“The bayou by you, not the bayou by me.”
Two weeks ago was fun, right? Although the horoscope post is in the “From the Vault” section, technically that story was an entirely original work, written just for this blog. Wow! I guess that’s kind of the first story I’ve done for this blog alone, and not for a class or just for myself. Maybe there will be more to come. Oh, it also wasn’t what I was talking about when I mentioned that I had more plans for days when I didn’t have time. That’s still something else, and upcoming. Don’t get excited.
I had a very different post planned for Horoscope Week, but then I had a blast of inspiration and/or madness while I was working out and listening to Weird Al’s amazing “Your Horoscope for Today,” and I knew exactly what kind of post I had to make that week. Hopefully it turned out alright. At the very least I wanted it to be fun to read. Let me know if you thought it was! Or don’t, that’s okay too. It’s whatever you’re comfortable with, Libra.
Also, I was going to write this post about New Orleans last week, but as I was, you know, just getting back from New Orleans and I didn’t have time, so I posted Spectral Crown instead. It’ll have to suffice that I’m writing about the Big Easy a couple days late. That’s fine, though. Time is relative anyway and nothing ultimately is now but rather exists in the past, when the light we perceive reaches our eyes. You know. The usual.
Anyway, the city. Ah, yes, the city of New Orleans, and I don’t mean the train song. What a beautiful, beautiful place, with wrought-iron railings, streets lined with trees, a gorgeous view of the Mississippi river, dead bodies buried six feet aboveground, and about a bajillion bars, each with their own spin on a Hurricane. I quite enjoyed my time there, limited as it was, though I’d have enjoyed it more if I could remember the last three hours of that Friday night.
A bit like my trip to Las Vegas, I went to New Orleans with my dad. But this time it wasn’t for hiking. It was for something entirely different and decidedly less wholesome; it was for my cousin’s bachelor party. We went to drink, party, and commit debauchery for the last time before my cousin gets hitched, which when you think about it doesn’t make any sense since it won’t be the last chance for him to party before he gets married, or even after he does. But it’s an excuse to throw a party, and really, who needs an excuse to throw a party anyway?
So we all got in our airplanes and tried not to catch Coronavirus and flew our way down to Louisiana, where myself, my dad, my cousin, my uncle, my other uncle, my other cousins, and friends of my soon-to-be-married cousin, all rented an Airbnb on the outskirts of New Orleans. We then spent the next two-and-a-half-days, from Friday morning to Sunday afternoon, living it up in the city of NOLA, and this living-it-up-ness mostly entailed imbibing exorbitantly overpriced drinks and consuming some creole cookery, and we did all of that in spades. I spent close to $100 in drinks on Friday, and then got so totally hammered that I didn’t drink again for the rest of the weekend; that’s what celebrations are for. And good thing I’m 21, because we started drinking at breakfast on Friday.
We saw a lot of the sights of New Orleans, too, besides just drinking our way across the French Quarter. Well, rather, we saw some limited sights, as within the city we mostly stayed to the French Quarter-Bourbon Street area. But we also saw a bunch of cool houses in the area where we rented our Airbnb, so that was neat. But, at any rate, we saw Bourbon Street, got cursed at Marie Laveau’s house of voodoo, enjoyed the piano players at Pat O’Brien’s, got beignets at Café Du Monde, traveled into the swamp with our own Bayou Rambo and saw one alligator, and probably a couple other things too that I’m forgetting/don’t remember from when I was drunk. Oh, and I did see the statue of Ignatius J. Reilly, too, which I was pretty happy about. We also captured an absolutely cursed image at Pat O’Brien’s, which I have zero memory of taking. But it makes a great header for this post.
We saw live jazz on Frenchmen Street, of course, and I ate an alligator po’boy and a plate of jambalaya. I even tasted some catfish and enjoyed it, which is rare for me as I am deeply averse to seafood. It’s such a pretty city, though. The area we were in had murals on every wall, the food everywhere was incredible, the street performers were impressive, and everything was lit up like Christmas day. It’s something else entirely.
Now, normally this is the part where I say something about “it’s great, but it’s terrible for the environment because…” And you know what? I could talk about that. I could talk about how expansive the city is, how much space it takes up and how much swampland they had to dredge in order to sustain the city, swampland that is, mind you, great at weakening hurricanes. I could talk about the remnants of the oil industry in the bayous, and how the swamps are slowly being destroyed to make way for “progress,” or about how the native plants and animals are at risk due to natural resource exploitation. I could even talk about the gentrification that I suspect is a pretty big issue in the city, or cultural appropriation, though I’m not quite as versed in that area as I am in others. I could talk about all these things. But I won’t. Not at any great length, anyway.
The more I travel, the more I’m beginning to realize that every city has some major environmental flaw. LA has its traffic and its sprawl. Las Vegas probably has water issues. New Orleans exists in a floodplain and is eating the swamps. Chicago keeps shitting in Lake Michigan. New York is a waste powerhouse. The list goes on. At some point, I may come back to this topic and talk about the environmental problems in New Orleans, because they’re certainly there. They’re everywhere, no matter how hard the corporations try to hide it. But at some point, it’s just beating a dead horse, and I don’t want to do another city review post. And I didn’t feel like New Orleans was so astonishingly and openly wasteful as LA or Las Vegas, either, so that’s part of it. Well, except maybe the tourists. Like me and my group.
I did try to carry one cup with me throughout my journey that fateful Friday, attempting to refill it with alternating booze and water at each bar. I didn’t want to waste a perfectly good plastic cup and just throw it out, especially after I probably paid ten bucks just for the cup. But somewhere along the line, I forgot about it and left it on some bar counter somewhere. It’s likely in the trash now anyway, despite my best attempts. Oh, well. That’s what I get for buying a cheap plastic cup.
There was a lot of New Orleans that I didn’t get to see. I didn’t get a cemetery tour, or a ghost tour, and I didn’t get to see Nicolas Cage’s horror house, or Nicolas Cage’s tombstone, or the bar that Nicolas Cage probably owns. I also would have liked to get a better look at the bayou and see some more alligators, since we only saw one. I’d also like to see some alligator gar, since those fish look freaky as fuck and I’d way rather see a bunch of those than another alligator, frankly. And there’s the WWII museum, which is apparently one of the best museums ever, full stop. I guess these are all reasons to go back.
At any rate, the drinking was a great bonding experience for myself and the people I was with. Or at the very least, it was a kind of un-bonding, too, since we all loosened up. We talked to strangers, danced in the street, tried new things, and celebrated my cousin’s upcoming marriage. In a sense, we also celebrated life, too. You could say that about any party, though. I met new people and made a friend or two along the way, new friends that weren’t part of my family. Or at least acquaintances, anyway.
I suppose I could wax poetic here about the social bonds that form through shared drunkenness and midnight stupors, or the bonds that form from sharing a boat with a man who may have been hit in the face with a fish one too many times, or the bonds that form when your dad gets slapped by a drunk woman for absolutely zero reason, but there are plenty of places you can get that. Alternatively, I guess I could talk about the culture of the place, and the food. The music and the people, the shrimp and the oysters. But you can get that somewhere else, too. My specialty is taking a sustainability-look at things, analyzing them for their environmental science value. But I don’t feel like doing that today.
I had a great weekend, and a great time with my family in a gorgeous city that I’d love to go back to. I’m grateful to my dad for taking me on this trip and grateful to my cousin for inviting me, and grateful to the city for hosting us. For once, I don’t feel the need to talk about how many canals were dug to get to the oil in the swamp, or the invasive species that’s slowly eating the levees. And that’s okay. Sometimes, things can just be.
And, if there’s any place that can just be, it’s probably New Orleans.
