Watching the Mayor’s race and Saints season from the sidelines was killing me. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t have a soapbox from which to rant and rail, holler and wail.

As days turned to weeks turned to months, I realized that if I didn’t find a forum from which to throw tomatoes at the world, I was going to end up standing next to that guy down on Canal Street who wears the rainbow umbrella hat and clutches a megaphone through which he opines to any who will listen — and all who won’t — on the mysteries of Faith and Justice. I could already hear people whispering as they walked by: “Wow, look where Rose ended up.”…. — Chris Rose

The Huffington Post called him “the Crescent City’s bard.”

Anthony Bourdain called him “a hard-bitten, supposedly cynical professional journalist.”

And now Gambit calls Chris Rose — columnist, comedian, raconteur — the paper’s newest contributing writer.

Rose’s first essay will appear as the cover story in the Feb. 16 issue of Gambit and on its Web site, Blog of New Orleans. Thereafter, his column will appear weekly alongside the paper’s other award-winning columnists: Clancy DuBos, Jeremy Alford and the pseudonymous Blake Pontchartrain.

New Orleanians got to know Rose through his 25-year tenure at The Times-Picayune, but it was after Hurricane Katrina that his columns became widely read nationally. A collection of those columns, 1 Dead in Attic, earned him a nomination for a Pulitzer Prize in Journalism.

Gambit publisher Margo DuBos said, “Chris is a gifted writer whose train of thought connects with the reader on a near-religious basis, and Gambit is thrilled to have him join our group of talented writers.”

Here’s a look at Chris’ first day on the job: