nola, day 3.

midnight, 79 degrees, 85% humidity. this must be what people complain about when they bemoan tropical weather. I still hear thunder in the background. my skin is sticky. my hair is a completely different texture than it was 12 hours ago. I like it, this sultriness. it's kinda nice to feel perpetually grimy, to embrace your circumstances, to be a human gamely stumbling through a climactically foreign environment. after a while it's just, like, "fuck it", ya know?

that's a good attitude to apply to life in general. how often I forget that. I take things sooooo seriously, and for what? not for anyone else's benefit, and certainly not for mine.

fuck it!

-at the southern food & beverage museum, which is bizarrely tucked away in the far end of the Riverwalk mall. I fucking hate malls, so I never go into them unless I'm looking for, say, a liquor museum... so I was startled, like a cave-dweller, at the SPECIFICITY of shops available. it reminded me of that old Simpsons episode... the Riverwalk mall has stores devoted solely to watchbands, hot sauces, popcorn... it was desolate. workers stood in the entryways to their stores, looking drained. no one even spoke. the Muzak played their version of "Against All Odds." anyway, the museum was cool. and the guy asked if I was a student and I said "yeah?" so I paid half price.
-at one of the cemeteries at the lakeside end of Canal St.
-downpour! 3 visits I've waited for a proper New Orleans storm! I was heading back from uptown. sorry to exploit you, random jogger.
-my arm was hanging out the streetcar window. I was getting wet. saturated, saturated.
-Rue Conti? St Ann? don't remember.
-WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO THIS FACADE? Jesus! this is on the same block as my hotel. it's kind of awesome because it's SO very, very bad. the entire rest of the block, it seems, is vacant, except for the Brother's Food Mart, which is an interesting place.
-a jacket made out of red beans and rice for one of the mardi gras krewes.
-at cypress grove cemetery.
-a sidewalk in Carrollton. I fucking love this area. this'd be where I'd move. if I did. who knows.
-haphazard headstone action. Katrina? centuries of neglect? I visited two cemeteries today and both were similarly unkempt. it is fucking beautiful in a tragic, shitty kind of way.
-on the guest bulletin board at the museum.
-I couldn't tell if this house was vacant or not. this is where "the end" was spray-painted out front. I saw the house (and its garret!) first, then noticed the "too late" sign swaying on the 2nd story. it's on St Charles in Carrollton.
-the cemetery; I forget which one.
-this was a poster distributed after prohibition was recanted...
-look for it.

I love traveling alone. sometimes I fucking hate it and the loneliness makes me want to tear off my skin and burst into tears, but most of the time I adore it. I enjoy being anonymous and invisible. no one here knows me. no one here knows my past, or my thoughts, or what I'm capable of, or why I'm sprawled like a truck driver at an outside table with sweat clinging to my body at 1 in the morning... there's something so deliciously, addictively freeing about that.
I like my attitude towards the world A LOT MORE when I'm traveling.