The Excellent Sandwich
In the wake of Mardi Gras, I woke up with only about 20 bucks to show for "Fat Tuesday's" take in cash, but I was still full from an excellent sandwich which was given to me by a guy walking with a lady on Bourbon Street, at about midnight.
It had some kind of salami or pepperoni, but in slices thin enough to cut down on their contribution in grease to the whole thing, melted cheese, which might have been -I don't know, I don't really know my cheeses, but it was thick, yet not dry- and tomatoes and lettuce and some kind of sauce which might have had basil, all between two slightly toasted pieces of what might have been a rye or oat type bread.
The sandwich was cut not quite in half, leaving a smaller half (which made Howard cross my mind briefly), and placed next to a pasta type salad which most definitely had olive oil, and was excellent on its own.
It was a genuine sample of the food that New Orleans is famous for being famous for (there are so many places here with "famous" right in the name, that I've never even heard of half of them...).
There had been cigarette butts everywhere, of all sizes an quality, which could be broken open and rolled into a day's worth of tobacco, daily, during the festival.
There had been all kinds of drinks, like the gin and tonic which seemed to be saying to me "Someone took one sip of me and decided that they didn't like gin and tonic" which was sitting atop a trash receptacle* with its ice barely melted, on one of the side streets. I was on my way to the store to get a beer and decided to just save my 2 bucks; this happened in that way about a half dozen times over the festival.
*Placing stuff on or around the trash receptacles is kind of a universally accepted gesture here which means: "I was just going to throw this away, but there's nothing wrong with it and someone else might appreciate it. They're gonna just dig through the receptacle, anyways..."
Folks Couldn't Hang
All in all, I got the impression that most people just couldn't hang with the frenetic pace of the "stay up all night Monday and right through Fat Tuesday" tradition of Mardi Gras.
I saw, in the smiles on a lot of the faces that walked past me, a look that said, "I'm all Mardi Gras-ed out, we've been spending money like wild fire, and we're afraid to even count what we have left; every noise is giving me a headache right now...but you sound good, keep it up!"
- Food Card
- Strings and Cable
- Lawyer's Office
Last night, Howard and I slept right through the sounds of people tearing down their grills and tables all around us.
The sprawl of Mardi Gras had finally encroached upon our "doorstep," when Tuesday morning at about 4 a.m., people came and set up to do what looked like, drink a lot of Hennessey and sell barbequed food to the masses.
We just put our bags in the tree and went back to sleep, and tried to fit in -as if we had just passed out from the previous nights revelry.
When I layed down at midnight, the whole island was a mess. When I woke up at around 7 a.m., Howard said "It looks like they did a pretty good job cleaning up," and, indeed the lawn had been raked clean, all around Howard and I, while we slept. A bottle of water near my head was undisturbed.
I asked Howard, "Did you get any barbeque?" to which he replied; "No."
The grillers probably just never thought much about Howard at all in their frenzies.
Food Card
I need to go to Rebuild Center to see if I can get the address and/or name of the representative of that department, who sporadically shows up there to council people. She will not be there until March 1st, and I really don't want to just eat off of the free food at the shelters until then, or God forbid, my cash!
Strings And USB Cable
While there, I can check the mail to see if the "goody box" came from Alex in California, containing the above.
I broke a string Monday night and was not prepared to find the music stores all closed for Mardi Gras (I didn't think it was a national holiday, or anything)
This blog should be improved by my having a cable for my phone/camera, so I can bring up to date media to the whole experience.
In general, I would say that the Mardi Gras crowd was not very different from the BCS Championship game crowd, or the New Orleans Saints crowd, or any other crowd which has been crowding around here, since I got here.
To The Lawyer's Office
I found out that the courtdate of February 29th was not a "convenient" slip on the part of the cop issuing the citation. It is leap year, and I have to be there next Wednesday.
I was advised by my lawyer to plead not guilty and then to reitterate my desire to leave here, and ask them to dismiss the thing.
Last time, I was within a day or two of leaving, after the BCS Championship game, and then got a ticket, which effectively kept me here through the festival. This time, I am more hell bent upon leaving here, thank you very much.
OK, "The Gras" is over with, now you can plan to make tracks. As in, Git the hell out here.
ReplyDeleteI wish I could afford to send you a bus ticket, do you think you could get the Tingsleys or Cringeleys or whoever they are, to? Or your parents?
It is definitely much less dog-eat-dog out here in the Bay Area. There are homeless people here who just sit by a store, don't say a thing, and people know they're in need, they'll doze off and find a meal left for them and money too. There are a lot of places that *like* guitarists and some really friggin' excellent string shops, like Gryphon Strings in Palo Alto, that are excellent to everyone and have a soft spot for professional buskers. You are really in a social, as well as a musical, desert out there. Yeah yeah it's the birthplace of jazz, but I'd look at coon-asses living 'way back in the swamp, or hardcore ghetto kids who can't afford guitars for new waves in jazz-like music. Not NO home of the moldy figs...
If I were you, I'd consider "greyhound hops" across the country.
Or hitch-hops, a brainstorm I had *just now* is, to follow Route 66. Tell people you're following Route 66 because your parents did yadda yadda, trying to see 'em in California as yer Mom's about to die, blah blah .... thing is, Route 66 has a steady flow the monied hipster and older hipster types, and Europeans, yet at least along the portion of it I traveled on my motorcycle, grub and lodging are cheap. Even cheaper if lodging is homeless-style. Like the flow of people up and down Route 1 on the West Coast, Route 66 has this cachet to it and you can use that cachet like a snail's slime-trail to get you where you're going.
You definitely want to avoid Assholeville, er, Southern California, if you're trying to get up here. However, an interesting wrinkle on travel would be to end up in SoCal and then do what I did, slavishly follow Route 1 right up the coast and into Santa Cruz.
It's too bad you're not a "motorcycle guy", you could get a 250 and go right across the country. Hitching is cool though.
BTW we have the same conventions out here, anything useful or in town, good eatable food, will be left by not in the trash can, next to the dumpster, etc., good clothes, furniture, you name it, people would rather see it used than in the landfill.
I should mention that when I got back here to California, since good maps are not available outside of California, my plan was first to escape the Great American Desert and get safely across the mountains and home in on an old friend's place in Huntington Beach. And this is exactly what I did. But when I got there, he was no longer there - the impossible had happened, he'd sold the house and moved to Lake Elsinore. Which means essentially he died. I thought I had a good 1200 miles ahead of me of travel, up Route 1. My plan had been to stay in my friend's backyard in a tent for a couple weeks or so, drawing caricatures down at the beaches and saving up more $ for the long trek to the Bay Area. I discovered that I only had about 500 miles to go, And I had enough money to just go, so I did. But the original plan had been to camp out of sight alongside Route 1, and go into towns to draw caricatures and thus earn $ for food and gas for my bike.
ReplyDeleteThe plan had been, once in the Bay Area, to sell the motorcycle and use the resulting $2000 or so to rent a storage unit, and buy a bicycle. The storage unit was going to be Home Base, and then I'd bike around, do caricatures, and sleep in various hidey-holes I'd find. Instead I ended up meeting up with an old acquaintance and paying rent to sleep on his couch, and keeping the motorcycle. At $20/night that couch ran me $600 a month, but turns out there are plenty of places to be had for $300 a month out here. Just remember cash talks these days and be a good rent-payer and you can stay under a roof.
After reading your final form of today's post ....
ReplyDeleteI hope you can escape there. It seems like they want to keep you there, poor, desperate, and eternally a ward of their state due to the illegality there of things like sitting on the sidewalk, eating, sleeping, normal functions. There's probably some profit being made off of you, and they may be reluctant to let you leave, but then on the other hand, there are other "forces" who want to "get rid of the homeless" and since they can't shoot you yet, maybe they'll let you leave if you can convince them you *need* to leave. Come up with any number of dying relatives, anything, to convince them. Tell them you want to get out to California so bad you can taste it. Tell them you are happy to be taken to the edge of town in the paddy wagon, put on the road, and you will never turn back. Etc.
Yes, except I WILL come back, with an orangutang, stereo portable sound and two orphan girls singing backup vocals, I will be playing an exotic instrument like a harp; a full blown made for heaven type, with a special jerry rigged coil pickup, which I can switch to a metal "crunch" type distortion at the tap of a footswitch. Don't worry, the orphans and I and our pet will pull in enough touros to cover the expense of transporting us. "Now that's alright!" the city will say....
ReplyDeleteActually in a year or two the first cases of verified cannibalism will start occurring in NOLA and all whites not dead will be out. Just sayin'.
ReplyDeleteThis will be because this Greater Depression thing we're starting into will have taken its next sickening lurch downward.
Musicians will again be treasured though, when the grid is down and all the ipods fall silent, and the batteries in things can't be recharged, people will want music. They'll want food and the night-time marauders dead, they'll want a lot of things, but music will be one of them. Musicians will be highly regarded like they were 100 or more years ago, not considered the losers and oddballs they are now.
And it's not going to be possible to travel X-country as blithely as we do now. So you need to get to where you can survive the Greater Depression with a reasonable expectation of living, and NOLA is not the place.