Have you ever moved to a new city and weren't quite certain how to fit in?
What if I told you that there is a Krewe right here in New Orleans? It's been here always, only spoken of in whispers and gestures, only mentioned from the deepest of shadows. Few have dared to join and fewer have dared to tell the tale.
What happens in New Orleans at midnight on Mardi Gras? Is it true that the police sweep the city streets of citizens from horseback just as they have for two hundred years?
But perhaps what you haven't heard is the tale of the Krewe that rolls in the pre-dawn hours as the city moves reluctantly into Ash Wednesday. The Krewe of the Morning Star has rolled through the streets of the French Quarter in the pre-dawn hours for as long as New Orleans has stood on the banks of the Mississippi River.
Very few are there to witness this Krewe and I've yet to meet a soul that admits to having caught one of their throws and told the tale of what follows in the aftermath.
There may be legal reasons to stay inside as Mardi Gras draws to its official close at midnight but there are other, much darker reasons to stay inside and make your plans for atonement and forgiveness.
Have I been here in the void for a day? A month? A thousand thousand years? It makes so little difference. Their souls, their motives, and their behavior, never change.
They connect, interconnect, like spiders weaving drunken webs so often ensnaring themselves with their insipid lies, threadbare lives. They masterfully destroy themselves even if sometimes they require just one word, one little push, in the name of misdirection and self-destruction.
The unraveling of the human soul remains the only pastime that never grows old or wearisome for me.
I've seen it all. I've done it all. Feels like it's time for a reboot.