And every bartender, waitress, cook on the beat has stories of working 14-17 hours straight, from the Wednesday before (sometimes) until the Wednesday after Mardi Gras. It's like carrying an egg as a badge of honor.

After about three days of the on-going rush of music blared from the souvenir shops trying to attract customers, from the live bands in the clubs, after all the "Woo-hoo!" and "Show your tits!" and "Dude! Look! HUGE ASS BEER TO GO! Let's go get a huge ass beer to go!" "Kewl! Huge Ass Beer" long days of catering to the amateur drunks and very little sleep, a kind of hallucinatory glaze settles over everything and all of your perceptions."Exhaustion has been used as a form of torture by most modern armies. Sleep deprivation (dream deprivation) leads to an altered state of consciousness. This, too, is part of the New Orleans Way.

If you manage to work less than fourteen hours, you take it as a cause for celebration. You stop at a small local bar halfway between Bourbon Street and home on the path of your walk and take the opportunity of an extra hour to yourself to continue your paean to the season.

You'd expect to find those attributes to the Mardi Gras celebrants. To the contrary, you all-too-often find that the people most willing to embrace the New Orleans Way aren't inclined toward any of them.

I'd taken to saying that the only way to understand something that happens in New Orleans is to correlate the "versions" of the story that you hear. New Orleans is a city of versions. You find it difficult to run into two people who have the same version of even the most mundane event. So you have to dig for the (usually self-serving) interest which the particular version you're getting is meant to reinforce or promote.

Honor, an essential component of true justice, is something that you quickly come not to expect. Power on the other hand, dictates the actions and reactions of both the strong and weak. Those with power wield it brutally; the powerless toady towards their betters. The ritual politeness here is as thick and transparent as you'll find it in any Islamic country. "Sir" and "Ma'am" simply replace "Effendi" and "Bey" by dint of geography. As to faith, no one is as pious as the publican and the Pharisee.

Like all euphoria this one can be short-lived. It was a slow Mardi Gras, one in the slowest in the last five years, everyone tells you. One of the managers in the chain of clubs and restaurant your company owns decides to have the promotional slogan of a beer campaign body painted on her torso and flash for the crowds like the Quarter's traditional "bead whores." Everyone complains about low sales and low tips. (In your position, it matters less because you don't get tipped, anyway. The brother holding the HUGE ASS BEER sign near Toulouse tells you that he's making "mad bank" from the street crowds and also being tipped out by the bartenders and so he's having a great time. This is his first Mardi Gras, too, so he has no idea what mad bank is by Bourbon Street standards. Theories are tossed around like the fake doubloons of the krewes, worth as much as the Mardi Gras beads for which women expose their breasts and tourists pay good money (breast-flash tender) for in "gift" shops year round.

ASIDE: There is a saying here that you can tell an out-of-towner because they wear beads even when it isn't Mardi Gras.

BACK TO STREAM OF UNCONSCIOUSNESS: One theory is that this is the Mardi Gras of locals. That everybody who was coming to New Orleans for the holiday was here by Saturday and their presence plus the drive-ins from nearby that made Saturday our big day but that was not enough to make a real Mardi Gras. Blame it on the aftermath of September 1lth and (some) Americans still being fearful of travel.

( Blame it on the moon, I think.)

Another theory goes that it's the recession and the economic uncertainty people are feeling. According to that theory, the same number of people are here, they just aren't spending as much money as in the go-go Clinton years when everything was booming.

Pick your theory for why things don't work in a city where young people come to slack and stay drunk (or on junk) calling themselves the coolest of the cool and old people with a work ethic are treated like a valuable commodity.

And you know what? Any theory will do.

A man notorious for putting out fire with gasoline should be able to make it in this town --- but I'm still waiting for you to prove it by me.

The vegetation of New Orleans is relentless. Even the trees. Their gnawled root mock concrete and stone. Rip it up like falcon talons rip through the flesh of a rabbit. Strange vines grow over the sides of abandoned houses and reduce their walls to rubble, devour entire yards, resisting the efforts of men to "tame" Nature. Gardeners tear the vines up by the roots and every summer they manage to return.

In the older parts of the city, like the French Quarter or Marigny where you live, there is the added (walking) hazard of sidewalks being paved with bricks rather than slabs of concrete like most cities ... It is European, in that way, like people say about San Francisco. The big difference is that New Orleans is not faux. Unlike San Francisco, the streets, parts of the sewage and drainage system still extant were built by the Spanish and French centuries ago.

You -- I am not just exhausted but hallucinatory. But The Rules of Sleep are nowhere in sight.

"You refuse to understand my affliction. I refuse to write about it."

"Your 'affliction'! What does that mean?"

"Some people understand that there is not only one affliction I'm afraid of ... "

My Last Days @ Casa de Caca

I am serving my last days at Casa de Cace, God willing. I have told Matt I can't continue to tolerate the J.C. and its vagaries -- including the recurring practice of using this apartment as the public toilet for all their hangers-on. Matt says he doesn't want the problem, either, but he always opts for the lazy man's route, which means he doesn't have the courage to make any chanages to his environment. He only rhetorically understands the Tuna Question, "What would a Man do?" I understand... But the J.C. will not be my problem, I have told him.

(Interestingly, at least to me, is that I learned while waiting to launch this edition of the magazine that one of the more insidious of the J.C. members has recently gone to jail. This development should certainly change some of the lay of the land at Casa de Caca, but nowhere near enough to make me forget all that has gone before and in all probability will kick in again. The personnel of the J.C. might be changing, but I have lower hopes of its essential nature.)

I've asked my boss, who's well-connected, and all of my friends to keep their ears open for me. I've looked at a couple of apartments.

Now that I'm moonlighting as the janitor at O'Flaherty's(this weekend I set up for Garrison Keillor's live broadcast from the pub), I can look forward to enough income to get my own place. I'm even open to sharing another place. Just not in this neighborhood. I don't want to be anywhere close to this heroin infestation if I can help it.

Thus, I find myself in a disengagement mode at Casa de Caca, investing less of myself there while exploring the other people and offerings of Nawlins. It feels good. The minor irritations -- that no one will even do the simplest things like buy toilet paper, clean house, etc. -- are endurable because I can see an end. In the process, I am meeting people who actually want to do something with their lives. I've committed to myself to know where I shall live next here in Nawlins by the end of the week. Send good vibes.

Just the other night, among the new friends I am cultivating, I met an artist who did the "Yes! Oh yes!" response that I have come not to expect when I make reference to my Quest to find "Home." He immediately went into a jag of his own about how, for some people, there's always this sense of being a kind of emotional refugee, never feeling comfortable in a place -- much as one might like it -- because it just isn't "Home." He even went so far as to proclaim, rather excitedly, that the 'Net might be the only place for a community of people like "us" because there may not be a "civilized" country left to retreat to or gather in in geographic space. (I certainly hope he's wrong about that.)

But I am playing catch-up after the all-consuming time of Mardi Gras season, when service people like me are allowed little except (little) sleep outside of catering to the influx of merry-makers.

To add to my frustration, my e-mail account went weird on Thursday. Nothing gets in for now. I can only assume things get out... I can't diss Cox Cable for this. It's those wankers at ugo.com who put these damnable banners and pop-up ads on our site. My patience is about at an end.

You know what that means for a man with NO Patience...

Before the e-mail died, I was sent this interesting little page to peruse:
http://www.dreamwater.net/art/uncleernie/issues.html
by Rico, down in Texas.

Life is starting to take the contours of (what-passes-for) "normality" slowly for those of us who worked the Quarter this season. My friend Curtis, who is off to Belgium soon, reminds me that New Orleans is a Third World City, much better suited to somewhere in Central America. I have myself compared it to Haiti. But I am also more and more aware that anyone's "version" of New Orleans, even mine, says more about the interlocutor than about the Crescent City itself. Buyer beware.

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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