(Art by Eric Styles)
If an economy crashes and there is no one there to hear it, does it still make a sound?
As much as I want this shut down to end, I’m going to kind of miss it. The French Quarter is like small town America now. Mayberry like. Sparsely occupied sidewalks with familiar residents, little traffic. No litter or feces to step around, none. Quiet, eerie quiet. No music or barkers, no revving engines of little dick assholes, no screaming bachelorette banshees, just silence. Do you know that we have song birds in the Quarter? We do. I’m really impressed by how much sex my neighbors have.
By nature, I try to distance myself from people in public. Now it’s not just socially acceptable, it’s mandated. The best part is, I can no longer be accused of “microaggressions.”
“Why dija’cross the street to the other side? You racist?”
“You’re shirtless, have a huge piss stain on the front of your pants, wearing one shoe and are waving a broken beer bottle. Fuck yea, I’m crossing over to the other sidewalk.”
Now it’s my civic duty to put as much distance between me and strangers as I can.
I’ve been on the receiving end of the stare. One early evening a couple of years ago while walking down Toulouse towards Decatur, a cliché Midwest family were walking towards me; a sitcom-looking family: mom, dad and two kids. A boy, around 11 years of age, and the girl, about 8 years of age, were taking up the sidewalk. I was on curb side preparing to pass by, when from about 8 feet away, the boy looks up at me and shrieks “STRANGER DANGER!” He grabs his little sister and pulls them both back in line between their parents.
The father at the rear looks at me, knowing half of the block heard his son. The dad’s eyes were huge with a look of panic and embarrassment. I glared back with my most animated expression of “REALLY?”
A half a block later, I chuckled to myself thinking that I should have gone Jake Blues on all of them.
