Читать книгу Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around - Cheryl Wagner - Страница 6

That’s a great idea! You should really do that! I don’t remember ever consciously deciding that That’s a great idea! was a fine or even sound organizing principle for my life. By the time my boyfriend, Jake, and I were frantically boarding up our back wall and windows to evacuate for Hurricane Katrina, however, that’s how I had been living—mostly in New Orleans—since I was seventeen.

Truth be told, I have spent all of my adult life surrounded by people working on what most Americans would consider to be, at best, time-wasting, esoteric projects. Compiling a discography of every known existing recording of wax cylinder minstrel songs? Great! Building a digital urn for yourself on the Internet? Long overdue! Having a tea party with your pet pig as the guest of honor? What can I bring? Do I want to see a short movie about your tween Arkansas cousin’s love of Eminem? Who wouldn’t? On a quest to wash dishes in all fifty states? Well, move on in!

In my shortish time on this planet, I have gotten out of bed in the morning and tripped over many snoring bands and outfitted my basset hounds as spacemen for numerous French Quarter dog parades. It seems over the years I have become something of a professional enthusiast, which is weird because I’m also kind of cynical and grumpy. Mostly, this just makes me a typical New Orleanian of a sort.

New Orleans exists for many reasons. And over time it has evolved into the place where Southerners send their laidback people who can’t or won’t get with the program—their artists, gay relatives, eternal optimists, funny hat wearers, weirdos, and intellectuals. I guess I’m one of the above, and I have a sneaking suspicion that most Southerners do not want me or my friends back in their towns. Many of us are in New Orleans for a reason: to escape the fundamentalist Other South but still get to live near where we’re from.

We’re mostly seventeen to sixty, a few older or younger. We collect records, books, fine and trash musical instruments, old video games, pieces of wrought iron, and other ephemera. We go out to clubs, backyards, urban bayous, balconies, heavy metal haunted houses, bowling alleys, and street corners to hear bands play. Some of us travel for years and suddenly reappear; some never leave; some try to leave repeatedly and always boomerang back. Some of us secretly feel we’re “too smart to be rich” but then whine about our finances later. Others are trustafarians. Still others are bartenders or coffee servers or AV guys. There are teachers and carpenters and librarians and white-or pink-collar administrators of this or that who work forty-plus hours a week but consider this other life, their That’s a great idea! life, their real lives. The other life is just what they do to put food in their dog’s bowl.

Some are fun junkies, plain and simple. Others are great and not-so-great musicians, makers of sublime or total bullshit art, college or post-college radio geeks, Quarter Rats, T-shirt makers, people who go teach English abroad, gay and straight, history buffs, hippies and hipsters and none of the above, poets, electronic hobbyists who build drum machines, Goths and post-Goths and retro-Goths, Francophiles, Japanophiles, music fans of every stripe, potheads, abstainers, crawfish-addicted or vegan, winners and losers, gourmands, experimental filmmakers, brass band and Mardi Gras Indian superfans, Buddhists, poets, guys with beards obsessed with Tibet, bike people, tattoo artists, and folks who just like to sit reading paperbacks on their front porch.

Whenever one of us leaves, another guy or gal inevitably takes our place, some New Orleanian or Louisianan, some not. I’m talking about all the New Orleans people who would probably not call themselves bohemian but who nonetheless do not spend their lives clawing tooth and nail to compete! compete! conquer! conquer! and otherwise lock, stock, and barrel the American Dream.

These are people for whom That’s a great idea! is a much finer way to live than the standard American sour of Why in the world would anyone want to do a thing like that?