Zydeco a Go Go: the deep south through a t-shirt perspective

For New Year's, my friend Paul and I took a trip to Louisiana. Yes, we saw Katrina damage, and yes we saw obnoxious abortion protest, and yes, we fought gators with bowie knives after diving out of our fanboat full of crawdads and Tabasco sauce.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

We had gone down because I have some family there, and because it is nice to get out of Tennessee when possible. The trip wound up being cautious because of rampant intestinal influenza (or maybe just too much gumbo, hoowee!) which made us go through a lot of Germ-X. For New Year's itself we had a Bottle Rocket War which I lost because of a shoddy fuse on some Jumping Jacks*, leaving me with a decent burn on my hand.

A couple of days later we headed to New Orleans. Most of the buildings didn't look too bad, but had suffered sever damage on the interior. Bourbon Street provided all that it usually does including a t-shirt that says "I stayed in New Orleans for Katrina and all I got was this lousy t-shirt, a new Cadillac, and a plasma TV", another saying "Katrina gave me a blowjob I'll never forget." At the Cafe du Monde, an old oriental lady was my waitress, and when giving the total she said "Seven dollar even, baby", winking at me. Sweetheart, that doesn't work. I almost ralphed my beignet and cafe au lait, which would be a damn shame.

The French Quarter was up and in full effect, but the drowned parts of town weren't going anywhere. They were bad. All of the cars were put under the interstate overpasses, and most of the houses were in the process of being gutted. Esoteric FEMA shit was sprayed all over the fronts of the houses, mostly involving pet rescue. If you are from East New Orleans, sorry. If you are not, I know where you can get a bunch of free stuff.

We stopped at Popeye's for some fried chicken on the way out of town. Man, did this rock. This was the blackest place I'd been in a long time. People's cellphones kept ringing, and all of the ringers were rap songs like "Shake your Laffee Taffee" and other shit rap. Leaving town, I rode as passenger and had some time to reflect on some questions.

1. If you wore a shirt that said "I love niggers", could people really get mad at you? I mean, you love them, right? What's the big deal?

2. Is there a shirt that says "Don't blame me, I voted for Pedro"? If there isn't, we should do all in our power to prevent it. Its proliferation of a long-dead joke will choke my retinas and make them fall out.

3. The people in N.O. all seemed to feel royally screwed by the government. I'm not just saying that because of the other t-shirts that reflected this opinion, but by all the interviews, conversations I've heard, and the faces of the people I saw sifting through their former neighborhood. Most of the people haven't moved back if they're even going to in the first place, making a surreal atmosphere of a big city with few people.Everyone there has realized by now that there are sections of that town that they're just going to have to say that it was fun while it lasted.**



*Some kids at the bonfire kept referring to these as Nigger Chasers. Or maybe that was the bottle rockets. Either way, it doesn't matter because they had nigger related nomenclature for just about every kind of firework imaginable, such as Nigger Bombs, Nigger Jumpers, and so on.
**Or maybe not that much fun based on Master P lyrics, but you get my point.