Mardi Gras Week, 2021
This Foul Year of Our Lord, 2021. Mardi Gras week, New Orleans. It was cold, dismal, the kind of unique misery that comes from being a waterlogged ghost town that should have been bustling. In normal years this would be an adventurous, wild week, of smoking joints on Decatur offered by random helpful tourists, sitting in the back of the streetcar with a half-empty paper cup of cheap alcopop from a gas station on Canal like you're the king of the world. No drunken dozing by a tree in the middle of the neutral ground on Esplanade this year, though, or leaving Cheers in Fat City to wander around Lakeside Mall in a half-sloshed, rambling gait and annoying Macy's customers before the Metairie parades go marching down Severn Avenue. No patented Bourbon Street Strut followed by 3$ beers and a pool game in a leather bar off St. Anne surrounded by questionably dressed men and tvs with all porn. No, this time it was quiet, sedate, even bizarre, and not in the fun way. I'd left the