Living

Thought #1: don't blog after being up for 18 hours, after having gotten only five hours of sleep the night before.

Thought #2: why is all the food in my house so bland? Oh...of course.

So, yeah, I'm back. Some thoughts on S.D.:

• It wasn't really as wild as I thought it would be. A typical Folsom St. Fair has much more nastiness than what I saw the entire week. Or maybe I just wasn't in the right place, or maybe it was because...
  
• There were far fewer people than expected. I asked a number of other attendees, and they all agreed that it was a surprisingly small crowd. Smaller than at any time since the early '90s.
  
• It was a very Southern crowd.
  
• The entire city was very welcoming. Lots of businesses in the Quarter were sporting rainbow flags. The tour guide on my New Orleans Katrina disaster tour, a retired schoolteacher and grandfather, made a special point of welcoming S.D. tourists.
  
• If you have a partner or boyfriend don't go to Decadence. Just don't. Unless you need a reason to end a relationship, then by all means, go!
  
• Don't buy souveniers after having a few cocktails. I'm still trying to figure out what I'm going to do with enough mix for eight dozen beignets.
  
  
  
• New Orleans is coming back, whether you like it or not.
  

Because of the sparse attendence, I'm very glad that I made other plans for Thursday and Friday. On Thursday I rented a car and drove I-10 through Mississippi and Alabama, to see the damage and add two to my list of visited states. I had lunch in downtown Biloxi at the Ol' Schooner restaurant, where President Bush visited on Monday, August 28 (I heard a report on NPR on Tuesday and decided I wanted to visit). The food was very good, the staff very friendly, and the name tags from Bush's visit were in an unceremonious pile on a shelf behind the counter.

I spent all of 18 minutes in Alabama. That was enough.

On Friday I took the Gray Line Katrina disaster tour. It was three hours long and very sobering. I'm very glad I did it, though. I saw devestated neighborhoods, damaged levees, and a hell of a lot of determination to rebuild (and very little patience for those elsewhere in the country that don't want New Orleans to rebuild).


On Saturday, there was a free concert on the corner of Bourbon and St. Ann street, featuring Jeanie Tracy, Inaya Day, and Amber.


On Sunday, there was the parade. It was only thirty minutes long, about half of its usual length. That evening, I met a very outgoing man from Mississippi who made friends with a local resident. She ended up inviting us to her home in the Quarter, where we hung out in the interior courtyard with her neighbor and his two tenants for a couple of hours. The bad part is that I missed the height of the debauchery. But it was a reasonable trade: I got to see a bit of the real New Orleans. Unfiltered. It was, for reasons I can't really explain (and, no, not drugs) an experience that was more vivid, more alive, than anything I've felt in a long time. I'm still trying to figure it out.