It's sort of a 'Little Engine That Could' story. Why would you open a doughnut shop when all the other doughnut shops are closing?

I think people are ready to forget about this storm and to move forward in their lives. And I think Mardi Gras is a symbol of all that.

I thought you could build a story that would function as a machine or else a complex of machines, each one moving separately, yet part of a process that ultimately would produce an emotion or a sequence of emotions. You could swap out parts, replace them if they got too old. And this time you would build in some redundancy, if only just to handle the stress.
One question was: Would the engine still work if you were aware of it, or if you were told how it actually functioned? Maybe this was one of the crucial differences between a story and a machine.

I was sort of open to do anything, I was free.

You go into any doughnut shop and look at three cops having coffee, I guarantee I look like one of them.

We were 300 feet from landing when the pilot decided to abort and divert the flight.