... ..to every season ....February 12, 2005   Allow me to recap the trailing months:  Thanksgiving blew; Christmas sucked; the New Year gargled; and Mardi Gras failed to swallow. As a rule, I enjoy predictability.  It comforts me.  But the predictability of Mardi Gras is an exception.  Mardi Gras is irksome and unnerving.  It is a celebration of noise and garbage, urine and vomit.  It is cold and jangling.  Splashed across society pages, like so many spilled drinks, are photographs of grownups straining to look carefree.  They wear silly hats and bright, ill-fitting costumes.  They assume puzzling titles and "represent" zodiacs or Pacific islands.  In the smaller towns, drunken louts scrum for chickens and, when interviewed by local television reporters, sway and focus and blather on about the True Meaning of Mardi Gras.   In New Orleans--Mecca, if you will--boorish college boys and flash-happy girls wrestle ragged mothers and hordes of feral children for plastic beads and coconuts, and for Reason that will never be captured. And so it is that I await the Spring, a season predictably warm and fragrant, a time of breezy silence and of hope for grace. previous..|..current..|..archives..|..1st quarter index..|..next

©  2005 by the beastmaster