Sort-​​Of Bio

What (and why) nolanimrod?

The NOLA part:

When my daugh­ter was still a lit­tle girl I went to New Orleans to see her for her birth­day.  And never left.  I felt like I was born for the place.  It was like the Hip­pie Ideal of the 60’s with­out all the meanness.

Rents were incred­i­bly cheap.  Peo­ple were sell­ing “chif­farobes” to each other for around $20 that would later be in antique shops for $1000, the liquor flowed 24.7 and even the street bums were gourmet chefs, as I found out on my first Thanks­giv­ing there, when every­body brought some­thing, includ­ing a home­less poet who showed up with oys­ter and arti­choke dress­ing.  I soon had a job in a music club where I was on a first name basis with peo­ple I’d pre­vi­ously seen only on record album covers.

I went through a bunch of New Orleans adven­tures: dis­cov­er­ing the French Quar­ter and the West Bank, learn­ing to buy oys­ters by the sack from the oys­ter­men because they’re almost free that way, get­ting killed and brought back to life by the neu­ro­sur­geons at Ochsner Hos­pi­tal, then spend­ing a year at an adult day-​​care cen­ter called Kings­ley House, and then rent­ing an apart­ment from a won­der­ful man who later sold me the build­ing and helped me buy it.

The build­ing was a lit­tle shot­gun dou­ble there (aka, to the rest of the coun­try, a duplex), the rent of which paid my expenses, and I fig­ured to die there.

I got there at per­haps the absolute high tide of New Orleans.  It went down­hill from there, cul­mi­nat­ing in Katrina.

Kat­rina washed me first to Bossier City, LA, then to Shreveport,LA, then to Geneva in upstate New York, a fan­tas­tic city to get your mar­bles together.

Nolan­im­rod is a con­cate­na­tion of New Orleans, LA (it’s local short­hand; we addressed let­ters that way: so and so-​​and-​​so, NOLA) and Nim­rod.  Nim­rod was, in the bible, a mighty hunter and, in the bible, the archi­tect of the Tower of Babel. And, in gen­eral par­lance, a doo­fus.  It fit.  NOLA Nimrod.

Here is a pic­ture of NOLA Nim­rod after view­ing his house for the first time after Katrina.

Look­ing pretty good con­sid­er­ing he had walked in the house for all of one minute and then coughed, sneezed, and had stream­ing eyes and a run­ning nose for the rest of the day.  Those EPA guys in Shreve­port weren’t kid­ding about the TOXIC part of toxic mold and mildew.

The strange orange mark­ings on the door mean that

• there were no dead bod­ies inside,
• that the house was a total waste,
• and the ID of the crew mak­ing the evaluation.