Homesick still, even on Mardi Gras, believe it or not...

You know that you're fuckin' homesick when you even miss NOLA during "that season," which has become such a waste of money & oxygen that you can't even allow yourself to remember the near-fistfights that made you abdicate from teh cath-o-lick pre-lenten orgy back in 2000. Well, what I really miss is the New Orleans of the early 1990s, before Bill's blowjob helped repeal 100+ years' worth of suffragism & feminism, hand-in-hand with the knuckle-dragging neanderthal Newt Gingrich motherfuckers who wanted us all to give up our brains and our rights and go back to birthin' babies for a living. Back in those fabled days, a woman didn't need kneepads or silicone implants to get a job in the media or anywhere else in New Orleans, just hard work, some measure of smarts, and a helluva lot of patience for the throwbacks who hadn't caught up to the progress and never will.

Mardi Gras used to actually be fun for EVERYBODY, not just for that maggot who's made billions by exploiting drunk/high/needy underage girls, and all that they get is a fucking t-shirt. (And fuck no, neither his name nor his "enterprise" will ever be spoken upon this blog, unless somebody wants to lose a testie.) Used to be, a woman or group of women could go to Lee Circle, Canal Street, any Uptown neighborhood, Basin or Claiborne, or even the Quarter, and not only not be molested by twelve or twenty freaks in a crowd who disappear as soon as they've copped a feel, but actually be treated like a fucking HUMAN BEING! Yes, "show us yer tits" has been around since the dawn of civilization in that swamp, but it wasn't the TOWN MOTTO. It wasn't ALL THAT ANYBODY CAME TO MARDI GRAS FOR. It was for stupid drunk tourist chicks, who didn't know that they could go out to Metairie and buy those plastic beads for $3.00/gross. Locals were left the hell alone, instead of being presumed to be WHORES (pro-am or exhibitionists) SIMPLY BECAUSE THEY FUCKING LIVED IN NEW ORLEANS and happened to leave the fucking house during carnival season. A woman could leave work in the Quarter at any hour of the day or night and make it back to her car or bus in one piece, and without having to mace, cut, or stomp the motherfuckers who jumped her halfway home.

After Bill Clinton fucked it up for everybody by fucking a neurotic bimbo with overpriced cigars, though, everything changed. You couldn't hang on Canal Street with an assload of total strangers and everybody have a good time, no matter their sex, color, preferences, politics, religious-cult status, whatever. Canal Street went segregated again, whites on the uptown side, blacks on the downtown side, and tourists at the mouth of Bourbon. Women couldn't wear anything more revealing than a BURQUA without some (or three dozen) drunken tourist scumbags thinking that they were ENTITLED to put their fucking hands upon you without even LOOKING AT YOUR FUCKING FACE. All that mattered was that you were a woman and you were out in public, that AUTOMATICALLY MADE YOU INTO A FUCKING TARGET. The Taliban would be proud of those sexist-pig recidivist mentalities. She leaves the house, she deserves to be molested, mugged, raped, mauled, murdered, whatever suits the tourist's fancy. And it ain't like the locals were innocent, but most of 'em (unless you count the mouth-breathing inbred rednecks from the burbs, who'd come back around in their hoopty pickups to bash on the gay boys leaving St. Ann Street at daylight --- projecting much???) had the minimum sense to understand that YOU COULD FOLLOW THEM HOME, KICK THEIR ASSES IN FRONT OF THEIR MAMAS AND THEN TELL HER WHY YOU DID IT.

Not that the fucking cops have ever cared about women's lives in New Orleans, my own experiences have more than proven that, but if you had to knock some motherfucker's cock up into his watch-pocket, the cops would generally back you up. Now they're all the same pig as a certain Levee Board "cop" of my former acquaintance, who stand at the barricades on Bourbon, demanding that drunken tourist co-eds flash their tits TO THEM, in order to get away with having flashed their tits to some jerk on a balcony with $5.00 flashing beads.

When I couldn't even go to the small, local neighborhood krewe parades on the weeknights, without some nouveau-riche douchebag on a float or a gaggle of slobbering frat-boys from Tennessee haranguing and hassling me and my friends, that's when I threw in the fucking towel. What used to be a fun town party, where everybody acted like neighbors instead of combatants for two weeks a year, with the tourists coming in to pay for the clean-up, and they still knew how to TIP the exhausted service-industry MAJORITY OF THE POPULATION --- it's all shot to hell.

The arrogant nouveau-riche redneck republicunts of Baton Rouge have always gotten up on their huffy bikes and look down their surgically-tilted noses at the "debauchery", the over-hyped crime, the disgusting behavior of THEIR OWN FUCKING COUNTRY-CLUB NEIGHBORS IN THOSE GATED COMMUNITIES IN FUCKING BATON HYPOCRITICAL ROUGE, that goes on in New Orleans, like they were all immaculately conceived and have been pure as the driven fucking snow ever since. Fuck 'em, they belong in the fucking suburbs. Baton Rouge will NEVER be a REAL CITY, no matter how many Katrina evacuees stay there, no matter how many tacky-ass casinos they build, no matter how much the Shaw Group postures about "promoting the arts," because they will always be a bunch of STUCK-UP SADIDDY-ASS REDNECK MUTHAFUCKAS WHO DON'T HAVE A FUCKING CLUE AS TO HOW TO BUILD OR LIVE IN A REAL FUCKING CITY. They will ALWAYS envy New Orleans, even as they and their uber-caucasian profiteering, thieving real-estate scum steal the property out from under the corpses of the genocide victims of GWB and Unca Dick.

If anybody can look at what New Orleans has become now, with the biggest and fastest-growing "minority" being Shaw Group, Bechtel, Halliburton and Boh Bros. shipped-in ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS, and not realize how it was all planned-out from the day that those cocksuckers took office, when they gutted the funding of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from the GET-GO, then you're as stupid as the people who believe that Hillary and Barack are "democrats." Yeah, she still talks a good game, but we know who pays her bills, and Barack can try and hijack JFK's corpse, but I ain't buyin' it.

And yes, I still fantasize, at $3 a week, of someday finally hitting that fucking Powerball and going the fuck HOME. Buying enough land to not have cocksucker neighbors like I did on Cameron or S. Gayoso, who went out of their fucking WAY to take it upon themselves to PENALIZE ME FOR WORKING FUCKING NIGHTS, mostly so that I could avoid motherfuckers JUST LIKE THEM in the daylight hours. Bring Mr. Bonds, as many of my nieces as wanna go with me, get good lawyers to get their kids back for them, build us all our own little green-off-the-grid houses so that we don't have to kill one another, and get back to REAL LIFE, as opposed to the under-siege hermitage of being surrounded by wall-to-wall redneck-white-trash-republicunts-with-money (or without) and bible-banging pentecostal and cath-o-lick hypocrites who wouldn't piss on another human being if their face was on fire.

Yeah, there was a lot wrong with New Orleans when I left it, like the encroachment of suburbanite rednecks who thought that MEDIOCRITY WAS THE HEIGHT OF CREATIVITY, who thought that DARING TO CONFORM was a kind of "rebellion"; not being able to make a living with a hard-won bachelor's degree, 'cause I didn't have a daddy (or sugar-daddy) in the bidness, and 'cause my diploma didn't come with diamond-studded kneepads; being harassed by illiterate yuppie-scum-wannabe morons on all sides, because I was a SINGLE WOMAN who WORKED FUCKING NIGHTS, as opposed to working some secretarial gig in order to CATCH MAHSEF A MAYUNNNN; the world's second-crookedest cops and speed-traps ONLY to frame the LOCALS, never the drunk-driving TOURISTS (Hillbilly Hell-Hole here features THE crookedest cops on the PLANET, EVER!!!).

New Orleans had a million problems, but y'know what? There will never be another place like that. And the way that things are going, with the forced white-ification of the metro (as hundreds of thousands of 10th-generation locals are STILL forbidden from coming home, either by the real-estate gouging or the bullshit excuse for a "reconstruction" scheme that the state as fucked into the saturated GROUND, by farming it out to some yankee carpetbagging motherfuckers who have embezzled what was supposed to BRING THESE PEOPLE HOME, DAMMIT!!!!! Fuck rebuilding Iraq, when in the fuck are we gonna rebuild NEW ORLEANS?!?!?!), there will never be another New Orleans. There will be a Disney-fied, over-marketed commodity of condos and gated communities and bullshit white 20-somethings with legacy "educations" and inherited "careers" who have never had a fucking CLUE as to the character, the history, or the very MEANING of New Orleans, nor will they ever care to --- after all, if Margaritaville is still standing, as long as the titty bars are still open, then that's all that matters, right?

I don't even know that this rant even has a point, I sure as hell don't have any miraculous solutions or lifesaving fixes for any of this shit, I don't have a fucking clue as to how I or anyone more deserving will ever get home without the fucking Powerball jackpot. But I do know that if I'm still feeling this homesick, even on Mardi Gras, that this will never change. Even as the republicunts have destroyed the country that we worked so hard to build back then, in the pre-Kenneth-Starr world, even as teh republicunts and teh corporate whores have destroyed the most amazing and culturally rich, most creative and muse-infested city on this continent, I still crave it. I will always want to go back.

I know that no amount of money will ever give me those great first few years in New Orleans back, I know that no time machine could give me those breathless first years in radio or what I accomplished there back, and I know that I'll never be that hopeful, however naive, ambitious young woman again. But dammit, I still want to go home. It'll never be the same, and I'll probably never go to another Mardi Gras, not until that "Pathetic Chicks Gone Alcohol-Poisoning" motherfucker dies, at least. But I will always want New Orleans back.