The first Mardi Gras parade of the season -- by the Krewe du Vieux - complete with risque costumes and eight brass bands, passed a block from my apartment here last night. I got festooned with my first beads. But I was not personally dancing in the streets.

It's that "against all odds" survival thing that one reader mentioned a few weeks back. Sometimes I feel like I have a cheering section committed to my on-going misery.

Abject penury only makes the "normal" irritations of life more grating. For someone so committed to avoiding angry outbursts, I find myself silently seething more and more these days. You probably noticed that last week, when I talked about another injustice...

Noise, for example. You probably noticed how taken I was by Kevin Carey's essay about the modern fear of silence. I find it annoying, always have, that so many people seem compelled to fill every one of their waking moments with cacophony. That makes it difficult for me to live around other people, for any extended period, as I do now.

I keep wanting to scream: "How about some damned SILENCE?!? How about being able to hear ourselves THINK?!?"

I don't, of course.

I feel like I am drowning in banality.

AND, FINALLY, I landed a new job that I like -- BUT that required me to work on Saturday this week. (More on the job next week.) I had planned on launching after I arrived home this evening, after finishing the last nips and tucks, only to find that Cox Cable was having a major outtage.

I do most of the work off-line, but there are some chores that demand I make a quick connection during preparation. No chance. So, I write this waiting for the opportunity to add those touches and then to launch.

It's already after 10 p.m. We may not "appear" before Tuesday.


Things have turned upside down, as they are wont to do. Last month at this time, it was necessary for me to bail my roommates out with the little money I had gotten as Manuel Labore. This month, as I floundered and looked for new work, Matt, my roommate, has been my Rod. He has bailed me out through jobs that haven't paid me and the long trough of pounding the pavement.

I am grateful.

Matt wants me very much to like New Orleans (in case you hadn't' noticed it by now) even though he knows that the place goes against my essential (anal) nature. I am industrious to a fault. This magazine is certainly evidence of that. I eat my liver every time we have some problem or delay (think: Cox Cable.) New Orleans is "The Big Easy" in that sloth and indolence and debauchery are celebrated here. I can't make that "work for" me.

But you probably want to hear about that first Mardi Gras parade we attended. Okay.

Besides passing out iridescent beads in rich colors, and condoms, sprinkling people with glitter, they also passed out irreverent flyers. Matt's favorite says this:

- SHIT PURSE -
cutin' dido ...! its super super fun cool!
remember he flaming bag-o-poo? ... well, this is better!

REQUIRED TOOLS

1. shit
2. 2 or more nice looking purses (used ... these can be purchased @ Thrift City)
3. 2 or more dollar bills (equal dollars to # of purses)
4. 2 or more ACTIVE participants
5. video camera (optional)

now that you have all that ... let's begin ... SHITPURSE!

(you can record this whole event)

step 1. Get shit in purse
step 2. Place dollar gingerly atop shit in purse
step 3. Place purse on sidewalk of busy, well-trafficked street
step 4. Wait for it (be patient)
step 5. When purse is eyed, picked up, opned and reached into (and it will be) wait for the look in their eyes and then point and scream

SHITPURSE! Hint - (flight may be necessary)
REPEAT REPEAT REPEAT (change locale and time of course)
Hint - (if someone picks up the SHITPURSE and takes it without opening it ... LET IT GO... this is why multiple purses were purchased ... LET IT GO ... there will be others) Why? You ask .... to make a better world. Imagine ... soon, no one no where will dare steal a lost/dropped purse for fear of the shit inside. [sic]

(Matt -- and maybe you, too -- will have to forgive me for this, but I found this flyer as funny as a train wreck. My internal reaction was, "It's true. Some people have too much time on their hands."

As I was transcribing it here tonight, I thought: "The idle mind is not the Devil's playground, the idle mind is pathetic. The Devil would certainly have better taste than to hang out in a place like this."

I feel like I am drowning in banality.)

The thing about Carnaval, New Orleans-style, is that it has this under-current to it. It's less about having fun than about clipping all the people who flock to this town for Mardi Gras. Bourbon Street is just the sleaziest trick working that corner. The whole town is gearing up to rip off all the people who come here for the Mardi Gras experience. Listening to the locals talk about the tourists is like listening to old whores talk about the johns they disdain the most.

If you talk to anyone who actually lives in New Orleans, it's not Mardi Gras that they look forward to, because they look down on people who don't live in towns with bars open 24/7 and who don't live to make slacking "work for" them. If you talk to the locals, they are looking forward to Jazz Fest. That's the real party that New Orleans is proud of, no matter what the Tourist Bureau might tell you.

All the local talk about Mardi Gras is about how much money can made (off the "amateurs") during that two weeks of debauchery. This is tourist town, after all --- our polite euphemism for a metropolitan clip joint. Listen: If you're planning to come here, and you're (probably) not used to how this town can imbibe, be careful. There's a Rule here: you get busted during Mardi Gras, you don't get out of jail until Lent. Period.

It works like this: all those great parades you hear about are being financed privately by what're call Krewes. A Krewe is a social club. Most of them are invitation-only. Most of the people involved are social climbers. As you might expect, these people include doctors, business-people, lawyers and judges.

That means there's no way in Hell you're getting a court date down here during Mardi Gras, Baby. (Everybody in Nawlins calls everybody "Baby.")

So you are S.O.L. You have been warned, Pilgrim.

Even as an infant, Rod had trouble
with authority figures for being such
a Wild Child.

Matt and I were talking tonight about the fact that, since my new job is at Bourbon Street, I will have to look forward to wending my way through drunken revelers and frat boys, on my way home from work, for the two weeks starting this Friday.

I mentioned last week that I'll be a doorman for a local Irish Pub during Super Bowl weekend.

"Look on the bright side," Matt says. "Working on Bourbon Street, you'll get to see a lot of college girls showing their tits."

(In case you didn't know, that's another big Mardi Gras tradition. Drunks on the balcony of the local spots yell down to drunken young girls on the French Quarter streets to show their breasts in exchange of showers of Mardi Gras beads. Lots do. People even sell those sleazy videos you see on late night television here in America of this spectacle.)

I cringe.

I'll be fifty this year. I've seen my share of breasts, I figure. Seeing a woman expose her breasts doesn't do for me what it did when I was fourteen. Seeing a stupid drunk woman do it for a handful of plastic beads will probably do even less when I'm tired from a long day of work and jostling my way through the Visigoths in order to make my way home...

End of Curmudgeon's pre-Mardi Gras lament.

THINGS ON THE ROD-LIST THIS WEEK

Rod was a columnist for the Andover News Network, where he wrote over two hundred articles on web design and development issues. He was also principal writer and Editor for IT Manager's Journal, where he reviewed technology issues weekly, producing 383 editorials. He became the Managing Editor for Electronic Mail/Newsletter Publications at Andover.net at the end of February, 2000, and left in September of the same year. He was a contributing writer for ACCESS magazine, which appears both on- and offline for 10 million readers in 100 newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, Boston Herald, Austin American-Statesman, Denver Post and Orlando Sentinel, among others. Rod was the US reporter for Silicon.com, a division of Network Multimedia Television in London, UK, reaching 3.5 million European readers, until May, 2001.

Rod lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, right now. The new home of the magazine. But he plans to return to Serbia next year.

He continues to be committed to integrity, chastity and a dose of humility.

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