that moment, in the eleventh hour of my work with the shelter program, almost brought me to my knees. In prayer, or defeat, or pure humility towards life, I am not certain.

But I am here and it is hard and I have failed in many ways, and I understand next to nothing about this city. So it goes...