phat tuesday...

this morning on the bus, i was listening to the ol' ipod. for a change of pace, i had it on shuffle mode (because lately i've been obsessively listening to the sufjan stevens album _illinois_, which is nothing short of mesmerizing), and one of the songs that came up was "crosstown traffic" by jimi hendrix. which reminded me that, hey! it's mardi gras today!

here's how that worked out in my mind...

picture me, seventeen years old, a pot-smokin', authority-hatin' high school senior who listened to a lot of hendrix, led zeppelin, and the grateful dead. a bunch of my friends and i decided to go to biloxi for mardi gras (since i'm from that part of the country that legitimately celebrates the carnival season and we got the monday and tuesday before ash wednesday off of work/school). there were maybe eight of us in total, we took two cars (one of which was the brown datsun 200SX that i drove around in those days), and brought as much beer/booze as we could acquire through our of-age sources. well, everything that could have possibly gone wrong that day did. we got our ice chest full of beer confiscated by the cops that morning, before any of us could reap the benefits of its presence. there was high drama in the various couples in my friend group. my friend amy locked her keys in her car so at the end of the day we all had to pile into my car to drive back to pascagoula. good times.

but why did the hendrix tune remind me of this? because in the early part of the day, before everything went to shit, as we arrived in biloxi, "crosstown traffic" came up on whatever mix tape was playing in my car's cassette deck and my friend matt hung his head out the window and shouted out the lyrics to anybody who was within earshot. ah, high school...

i never did new orleans for mardi gras and never really had any desire to. it always seemed too touristy, too frustrating, too crowded for my liking. biloxi was easy, it was familiar, it was social enough.

but today i'm thinking about new orleans. i guess i'm glad that there's another reason to remind the rest of the country of how completely devastating hurricane katrina continues to be for those areas affected. lots of folks are still homeless and jobless and displaced. seems like a crappy reason to throw a big party. or maybe it's a good reason -- things deserve to go on as usual. onward and upward.

onward and upward.