Saints and sinners

There are a lot of things that I love about New Orleans -- and if you're around me for any length of time, you'll hear me expound on them... excessively.

But perhaps my favorite thing about the city is its willingness to suspend time and reality and get really drunk and rowdy at the drop of a hat; or, as this article on NOLA and Saints fans puts it, on "Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest, Halloween, days that end in ‘y’..." (add to this list: Southern Decadence aka Gay Mardi Gras, St. Patrick's Day, Art for Art's Sake, Voodoofest, Swampfest, French Quarter Fest, Soulfest, Po'boy Fest -- and these are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head). We all agree that there's something wonderful about official holidays, when the genus Working Stiff is given an arbitrary reprieve and told to putter around the house in jammies instead of slaving away in the pursuit of Das Kapital. But, obviously, it's much more wonderful to have holiday be the rule to the work-day exception, and in New Orleans, that it is. When I found out I'd gotten into grad school, for instance, it just happened to be in the middle of the month-long affair that is Mardi Gras season -- which means that I wasn't alerted via post (not functioning) or email (wasn't checking it), but by a phone call from my mom, who'd been rung up by the department secretary and told in a concerned and slightly baffled voice that I'd officially been accepted but hadn't yet responded. Did I then instantly rush off to bang out a humble, conciliatory email, dripping with gratitude and obsequiousness? Not really. From what I recall, I went around triumphantly banging on the doors of my roommates, then filled a flask up with whiskey and drunkenly biked through Uptown to catch a parade. Priorities.

Of course, this kind of hedonistic atmosphere is not conducive to getting things done, and all the petty and not-so-petty corruption in the state of Louisiana notwithstanding, all levels of infrastructure there are as dependable as will-o-wisps. But, really, who cares about getting things done? In other cities, people live for the weekend, that brief sliver of time into which is squeezed all of sweaty, unwieldy, genuine human experience. In New Orleans, people float from carnival to carnival, each new instantiation of which appears with the mechanical regularity of a roving cloud-platform in a level of Super Mario. The weekends are mainly for sleeping. Unfortunately, going from the latter paradigm to the former feels like being violently thrust from a lush, technicolor utopian dream into a black-and-white German expressionist film. There's no way to adjust -- and, sadly, no way to get across to your new fellow wage-slaves just how wonderful institutionalized irreverence can be.

And, to wit, I leave you with this little gem of NOLA reality (culled from the gchat status of one of my former students -- thanks, Dan). What other city would have the brass to use fine art as gambling chips in a Superbowl wager? Well, Indianapolis, I guess... but who wants to live there?