I could maneouver my way around New Orleans with a drink in one hand and a blindfold tied firmly into place.
This city personifies perfume, if I could bottle the french quarter and present it in dainty blue glass bottles to every scarved and colourfully skirted beautiful hippy girl on Mount Royal back home, I might manage a vague nostalgic shadow of the adventures that my nose has been on.
From the airport, all musty and metallic and freon-esque air-conditioning stink to the first stretch of highway on our way to the garden district where suddenly I understood what tropical smells like. First wet and green and wild and then the careful aesthetic of the garden district, wild jasmine and asian jasmine (pink flowers, then daintier white ones) and as soon as my head was just beginning to reel with my first real smell of what has always been my favourite scent dans le monde I come upon Gardenias hanging lazily off heavy branches and now I know what butter should smell like.
Sweet and heady and real...
Trolley cars and unfamiliar people stink, not as offensive as Bourbon street's puke and piss and frat boy offal, then careening from there into GET THIS an Irish Pub (just like back home hehehe)and from there onto the tarot reading alley in Jackson Square where it's sandalwood and incense and perfume the way it was meant to smell
Not of ethanol but of pheromones and sweat and hard nipples.
Le Marquis is about as gracious a host as someone just beyond human could possibly be, from Bloody Mary welcomes to his uber-friendly wifey, roommate, and just about every bartender in town.
This place is magic. Last week I was lying amidst a post-coital tangle of sheets trying to explain magic to David.
Yesterday I e-mailed him the concrete description he'd been asking for. The circus/burlesque show that we happened upon on our tour of the quarter, the way the walls reflect every storybook I've ever read that has touted New Orleans' puissance.
And starting off this morning with a book on a stoop listening to The Marquis prattle away ever so eloquently on his piano was just another page in the spellbook.
I have a feeling I'll be back here again, not just for the feather masks and exotic glories, not just for the alcohol and the way the streets sing with the Alice-in-wonderland neverending footrace party -- no one remembers how it began, and there's no end in sight, but for...
Something that I have no words for.
Living adventurously.
Escaping the nostalgia coma that routine hits you upside the head with when you're not looking.
Just living, maybe.