Mardi Blog: Part(y) One

Hey there, 'Redheads... Did everyone fill out their brackets today? It's your responsibility as an American. Vote or die. Today's the day when nationwide productivity plummets while we sift through more seeds than a stoner looking for one last toke. It doesn't matter if you haven't watched a college basketball game all season. My girlfriend just picked Old Dominion because she likes the root beer. Let's not get sidetracked, though. We'll get back to remedial bracketology tomorrow. After a week long hiatus, I'm back to chisel through the writer's block and provide you with as much as I can recall of my jaunt to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. I was going to attempt to do this on Friday, but my body needed the extra recovery time to shake the gristle from my fried synapses, which were marinated in whiskey and Hurricanes for three days. Sure, it sounds delicious (if Paula Deen was a zombie), but it was a recipe for one exhausted Jew. Let's see if I can focus and give you a glimpse of what went down.

I landed at Louis Armstrong International Airport at roughly midnight and piled into a cab with five strangers who were all headed to the French Quarter. Our cabbie was an older gentleman who seemed to have already had his fill of the uppity hipsters and douchebag frat boys who were in his city to cause a ruckus. With the party raging on the main drag of Canal St, he dropped us off as close has he could to our respective hotels. Luckily, mine was a quick two blocks to the corner of Canal and Bourbon. I met my buddies, Nick and Gary, at the room, dropped off my stuff, and we decided to wade into the sea of drunken humanity that was Bourbon St.My first impression? Filth. On every level. Garbage strewn in the street, piles of discarded beads, and, since it had rained for two days, everything was slippery. I had to cuff my pant legs so that I wouldn't have to burn them later. And then there's the people. Maybe the A talent was getting in on a later flight, but it was just a Fantasia broomstick army of people who walked off the sets of Maury and The Jerry Springer Show. A parade of stumbling ugly. I was able to document my initial reaction to the shit show...I'm not one to nitpick about physical beauty, I'm a nebbishy tub of goo, but holy crap. And without fail, if we spotted a woman who was remotely attractive, she was tethered to a grotesque fat guy that made Jabba the Hutt look like George Clooney. The soundtrack of Mardi Gras was a persistent woooing. So much woooing, it was like someone shoved a police siren down Ric Flair's throat. The only thing that cut through the wooo was the rhythmic chant of "show your tits!" These particular tits were not the kind that should be encouraged or, unfortunately, needed encouragement. All it took was some particularly shiny boob wampum for some of these girls to release the hounds. It's an odd double standard that exists on the lawless streets of New Orleans. Drunk guys want to see boobs and drunk girls have boobs to offer, but these aren't the boobs you're looking for. The boobs you want are the professional drivers on a closed course, the ones you get are Toonces the Cat crashing through the guard rail. Anyway, we gawked as the drunken current carried us down Bourbon St, then we went back to the hotel around 2am to recharge for whatever debauchery lay ahead.

To be continued...