Wishful Thinking
Winter in upstate New York is long and cold, snow falls by November and stays until April. Walking alone in the streets on a dark cold night makes you feel like you're in Siberia. We used to run down the middle of the street and then slide on the packed snow. Winter is such a solemn season. And when you're a college student, heading back from bars alone, it was easy to lose your thoughts to the cold and dream of spring to come to your rescue.
1994 was a crazy year in general, it was President Clinton's second full year in office and Netscape 1.0 was released. The Knicks would make the finals that year, losing and sucking the air out of NYC. During a playoff game against the Bulls, OJ Simpson and his white Bronco stopped the telecast, and every other telecast, it felt like time froze. I read somewhere that more people ordered pizza that night than any other night in history. Hmmm, in today's world I don't think that would happen, I'm sure the national pizza chains would be happy if it did, but news is so much more continuous now. There were also some major losses in '94, John Candy and Kurt Cobain died. The latter event left many college students, myself included, wondering what music would be like without one of it's great poets. We didn't have cellphones or computers like we have now. The internet was mostly accessed through massive computer labs, that were in themselves inaccessible. Music came from CDs, but most of us had these boxes of tapes -- mixes and bootlegs were rampant. Nowadays, the future seems very predictable, because we see it unfold online -- the minute something happens to anyone everyone is aware, nothing is really that surprising is it? Back then, pre-9/11, we were living at times with blinders, the future seemed like this far off destination, that someday we would see and be surprised by. That started to change during the Persian Gulf War, when Bernard Shaw reported from under a table in his Baghdad hotel room while missiles blew up around him. Or when the news covered the ATF's siege on the Branch Davidian ranch in Waco Texas in 1993. I sat in my dorm room and watched a massive fire destroy the ranch and everyone who lived inside. The filters were being broken down by the power of the people, we were demanding instant access. Live coverage of OJ's attempt to evade the law and the launch of Netscape Navigator 1.0, in many ways marked the beginning of a major shift in how the world consumed information. Honestly, if I had a cellphone, mobile access to the web, and an iPod in 1994, I wouldn't be telling this story right now. I would be broadcasting it.
I don't remember how the idea of going to New Orleans for Mardi Gras got started. But by the middle of January I had an empty spaghetti sauce jar on my coffee table labeled Mardi Gras Fund. It was wishful thinking at best, I didn't know if I was really going. In fact, none of my roommates or friends took the idea seriously. If it was going to happen it would be a very spur of the moment adventure. Could there possibly be any other type of adventure. Gene and Sam were in Massachusetts pretty much doing the same thing. Their apartment had a banner that read Mardi Gras or Bust. I guess you could say it was a ritual that college kids took part in, daring others to question if you really had it in you to make a trip like that while classes were in session. Flying down wasn't even an option, so it would have to be a road trip, which would make it that much better. Mardi Gras at the time wasn't as overplayed as it is now. This was about 4 years before all the girls gone wild videos would hit the pavement. I guess it still had a level of mystique, or maybe I was just younger and a little less wise.
By the time February rolled around there still weren't any solid plans. But the jar was slowly filling up. Fat Tuesday actually fell on Valentine's Day in 1994 and it was on Sunday the 6th when I spoke with Gene on the phone and we made the decision to do it. Sam was definitely in, so it would be the three of us trekking down south for a party that would hopefully catapult us out of winter and into spring. The plan was for Gene to drive his truck to New York to pick me up and then we just go south. We would spend a night camping in the Smokey Mountains, head to Memphis for a night, and then race south to New Orleans along the bayou.
1994 was a crazy year in general, it was President Clinton's second full year in office and Netscape 1.0 was released. The Knicks would make the finals that year, losing and sucking the air out of NYC. During a playoff game against the Bulls, OJ Simpson and his white Bronco stopped the telecast, and every other telecast, it felt like time froze. I read somewhere that more people ordered pizza that night than any other night in history. Hmmm, in today's world I don't think that would happen, I'm sure the national pizza chains would be happy if it did, but news is so much more continuous now. There were also some major losses in '94, John Candy and Kurt Cobain died. The latter event left many college students, myself included, wondering what music would be like without one of it's great poets. We didn't have cellphones or computers like we have now. The internet was mostly accessed through massive computer labs, that were in themselves inaccessible. Music came from CDs, but most of us had these boxes of tapes -- mixes and bootlegs were rampant. Nowadays, the future seems very predictable, because we see it unfold online -- the minute something happens to anyone everyone is aware, nothing is really that surprising is it? Back then, pre-9/11, we were living at times with blinders, the future seemed like this far off destination, that someday we would see and be surprised by. That started to change during the Persian Gulf War, when Bernard Shaw reported from under a table in his Baghdad hotel room while missiles blew up around him. Or when the news covered the ATF's siege on the Branch Davidian ranch in Waco Texas in 1993. I sat in my dorm room and watched a massive fire destroy the ranch and everyone who lived inside. The filters were being broken down by the power of the people, we were demanding instant access. Live coverage of OJ's attempt to evade the law and the launch of Netscape Navigator 1.0, in many ways marked the beginning of a major shift in how the world consumed information. Honestly, if I had a cellphone, mobile access to the web, and an iPod in 1994, I wouldn't be telling this story right now. I would be broadcasting it.
I don't remember how the idea of going to New Orleans for Mardi Gras got started. But by the middle of January I had an empty spaghetti sauce jar on my coffee table labeled Mardi Gras Fund. It was wishful thinking at best, I didn't know if I was really going. In fact, none of my roommates or friends took the idea seriously. If it was going to happen it would be a very spur of the moment adventure. Could there possibly be any other type of adventure. Gene and Sam were in Massachusetts pretty much doing the same thing. Their apartment had a banner that read Mardi Gras or Bust. I guess you could say it was a ritual that college kids took part in, daring others to question if you really had it in you to make a trip like that while classes were in session. Flying down wasn't even an option, so it would have to be a road trip, which would make it that much better. Mardi Gras at the time wasn't as overplayed as it is now. This was about 4 years before all the girls gone wild videos would hit the pavement. I guess it still had a level of mystique, or maybe I was just younger and a little less wise.
By the time February rolled around there still weren't any solid plans. But the jar was slowly filling up. Fat Tuesday actually fell on Valentine's Day in 1994 and it was on Sunday the 6th when I spoke with Gene on the phone and we made the decision to do it. Sam was definitely in, so it would be the three of us trekking down south for a party that would hopefully catapult us out of winter and into spring. The plan was for Gene to drive his truck to New York to pick me up and then we just go south. We would spend a night camping in the Smokey Mountains, head to Memphis for a night, and then race south to New Orleans along the bayou.
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