FAQs

who is the cajun boy?
i am a resident of new york city. i moved up here in june of 2002 from my home state of louisiana, to chase all of my crazy dreams. prior to moving to new york, i lived a life typical of a young, southern, suburban guy. i worked professionally in medical/pharmaceutical sales, was basically bored senseless and yearned for something much greater. though i had long thought of leaving louisiana and the comfort and security that working a "real job" provided to pursue a life in the arts, i lacked the courage to make drastic changes in my life for the longest time. then, in my 29th year, things began changing rapidly. a decade long relationship with the girl who was and will likely always be the great love of my life died of natural causes. i was made bedridden by a spinal injury that eventually required surgery and rehab/therapy. i was 29 years old and lacked the ability to wipe my own ass. i was a completely broken man physically and mentally. during the course of all of this strife i had plenty of time to look deep into my soul and did some extensive searching. i came to the conclusion that i needed to make some radical changes and take some serious risks otherwise i would wind up old and withered one day sitting out on my back porch in a rocking chair haunted by thoughts of "what if?" a few days prior to undergoing the surgery that essentially gave me my life back, i made a list of guidelines for my life that i would follow if and when i got back to full strength again. the 5th of these guidelines reads as follows...

"5. i will live a full and interesting life, a life
that others envy, one free of regrets and self-doubt.
i will actively pursue my dreams, regardless of how
daunting they may be or how others may ridicule them
as being unattainable. on the flip side, i will never
make light of anyone else's dreams and i will actively
encourage them to believe in themselves and their
abilities. i want to be the first person people
want to invite when they're having a party and the
first that they want to call when they need to talk."

and so it is. i had the surgery, recovered through rehab/therapy, and moved to nyc soon thereafter convinced that i could make a new and better life for myself. in my time here i have worked professionally as an actor/voice-over artist, had a brief stint at a major newspaper, worked in real estate, and as a party host/promoter at some of manhattan's more exclusive nightspots.


where exactly in louisiana are you from?
the town that i grew up in is very small coastal fishing community in terrebonne parish, about an hour southwest of new orleans. life there is about as simple as simple gets. it's a world away from life in manhattan, that's for sure. my childhood consisted of fishing and swimming in the bayous, hunting and fishing endlessly, playing sports, helping my mom around the house and, during the summers when i was off from school, helping my dad on his boat when he was working as a fisherman. as an adult, i have lived, worked and attended college in baton rouge and lafayette, la.


do you speak with a cajun accent? no. i can however, whip one out on demand. truth of the matter is that ever since i was a kid i never wanted to have an accent. i didn't want to sound like the people i grew up around, i wanted to sound like the people that i heard on tv and on the radio. i wanted to sound geographically ambiguous when i spoke and am largely successful at that. i have been known to give myself away when i get too drunk as i have a tendency to annunciate certain words in a distinctly cajun/southern manner when under the influence.


what motivated you to write a blog?
a number of things. i started posting regularly on this site in early february of 2007. for about 2 1/2 years prior to that point i had worked diligently and clandestinely on a failed novel. i say failed because i just one day came to the realization that, after an initial draft and 3 subsequent re-writes, i simply could not get it to the point where i felt comfortable with it, and by comfortable i mean that i never reached a level of comfort suitable to submit a manuscript to agents and publishers. if there's one piece of advice that i've heeded most about writing is to NEVER submit something until it's truly ready for submission. i simply never reached that point. the thing really became a creative albatross for me, a black hole of sorts and it was sucking the life out of me. finally a friend intervened, a published novelist friend who had went through a similar situation on her first attempt to write a novel, and what she suggested to me was something radical; to completely exorcise the project from my life. she saw how i was obsessed and frustrated and unable to let it go and had been through a similar experience herself and exorcism was what saved her creative soul and allowed her to move on to bigger and better things.

so i did.

i mulled it over for about a week before i finally came around to her line of thinking that doing such was not a total failure. rather, i had spent the last 2 1/2 years learning and growing as a writer. so one night i deleted every file dealing with the novel from my computer and then went up to the roof of my building with all of the physical manuscript copies that i had, a bottle of wine, a wine glass, some lighter fluid and a box of matches. the end.

doing this created a bit of a creative void in my life though and i needed something to fill it while i tried to figure out what my next project would be. that's really when i began to seriously consider writing a blog. the thought of writing one was something that i had long considered but could never seem to commit myself to doing. over the last few years people had constantly told me, "you should write a blog." i would post things occasionally on a myspace blog that many people responded positively to, so i figured why not. i already had a blogger site up and running as a backup to the things that i posted on myspace in the event that my profile was ever deleted, so i just started posting here. i threw up some mardi gras colors and a cock pic and voila, cajun boy in the city was born.

the things that gave me the greatest pause about blogging was whether or not i could...

a) post new and original content on a regular basis(i.e., daily) that was consistently smart and compelling.

b) come up with some sort of idea or concept that would make the blog distinctive, something that would separate it from the millions of others out there.

as for point a, i just basically said "fuck it!" i'm was tired of hearing "you should write a blog" from SO many people. i figured that it was something that i could maintain with minimal effort and still have it be something that is worth someone taking the time to seek on a regular basis. i was also acutely aware of the growing number of bloggers who had used their blogs as an effective platform for attaining book/film/television development deals. hell, i know people personally that have! so i have to admit, that was a big lure as well. in today's viral world there are so many ways that artists can get noticed that were never available before. blogging, or self-publishing as some refer to it as, is just that for an aspiring writer.

as for point b, i spent a lot of time reading and researching blogs and came to the conclusion that i did have something different to offer from the millions of other blogs out there...

me, and my distinctive voice.


how do you decide what to write about? i don't really have any sort of theme or angle here. i got hung up on that a little when i started considering the blog but eventually just gave in to doing whatever i felt like whenever i sit down to write. somedays i may write something farcical. somedays i may be more introspective. it all depends on how i'm feeling in the moment. i often have no clue what i will write about until i sit and stare at the computer. that's also one of the things that i love about a blog...not having to answer to anyone. i write about what i want, when i want. for the most part i'm just throwing shit up on the wall to see what sticks.


when do you post new blog entries? i try to, and have been largely successful to this point, to post daily monday thru friday. generally i post in the mid to late afternoon, depending on my schedule. i would love to be able to post in the early morning but i'm just not a morning person. i don't like to wake up early and my brain really doesn't function very well until i've had coffee and have gotten up and around a bit. sometimes if i know that i'm gonna have a crazy day i will write something the night before and post it early in the morning. otherwise i'd say that an average day will find me posting sometime between 2 and 4. weekend posts are rare but have happened before.


what exactly is a cajun?
historically cajuns, also less commonly referred to as "acadians", are people of french/canadian descent whose ancestors where exiled from nova scotia, canada in the 1700s and came to settle in the southern portion of louisiana. my mother's side of the family follows this lineage. south louisiana was also heavily settled by people of spanish, italian, creole, and german descent, among other things. cajuns are essentially a mish-mash, or perhaps more appropriately, a gumbo of cultures and ethnicity. we're human mutts essentially. more than anything the word cajun symbolizes an attitude, a way of life. joie de vivre, which translates to a carefree way of life. in the words of new orleans times picayune essayist chris rose cajuns "talk too much and laugh too loud and live too large and frankly, we're suspicious of others who don't."

i couldn't put it any better myself.


who are your favorite writers?
god where do i even begin? there are too many. here are some who have inspired me in some way...

john kennedy toole
jonathon swift
mark twain
john dryden
nora ephron
peggy noonan
jonathan ames
maureen dowd
chuck klosterman
bret easton ellis
john grisham (yes, i like him, ok! deal with it lit snobs i also seem to have a thing for writers names john, jonathan or jonathon!)
chris rose(new orleans times picayune)
michael lewis
joan didion
tom wolfe
hunter s. thompson

now i'm blanking. i'll add more as they pop into my head at later dates.


do you have something against guidos? absolutely not. well actually, there are certain aspects of guidodom that i despise, specifically the aspects that exhibit a high propensity for douchebaggery, but overall i have no issues with guidos. in fact, a couple of my closest friends since moving to new york are proud guidos. i just find them utterly fascinating and inherently hilarious, thus guidos will often be found as fodder for my blog. the only other american subculture that i find more fascination and hilarity in is that of my own...cajun people. spend any amount of time around cajuns and/or guidos and you will without question come away shaking your head and laughing. believe it or not but there are some striking similarities between the two cultures. strange but true.


why do you write in small case letters? (ED. NOTE...I'm getting away from this stand. Why? Because every snake in the grass has to shed it's skin in order to grow, that's why.) i decided to write the blog in small case because i feel it to be less formal and more conversational to do so. it just feels more like me and it fits who i am. i want my blog to read like a conversation that you might be having with an old friend. i tried writing a couple of entries in traditional style and it just seemed too stuffy to me. i do wish i could afford to pay someone to be an editor though...i am the absolute worst at proofreading and editing my own work. i have a tendency to read things that i write in my own voice and will easily overlook a misplaced comma, a misused word, a run-on sentence, etc. so my apologies in advance for any that you may incur.


besides the blog, are there other things that you are currently writing? yes. if you'd like to know more feel free to email me at cajunboyinthecity@gmail.com

more "about me"

http://cajunboyinthecity.blogspot.com/2007/06/about-me.html