Where has the time gone?
A mere 365 nights ago was J’Ouvert, the annual midnight parade, and so it returns once again.
I try to be decent about this, I do, but come 4:30 in the morning and yet another band is pounding its way down Nostrand, and I get a little crabby.
Still, it’s a good neighborhood, it is. I tell myself this over and over: it’s a decent place to live.
Except the night before Labor Day.
I don’t begrudge my neighbors the Caribbean carnival. Truly.
It happens once a year, over Labor Day weekend, and it’s a big damned deal to everyone who participates in and watches the West Indian Day Parade down Eastern Parkway. The costumes are faaabulous, the mood exuberant, and everyone is happy.
Almost everyone.
I’ve bitched about this before and noted that I am a bad, bad neighbor—because while I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade (heh) on Monday, I wish the hell out of rain for the midnight parade the night before.
And, actually, “midnight” is a bit of a misnomer: I went to bed around one, and the festivities didn’t really pick up until about 2:00 am. It lasted until about 12:30 this afternoon.
The big noises (bands, club-sound-systems-on-flatbeds) have mostly ceased, but some folks feel the need to drive around, slowly, with the steel-drums sounds breaking out of their cars and trucks, for the rest of the day.
Don’t forget the vuvuzelas, of course. If I had any energy at all—which I don’t, onnacountanot getting any sleep last night—I’d stomp down the stairs, out to the street, and shove that demonic tube down every person-who-even-thinks-of-raising-that-shit-horn-to-their-lips’s throat.
Except that would mean they would henceforth be bleating every time they breathed. Perhaps I could just break the damned things over my knees.
Oh, if you’re over the age of 12, the fuck you doing with a vuvuzela anyway? Shouldn’t you know better?
It’s supposed to rain later today, so hopefully that will dampen the need to party all day, and I might be able to get in a nap.
(Fuuuuuuuuck. I gotta get a honey before next year—-one who doesn’t live in my neighborhood, so I could stay at his or her joint for a decent night’s sleep.)
Crab crab crab.
Okay, so maybe I begrudge them a little.
I gambled and lost.
‘Tis the night before the West Indian parade down Eastern Parkway—which means the night-before parade down Nostrand. It got going full blast within the past 20 minutes or so, i.e., about twenty past one.
And the gamble? There was a decent chance at rain, so I decided against calling C. and asking to bunk at her joint for the night.
Ah, well. Perhaps it will rain later.
AbsurdBeats 