Nope, not quite summertime, but I’m still happy to be on my bike. I managed to miss the thunderstorms on my ride up to campus today, and we all managed to talk loudly enough to hear each other over the thunderstorms and the car alarms set off by said thunderstorms. But it was dark all day long, and that settled my mood as well. I got back on the Surly in the late afternoon and headed downtown via Simon Bolivar. I love taking this street–smooth-as-ice asphalt, wide lanes, not a lot of traffic–but it takes you by a lot of blight. This is Central City, a neighborhood that I think is often forgotten in our narratives of New Orleans, post-storm. I stopped to take this picture of a food truck for sale and an old car in an overgrown empty lot near Felicity. This isn’t the blue sky picture or the magnolia tree or the river or the lake, but it’s the sort of scene I usually see when riding my bike around. I wonder who is going to buy that food truck and if anyone is ever going to drive that cool car again and if the Pothole Killer is ever going to take care of the pocked asphalt and how long it will be before the pool of water collected many hours earlier across the street from where I was standing will drain away. There are so many stories in just this small scene, very few of which I’ll ever hear. But I can learn the stories that have lead to the blight in Central City–that’s called history and political economy and geography. I hope we figure out how to tell a different tale.