New Orleans: A Columnist Faces the Abyss

I've linked to Chris Rose columns from the Times-Picayune fairly often during the past year. For New Orleanians, Chris has been an amazing journalistic phoenix: an amiable music columnist before the disaster, he became the chronicler of the ironies, lunacies and sadnesses of the city in the wake of the collapse of the federal levees. He had, we told each other, "found his voice", and nobody from the city could read his columns without laughing and crying in rapid sequence.
Yesterday, Chris told the rest of the story. It's typical of nobody, just the story of a guy who tried to tell the stories of his city going through a stupefying disaster and found himself going through something he couldn't be ironic and funny and smart about: his own clinical depression. There's nothing political about this column, and I'm so not interested in people drawing political points from Chris' story, but other comments are, as always, welcome.