ragcity

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ATTENTION: BLOG CHANGE

Hello followers. I have updated this blog and created a new URL. If you would like to continue to read and receive updates, please follow the new Cogito Ergo Sum Same type of posts, same me, just a new design with fewer archives available. I will be removing this site soon. Happy reading!Sum -Alex

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Pouring

Remember to subscribe to my new blog: The New Orleans Sun. via Substack. Here’s the latest post, just for you. It’s a dreary, rainy day in New Orleans. The atmosphere is quiet, pensive, people are sitting outside, huddled under the dripping tent at Café Degas drinking their mimosas and bloody marys. The red roses on each table appear extra red. Little droplets coat the petals. The paté is nice.…

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Treme Gentlemen

Ladies and Gentlemen, I have started a new blog with a talented collaborator. We tackle New Orleans news in a creative voice, fearless to touch timeless topics, no matter how tough. theneworleanssun.substack.com Below is the latest article from your new New Orleans neighborhood reporter, Alex Ragonesi, also known as Felicity Jones, but better known as Felicity Bijou. See you under the…

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Ratatouille

I came to Lower Decatur Street to see if King’s other Angel, Leather, was working. She is not. I get Richard. His disciples, some people from the East, whose birthday it is, are entertaining themselves. Apparently, I’m too “classy” for this place, which I’ll take. I ordered a Manhattan. No ingredients. An Old Fashioned. No ingredients. A Disaronno Sour. No ingredients. I settled for a Jameson and…

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Are you Happy?

I am a millennial. I am apparent of Instagram’s influence on our lives. I see so many girls I went to high school with post about their husbands and dogs and baby bumps. It’s exhausting and I am envious, but actually, not really. I do not want their lives, per se. I want a husband and baby bump, but I do not want to go about it the same.  I’m sure they are happy. Sure. If “happiness” is the…

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Tradition is Okay

The kitchen is covered in flour and strips of cookie dough – fresh cookie dough, made from scratch, from the hands of the Ragonesi girls, though I suppose my mother is not technically a Ragonesi any longer. She wears a striped apron, and her coarse blonde hair is pulled into a ponytail, wispy hairs poking out around her tan face.  I hear her voice sing a soprano, as she snaps her fingers and…

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Chickie Chickie Boom Boom, Will There Be Enough Room?

Chickie Wah Wah is not a chicken shack on canal street like I originally thought when I passed it. It looks like a dive, it’s sign written like a colorful chalkboard. It is a dive, I suppose, but it is not a chicken shack. It is a music venue with a bar.  The tables are only along the right wall, with little touch lamps at each. The first time I went, my friend and I shared a table with an older…

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Stay

Nothing lasts forever. This I know. But I wanted  to keep him a bit longer. Just a boy, or rather, a man –  a grown adult with kids and an ex-wife to boot. Just a man  whose musical taste makes my head spin  in a pleasantly disoriented tizzy – jam bands and  guitar solos that he’d try to match.  Posters and shirts  printed with such artistic display it makes me drool  thinking his hands…

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Writer's Block

The blank page might be the most daunting image. At least to me. Words have already filled space with these first two sentences, yet my fears and blockage are still so present. Once a writer has retired a subject matter, how does she move onto the next? Does she summon something from the past, perhaps some story or anecdote that’s swimming in nostalgia? Perhaps I could rewrite about the road…

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Freddy’s Back

I remember the video you took of me, running around, insides and out of the apartment on Delta – my apartment before it was ours – screaming, talking in circles, not making a lick of sense, trapped in my own subconscious, words firing without cause. You only recorded it to show me my belligerence. I was drunk. Sadly. But I’m also ill. Mentally. Is that why you could never love me? Because…

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Broken

When I bend my right hand, my middle finger doesn’t touch all the way close. My fist is a miss – forever a slightly opened grasp. Broken at the center bend. Swollen purple for weeks, now a subtle crooked lean. Battle wounded from a car wreck, a drunken stupor in the night, a stupid fight I can’t remember with an ex who should have never entered me or my New Orleans story. Battle wounded from…

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Louisiana Snow Days

The storm has passed, leaving behind a river down the street whose current contains washed up leaves. Ripples wave as car tires swim through the mess, and as the water rises, I’m happy to be perched above what used to be a clear street. Louisiana snow days are floods and rainstorms. There’s clarity in the chaos and reason in ripples that graze telephone poles and tipped over trash cans. This…

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Perhaps…

I romanticize the heartbreak. I’m addicted to it, it’s all I have left of you. Sporadic hellos invade the days meant to be filled with activities that help me move on. And maybe I should be upset by these invasions, but I welcome the attack. Sometimes. Because the absence of a “thinking of you” leaves me hollow, wondering if you’re past the days of thinking of me altogether. Perhaps I…

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I Remember Watching Survivor with You

I remember the way the heater used to blow at our feet when we watched Survivor and chose our Final Four contestants after the first episode. We’d handwrite our selections on little ripped slips of paper and keep them in an old Christmas box. I remember how we were hellbent on being Survivor contestants, and how you would be the nice guy who led his tribe to victory in challenges, whereas I’d be…

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Tuesday Thoughts

If I thought “I Love You” was enough to encapsulate all I feel for you, then maybe I wouldn’t be so afraid to say it. Perhaps I’ll dance around those three words, sending paragraphs and big blocks of blue text on my iPhone in hopes that more words mean more than these three words – these three loaded words you seem to dance around, too.  You have been my ex for over a year now, and I know deep…

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Waves (Revision)

Calloused hands brush my pinky, his hand doesn’t hold me tight. And that’s alright.  The scent of Winston cigarettes  stains his lips where I give  my haphazard kiss.   Conspiracy, conspiracy, he rambles about controversial topics he deems  too dense for those who wear  political affiliations on their sleeves.  Words spew from his sly mouth  as though it may never shut, and I’m lost…

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Love Me Like Music, I’ll Be Your Song

The cool breeze blows through the open window, and I jerk my head to my shoulder repeatedly as I hum the lyrics what is love, baby don’t hurt me like I’m performing the SNL skit. But then I ask myself, what is love? Does anyone know? Have I been in love? I’d argue, yes. But how many times? Have there been times I thought this is love when it wasn’t? Absolutely. And have there been times I said “I…