Day: February 23, 2025

Yesterday was a whirlwind New Orleanic experience. I found myself walking miles across a city I am beginning to understand in segments. The idea of that cultural difference was on my mind the entire time. At one point we rode through the hood in a cab, and that entire area stared at our passing. It wasn’t because of who we are. It was because of the reality that people don’t come through there unless they need to and we were clearly out of our area. It felt like parts of the Harlem of my childhood. There were the boys lined up on the steps of a building that was long past condemned. There was the dad standing in the street watching his daughter but also watching for anyone who didn’t belong. There were families walking around and living life. It felt like a community. It felt tight knit and dangerous to anyone who would try to disrupt what was.

I wanted to see more of the city, but the parts I saw made me feel like I could actually enjoy being here for longer stretches of time. The touristy stuff is fine, but the Garden District with its old homes and front porch charm called to me. I even found my favorite coffee/wine shop to write at on Magazine street. This was a successful journey. It has me excited for the next new thing.

Some Thoughts:

1. All things have a season. Will the season of yoga pants ever end? please?

The culture of place is something that I find myself thinking about more and more as I build towards creating new worlds. When I think about place I think about the people and where they come from and what influenced them in a way to make them different from everything around them. There is a bit of bleed between cultures at the boundaries of places. People in New Orleans won’t be like people in Alabama, but closer to the border the similarities become quite apparent I imagine.

Culture is also driven by place in a geographical way. Weather plays a factor. All of these things coalesce to form who people are where tese people exist. It is not a simple thing to design a world based on multiple cultures without understanding how and why existing human cultures exist.