This past Tuesday was so odd that it has taken me 5 days to digest it– or, at least that’s my excuse for taking so long for this post.  As you all know (or at least everyone in the Middle Tennessee area should know– there wasn’t such great national coverage of the event) two weeks ago we had a flood of “almost biblical proportions” (paraphrased from Treme).  By some estimates, it was a 1000-year flood.  The commuter train that I take to work everyday was shut down for a week after the flood due to washed out track and a partually-submerged train station.  So I was quite happy when train service restarted last Monday.

Last Tuesday, I didn’t have any 8 AM meetings to attend, so I chose to take a more leisurely walk from the train station to the office.  After the flood, Nashville received a welcome invasion of private disaster response teams.  As you can see in my blog from a couple of weeks ago, pump discharge hoses were ubiquitous in downtown Nashville as merchants pumped the flood waters out of their establishments on to the street.  The smaller hoses of the pumps are now being replaced by the much larger hoses of massive portable dehumidifiers.  This was especially evident as I passed the Schermerhorn Symphony Center.

Tubular Assault

After shooting a few at the Schermerhorn, I headed up one block north and the first thing I saw was a guy transporting a fortune teller machine past the honkey tonks on Broadway.

Something Wicked this Way Comes

I proceeded further down Broadway to pass the Mother Church of honkey tonks, Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, and saw a most unusual procession moving quickly past the beer joints of downtown Nashville.

Bonnarumschpringe

 So it was a pretty odd 15 minute walk to work.

More…Dwight