Carcosa Bound

On our first full day in New Orleans, we start with brunch and cocktails at Jeff Beachbum Berry's Latitude 29. This is one of the pilgrimage points of the modern tiki revival.

In short order, my lovely and intrepid wife and I find out why. After several cocktails, and taking a delicious and potent zombie cocktail to go (due to New Orleans' curious rule about being able to drink while walking to the next bar), we end up at a riverboat.

Sure. We ride on a paddle steamer on the Mississippi. We dance to jazz music, drink more ferociously potent cocktails, and talk to the lovely people who run the show.

We get good intel on the actual state of things. Times are tough. There are a lot of challenges facing the city, and the sector. People are keeping to themselves, generally.

The ride ends, the cocktails continue.

Somewhere, we get cigars.

Somehow, it is dark, and we're drinking purple drinks. We're in a supposedly haunted bar once owned by a pirate, now by a low-key dangerous-looking dude with a high-and-tight haircut and a crisp mustache.

We're talking to another guy who looks like a shark, and gives off dangerous vibes. We meet another couple – the lady says not to trust him.

I wake up – having somehow make it back to our lodgings – wearing a new hat, and no idea where it came from.

Sometime after, not exactly hungover, walking lost around the streets, we have no sense of time, and all is disconnected, out of sync, somehow. Like we've always been here.

I seriously start speculating whether we're actually dead, and forever wandering the streets of New Orleans as forgetful, hungry ghosts, revenants, or some other undead creature.

Maybe we've been captured by the City, or sacrificed and bound by evil sorcerors. Maybe we were the victims of the Black Rite, in which our souls were evicted from out bodies, and we are wandering, lost and damned, like so many here.

My wife tells me to shut up, that it's not helping, but I think that's just because she feels it too.

This city is incredible. It's the first place I've ever been that can so conducively escalate a hangover into an eternal supernatural curse.

A+ highly recommend.