“Time for a new post.” says Jen.

Where are you? I am someplace odd. I am at my crossroads. The signs read empty life selling insurance and magical life telling stories. Every truth’s a lie and every lie’s a truth at the crossroads, so make your deal and get real.
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I went to the Fat Tuesday parade downtown last night and then John and I walked over to the landing. I took the metro link downtown so I wouldn’t have to deal with my car and I’d have train time later to sober up. Since this blog now has a searchable subcategory of Beatle Bob sightings, Beatle Bob was the last man on the last float. I did not catch any of the beads he was throwing.

I did have a pulled pork and pickle sandwich. It was very cold out, two pairs of gloves cold; all the colder for a certain urban dampness resultant from arch obscuring fog rolling off the Mississippi and a slight mist that arrived with the start of the parade, having dumped most of its moisture in a Kansas City snowstorm. I had an Irish coffee at our first actual bar, The Train Wreck, to warm up. Oddly, that bar was nearly empty, but for the older and colder set. They were handing out Bacardi promotional T-shirts and everyone was putting them on to warm up. We looked like the Bacardi softball team.

Out in the streets it was a mostly younger crowd and there was that odd element of breast worship. There were flashing girls on the shoulders of their strapping “protectors” getting clocked in the head from all sides with worthless booty – pun intended. This was made all the more strange by the presence of police officers with large wooden clubs. Their clubs, not really nightsticks but clubs, had these brass fittings on the end that suggested strongly the suckiness of being struck by one. Think of a trucker’s tire knocker and then add a foot and a half, make it thicker and put a mental cap on it. They were positively medieval and I am sure that today more then one brittle tibia is bemoaning an encounter.

There was a clear mood to those officers and it was initially boredom; good-natured guard dogs corralling drunken sheep, warriors without a war. I’m reluctant to write about last night because there was something too much about it. Everyone who was there drank too much, it was too cold, it was too crowded, and eventually the police were too needed.

At one point we were in the back of a three-tier bar, Morgan Street Brewery, which is built into the slope of a hill. To get to the area we were in you need to enter from the street, traverse a restaurant, ascend a staircase, pass miles of pool tables and acres of bar, exit the building to cross a courtyard, walk through another bar and ascend more stairs to the dance floor.

We’d been dancing and were outside cooling off, actually thinking about leaving, when a wave of about forty or so people (this is a large place) came out of the first building and into the courtyard. My friend Dan was out in the front of this wave and, after a handshake and introductions, he explained that the bacchanal on the street had turned ugly. The rumor in the crowd was that a racial fight had broken out, black’s on whites, and we were well off in our removed location. Sex and violence have been holding hands in America for a long time, give them a drink and they start to round the race bases.

I didn’t see any blood or violence, but I can infer from the number of large white police vans leaving the area that several drunks met tank last night – the ethnicity and motivation of the combatants remain a mystery to the non-observer, but we can take a good look at the rumor wave. St. Louis’ racial mix can get edgy; on the dance floor it was pure percolation, but the white flight rumor race lets you know that economic tensions can sometimes get social. Even if the fight wasn’t real the fear was and no one left for a long time, we just went back to drinking and dancing.

Ah well, a city works on its issues in a population-swelling orgy of blood boiling frenzy. I suppose that’s the idea, the final excess that leaves you longing for the peace of lent.