feelings on the radio, scrolling songs to find the one that has your heart ripped open and raw.

before, there were only so many stations. you had to turn the speakers off when your car ran out of signals, but now, you never have to stop searching for a space to sit in. at least, not until the fatigue hits you.

the blues, and upbeat, syncopated piano because you need that synth waver to break up the emotion, because you are not a teenage girl and her pillows in the afternoon, but a man on a mission, and a broken heart knows mostly only its own misfortune.

the fear of too many pills, but it's not today, even though you already take one for your headaches, and vitamins for health, and whiskey, because whiskey is the solution for all the little things.

--

work is not really the place for friends. i don't think new orleans is either, but i don't think not having friends is the problem, so much as the need for new conversations.

fanny has adventures in nola-land

i. Flew in late Thursday night; dinner at some swank-esque place; food (braised beef cheeks) was melt-in-mouth perfect, wine was dry Austrian. Good wine always reminds me of former lovers. Waitress was a Stuy-girl, and well, I love my Stuy-people. It's brethren; finding a Hunter-kid never happens, so Stuy kids are the next best thing. We know & run adjacent city-social-circles. Bought her a shot; her husband is currently doing Batman comics, which is awesome.

Staying on the Champs-Élysées. (If I could time travel, I'd have a chat with Roger Zelazny about his literary use of the Elysian Fields.)

--There is a nickel-loading automatic music box at the foot of my bed. Forget paying for ad-free Pandora; for the price of a loaf of bread in the early 1900's, I have saloon piano tunes.

ii. Friday was wrecked houses (I love decayed, decrepit structure), & fried chicken at Willie Mae's.  I don't feel like reviewing the food; it makes me feel like I'm doing a literary instagram. Would've rather explored the remains of the neighborhood than nom on greasy bird, but whatever, I can do that when I'm not traveling with my best friend.

Swung by the art museum on a whim; the temp exhibits (Mel Chin, Camille Henrot) were interesting. Chin was cool, the work was good, but his thoughts/consciousness was loud. I liked Henrot for not getting in the way of the work itself. Art is cerebral amusement/beauty, this era anyway. I harvested a few concepts: ocean of thought/subconscious, & multiple perspectives/experiences on one visual.
In the reg. collection, the statues from the Hindu pantheon creeped me out a little, though not to the degree that the Met's collection does. They were my family's ancient gods, prior to their migration across the ocean & lands in the late 1800's. My mother's patron bodhisattva/goddess was standing on the top floor, time-worn & alone. It was a strange note, to find something core to my family lineage, from gone centuries, on this other side of the world. She was worshiped; people prayed or meditated to her, and now she is a permanent piece on the topmost floor of a beauty-mausoleum on the banks of the Mississippi.

Afterwards, decompressed on the grass & made a bouquet off the bayou. Hit up a Creole sausage establishment for gator sausage, wound up on a spontaneous tour around the factory. Nadine fed us freshly smoked sausage: gator, spicy, boudin, french chorizo (chaurice), cut from endless yards of hot links with a machete-esque blade. We picked up gator meat for our city-foodieboys & stopped by the local supermarket. 

Couldn't find wine that suited my mood, although there were the essential Sancerres and Riojas. A local boy tried to flirt and impress with his taste for Verdi sparkling wine (sketchy bodega sugar booze!) He was friendly, rambled about football and the Giants. Seemed like a good guy, but dude, not that I'm a city-slicker kinda chick, I mean, I'm pretty weird/idiosyncratic even for New York, but sports aren't up my alley, except when I want to put the discomfort/sense of psychological distance into the guts of my academic/nerdy ilk. Plus giving up things for Lent/religion isn't in my thread of a happy existence. I give up nothing for mythos. Not that I could really be with a boy who talked Joyce or pretentious-literary either. Truly loving a thing, deeply, is one thing; talking endlessly about it, is like a dude who talks about how he's good at sex to anyone who'll listen. Anyway, enough commentary. At least Freud was coked up when he got into the psychology of things. It helped him bullshit, self-assured. At the core of it, dude was saying, "Yes, you." & I was saying, "You? No."

We prepped dinner; standard garlic & olive oil on everything for the grill. (Oil for cooking, butter for baking; not a rule, but nobody has to eat well as a rule either.) Then we hiked out, saw Washboard Chaz at The Spotted Cat. The bartender was new. You can always tell. (No, you can't.) Music was great; got me nostalgic for New York jazz & people though. I try to be present. It's hard sometimes. Home is home, so I like to forget it for a bit, even if I love it. It's right where I left it, with all my good sentiments. Was excited to leave the city & am happy to be here, but I'm pretty happy and content with life. It's a recreational vacation, not an escapist one. / Everyone (drunk) streamed in as the evening grew late. Our hosts were enjoying themselves; everyone was dancing. I stepped out for air, chatted with the bouncer (Honduran first-gen); he looked like a cuddly friend I once knew in my teens. Then I hit up the art market next door. 

People keep talking about how friendly people are here, but I think people are as friendly or unfriendly everywhere.

Dinner is dinner, was light & lovely in the backyard.

Me & Alair (alair & i) afterwards wandered the quarters, found the local bars (opposed to tourist bars; less vacation partiers and more people just having a drink or two), hit up The Spotted Cat, again, & then wandered the open air gallery.

On a side street, I ran into a poet with a typewriter. He's 27 and from the city (NY) too. Was a native, but not my kind. He was a private-school K-12-er and I was public school magnet. Post-bohemian money versus cutthroat intellectual meritocracy.
I requested a poem, and offered one in return. He typed, & I scribbled in dark green ink on my heavyweight notebook paper. He was selling his poetry to drunks. I started readings in the city. It's worse than two communists in the same room; it's two native NYC poets of different circles on a New Orleans street. He had his bottle of hipster beer that he kept spilling and I had my novelty go-cup of scotch. We read our poems and exchanged them. I wished him in life, everything he deserved, no more & no less.

Afterwards, me & a. wandered the empty streets and window-shopped the closed storefronts. We found ourselves where we had dinner the night before. There was a young couple sharing a sandwich on a doorstep. They were in love, & happy. You can always tell by the way they look at each other. I wanted a bodega sandwich, so we had one, and it was good. Late summer-night bodega sandwiches are always a highlight.

I noticed some incredibly shady guy turned around from his path to follow us, so I casually modded our path & lost him; we slipped down a long dark alleyway, & into an open-air atrium of sleepy apartments in the dead of night. I've been losing creeps for years. Also finding secret tranquil places of gorgeousness. It was moonlight & lamps & water fountains. If this was Starcraft, my hero units successfully avoided detection from lame enemy units and entered a cinematic cut-scene.

We sat & talked about dating, and how we'd fail Bechdel on a technicality if we were a movie. Sometimes we love people we know it won't work out it, or how sometimes we fall in love with ideas or a relationship but never get to know a person. Dating is difficult; I've kinda been writing off everyone I'd ever meet in my twenties. It doesn't even matter if they're the right person, because I'm not ready, but I'm thinking, maybe that's the wrong way to go about it too.

It's easy to love people at their best. It's when you love them, even at their worst and most flawed, and you know you won't kill them, that you might work out. Maybe I write off love, & people too easily. I get so avoidant. I don't want to commit to something, just to have it fail because hey, I'm kinda a little guarded bitch when it comes to my feelings, but eh. Suck it trust/control issues. Just gotta let go to be happy. I've gotten excellent at going with the flow in most arenas, except love. The more emotionally invested I become in someone, the more guarded & detached & distant I get, and it sucks. It's that stupid hangup that once I let myself believe in something beautiful, it's going to break, and then I'm going to be so damn sad. The funny thing, I've learned though, is that even if I write off something on a cerebral/rational level, apparently, the ups and downs are still there. Tenderness still happens, and soul-gutting heartache still happens. The only difference, is whether I'm honest & vulnerable about it when it still matters. Crazy sex is easy. Love, & the willingness to be emotional when it's infinitely easier not to be, that takes guts. Guts. Who gives a shit about sexual godhood when you're a copout when it comes to feelings? !!! Intimacy & trust is sexy. And really honest communication.

Anyway, afterwards, we wandered into the local Irish dives. We pretty much found the best lowkey places and avoided the rest of the world.

We hit up late-night voodoo shops.

And then, I spotted pole-dancers in a sketchy looking window in a sketchy part of town. Alair was iffy about going in, but I promised to get one-drink only and we could leave immed' if it was too sketch, and it was victory! Pole-dancers were up front, but then I was like, hey, there's a back! And we went. It was a huge diva drag show/mostly nekkid twerk party in the back. So good. Made the night.

The dancing ended. We wound up chilling along the dewy Mississipi; it reminded me so much of Bensonhurst. We ended with pizza. A mistake, because when people outside of New York order pizza, they are ordering a disgusting, fat, bullshit, tasteless travesty that passes for pizza. All good. It was 4am, which meant it was 5am in NYC; which meant it was almost bedtime.

Cabbed home. That's like, at least 15 different things crammed into a long, long day.

We're hitting up the swamp next.