Andrei Codrescu opens New Orleans, Mon Amour, Twenty Years of Writings from the City by popping the question:

“How did we fall in love? At first sight, violently.”

“Later, when I started living there, I caught the Mythifying-of-New Orleans virus, too. The city that Mark Twain called “the upholstered sewer” generated stories like water from a faucet left on everywhere you looked."

Andrei Codrescu, New Orleans, Mon Amour, Twenty Years of Writings from the City, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 2006.