Photobomb: (Another) Drunken Sightseeing in New Orleans

“Or, the Not-Quite-As-Drunk Post-Covid 2022 (& Knuckles) Prepare-to-Die now with Funky Mode Edition”

Isn’t it weird how sometimes history repeats itself when we’re least expecting it? Almost exactly two years after I went drunkenly sightseeing in New Orleans for a bachelor party (give or take a week), here I am posting another blog post about how I went drunkenly sightseeing in New Orleans for a bachelor party. But boy, how the world has changed in those two years. How I have changed in those two years. How we all have changed in those two years. I mean, two years ago when I went to NOLA the first time, the pandemic was just starting to loom over the horizon, masks weren’t even a thing yet, I was still living in Champaign Illinois, the United States had yet to witness the most blatant attack on civil democracy for the last century, most Americans knew Ukraine as “there’s a level in Black Ops there, right?”, and Black Lives Matter had yet to see its summer 2020 resurgence. Back then, my biggest worry was “What will I cook for my cooperative household today and how will I dress for the party this weekend?” How the times have changed.

As I post this now, the pandemic is nearing its “end” (for some people) thanks to vaccines, World War Three may be kicking up now that Ukraine is actively being invaded by Russia, federal trials for the American insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol are starting to pick up, Black Lives Matter has thoroughly ingrained itself into the American lexicon, though perhaps not as wide reaching as it should be, I live in Minneapolis Minnesota with a long-term romantic partner (and my brother), and Elden Ring is finally out, though Breath of the Wild 2 is not. Those statements, despite being grammatically situated as equal, very much do not all hold equal importance. But what a world it is that we live in now. I can barely imagine myself and what I was like two years ago, and now, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. But at least I got to forget about all that for a little bit while celebrating one of my best friend’s upcoming weddings!

Huh, even this photo is the same as the other blog post. Except this time, I took this photo!

That friend is Kenny, a man I met the freshman year of my time at the University of Illinois (I’ve known him longer than this blog had been running!) that has grown to become one of my closest companions, despite the fact that we no longer live in the same state. I think I’ve mentioned him on here before. At the very least, there’re pictures of him on here, as well as his soon-to-be wife, Eva. It is, thinking about it now, a little bit surreal that they’re now getting married, considering how long ago it was now that I first met them both. But congratulations to them! It is very exciting, and I am very excited for them. And I’m excited to stand up at the wedding, too! I get the matching suit and everything. I’m gonna get absolutely sloshed beforehand, take the mic when the pastor starts the service, and start rambling incoherently about the socioeconomic ramifications of Canada’s maple syrup vault until they have to boot me to the back of the church. It’s going to be wonderful.

I guess bachelor parties are supposed to be some sort of last hurrah before the drudge of married life, but that seems like an exceptionally pessimistic viewpoint, and Kenny and Eva are not people who are going to trudge through their life together, so I feel confident that this bachelor party was less “Last Moment of Freedom” and more “Bonding for Bros,” which still sounds terrible even as I say it out loud. But you know what I mean. It was a fun time! I didn’t vomit this time around (although someone else did, not naming names), and we drank, walked up and down Bourbon street, threw beads at passersby, took in the sea life (by taking it into our bodies), ate beignets and listened to jazz, visited the world-famous New Orleans Irish Cultural Center twice, mixed Four Lokos with Buzzballs and shitty vodka, had a grand old time together, and got heckled by everyone with something to sell us. And isn’t that what a bachelor party is all about, really?

The group was a bit smaller this time around, too, which did make for a different kind of vibe.

The party consisted of Kenny, his brother Jake, his friend Tony, and myself, and we all came to the city from different parts of the country. Come to think of it, it is impressive that we were able to get people from four different states into a fifth, different state all at the same time for a whole two-ish days. And while our time was, unfortunately, limited, I think we did our best to make it worth our while.

I just can’t shake the feeling that it’s one big caterpillar with a man-shaped face.

To make our time even more worthwhile, we got there on Fat Tuesday, the very last day of the Mardi Gras celebration. For the unfamiliar, Mardi Gras is the big flashy end-of-the-line party right before Catholic Lent starts, which, in New Orleans, is a celebration that spawns from largely French, Caribbean, and African roots. After the party, the penitent are supposed to give up something in symbolic deference to the sacrifice made by Jesus in his final moments. For the rest of us heathens, it’s a colorful parade of lights, beads, alcohol, and excess that becomes something of a cross between real culture and the bastardization of good things that white America thrives on.

Despite popular opinion, Mardi Gras is, in fact, more than just drinking and getting strangers to show you their nipples, depending on where you look. But part of the good thing about Mardi Gras is that it seems to get everything because we got to see the parade floats, jazz performances, Voodoo shops, unique wrought-iron architecture, crumbling above-ground cemeteries, large amounts of alcohol, and the nipples of strangers, always unexpectedly and sometimes unwelcomely. It is, as the French might say, all a part of the baguette.

It was very, very crowded, too. I got closer to more people here than I had for the last two years.

This might seem strange, in Covid times, and to be frank, it was a bit odd for me to go without masks pretty much the entire time. But numbers are down, the CDC said most places can go without masks, and the city of New Orleans actually required us to present our vaccination cards to get into every bar or restaurant. I was carded more frequently about my vaccination status than the age on my ID. If you had told under-21 me that you could get booze just by being vaccinated, I probably would have shrugged and said “that’s pretty neat” because I wasn’t much a drinker, even when it wasn’t easy for me to get alcohol, but still. You get the idea.

But the ease with which the alcohol flowed did make it so that we got pretty buzzed pretty quick the first night, so after stumbling around in a construction zone and physically slipping on piles of beads that had been abandoned on the side of the road (I smell a future environmental critique!), we ended up getting some of the freshest Popeye’s chicken we’d ever had. There were no tables or stools in the restaurant. It was just lobby and chicken, full of dozens of people. And everyone wanted that damn chicken, and for good reason. That shit was delicious. Now, that could be the alcohol talking, but Kenny can vouch for me, he was there, too. He knows.

That is an incredibly unappetizing photo.

But that wasn’t the end of the party, of course. We still had a couple days to bum around the city and see what there was to see. Most of our time was spent on Bourbon Street, which is kind of the main hub of the historic/party district of the city. But we also spent a fair amount of time on Canal, and around Jackson Square, and whatever street it is that Cafe Du Monde is on. We walked a lot that trip, covering fifteen miles in one day on at least one occasion. I walked more in my vans this trip than I have in probably forever, and it gave me blisters all to hell and fucked with my knees but that is the pain I pay for fashion. Of course, any fashion left my body as soon as I tripped in a puddle and fell in the construction zone, but, as the French would say, c’est la vie. Which I’m assuming means “too fucking bad, you moron.”

When you- when- whenyou- when the boys- When you and the boys- When

Yeah, I took a photography class in college.

Like so many of the photos I take, most of the photos on this trip are either appallingly unflattering, remarkably illegal, or unspeakably evil, and the best ones are some combination or all of the above. So, yeah, I get a lot of pictures of the backs of people’s heads or at the worst possible moments or just generic scenery with Kenny’s head poking out of the corner like a bug. It’s a bit too bad that most of the actual picture of people I have are mid-chew during our crawfish meal or while Kenny attempted to escape the vaguely European man who really, really wanted to sell him jewelry. But I do have some cool photos, at least! And those ones get to go here, with some description of them.

I know you can’t see it here, but the two singers were so into it, jumping and singing all over the place, and then the dude on the keyboard was just kinda… existing. I got the distinct impression that the guy on the drums really *didn’t* want to be there.

Thanks to a cover by the Grateful Dead and an estranged copy of Buckwheat Zydeco’s kids album, I can sing all the words of Iko Iko in broken creole that’s almost on key.

Nowhere else in the world can you start out in a bar where you’re listening to a woman sing a cover of “Enter Sandman” that suddenly turns into “Du Hast,” then go outside, walk five blocks, and stand outside a bar and listen to a jazz trumpeter work the crowd up into singing the call-and-response to “Iko Iko” for fifteen minutes (and I mean the good version, not whatever that shit is on TikTok). And then immediately find a group of drunk and horny 40-year-olds as they suck on each other’s nipples. Not, like, for beads or anything. Just because they wanted to. Bourbon street is something else, let me tell you. Suddenly, Rammstein. Suddenly, jazz. Suddenly, tits. It is a little bit of whiplash.

This whole setup is just ominously seated at the end of a road off of Bourbon Street, as if it totally wasn’t put there to get drunk folks to think twice about what, exactly, they are doing.

Man, the New Orleans Saints stadium could really use a new lick of paint, amirite?

At the very least, there’s tons of stuff to do off of Bourbon street, too. There are book stores and jewelry stores and antique stores and strip clubs and the cemeteries and churches and the riverfront and Jackson Square and the candy stores and all sorts of nice, wholesome things if you grow weary of the seedier parts of the city. Kenny and I became quite familiar with the path to the cemetery as we walked there twice, only to find out that the gates were locked.* We wandered the streets, poking our noses in places both welcome and unwelcome, even after Tony had to leave to go to work and Jake had to leave to take care of a baby with constipation or something, I don’t know.

*Here’s today’s wholly and legally unrelated cryptic fortune cookie: Bribery acts as a key to many locked opportunities.

I have no idea if this is the the same building as that other photo, but I have every reason to suspect that, yes, it totally is.

But there you have it; a second whirlwind tour of New Orleans made by a man who is completely unqualified to make judgements off of any city after seeing about a square mile of it. But what a square mile it is! We may have spent the entire trip bounded by Bourbon street on one side, the river on the other, and Canal street and some hazy, ill-named liminal zone for the other edge, but damn it, we had fun! You don’t always have to go on tours of museums or carriage rides or expansive, city-covering sightseeing tours to have fun on a vacation. Sometimes all you need is a good parade, tons and tons of bars, lots of alcohol, more balconies than you can shake a stick at, and good company. And isn’t that what Mardi Gras is all about?

No, of course not, but you get the idea. That’s gotta be the cheesiest ending I’ve ever written, but it’s true! I’m glad that I got to take in the sights of the city again, this time with a different krewe of bachelor party attendees for a whole different wedding. In these trying times, you can never be too sure of when you’ll see your friends again, or what the world will look like in even a few months, so I think it’s good practice to take the opportunities as they present themselves to you. That’s how I ended up at a comedy/mortuary intrigue dinner show where a funeral director gave us a Google Slides PowerPoint presentation of photos of ghosts and apparitions he’s collected over the years. Now that’s what I call living.

Thank you, Kenny, for having me along to your bachelor party, and thank you for being my friend. I wish you and Eva the best in your married future together, and I can’t wait to have more fun at the wedding, too. And perhaps for my bachelor party, whenever that is, we’ll go somewhere even crazier. Like the heart of America: Fargo, North Dakota. Now that’s a party town.