Location: The Old Absinthe House, Bourbon Street

At long last, and despite the storm that nearly killed this amazing old city, I get to enjoy an (again legal) absinthe at one of the best watering-holes in New Orleans. The building has housed a bar for 200 years, though its fixtures were hidden away during the moronic American spectacle called Prohibition, when do-gooders thought they could save us from vice by telling everyone else what to do. But despite the decades—no, centuries—of atmosphere in Jean Lafitte’s old hangout, I keep wondering how real the public face of this city is today.

Looking along Bourbon street trough my cloud of cigar smoke, I also wonder how different it all is from Second Life.

It’s not the absinthe talking, though the allure of the fabled liquor cannot be denied.  I love this town. There’s an amazing emotional pull of its old buildings and its unique culture. The very building where I’m sipping the drink of poets and madman,  as its Web site notes, hosted “Oscar Wilde, P.T. Barnum, Mark Twain, Jenny Lind, Enrico Caruso, General Robert E Lee” as well as being the supposed meeting place for Andrew Jackson and the pirate Jean Lafitte.

This city, in the wake of Katrina, seems even more of an invented world than ever, and New Orleans was always an anomaly in the US, more a Mediterranean port jammed into the Deep South.  It’s our anti-Disney World. Instead of a sanitized version of an idyllic, forward-looking America, New Orleans gave us a glancing-over-the-shoulder, shadowy, and scruffy city at peace with its own wickedness.

It’s the South I prefer to that of the fanatical boobs who actually claimed that Katrina was the wrath of God on a wicked city.  Perhaps a petty, juvenile God, too clumsy to punish individual sinners, instead decided to lash out at a bunch of poor African-Americans and elderly working-class whites who did not flee in time. I think not. Shame on anyone who would believe such a thing.

So I want this place to remain intact and funky, a humid and pugnacious rebuke to the smooth, sleek, and unsustainable America of strip-malls, gated suburbs, and chain restaurants (yeah, I see chain places here and hurry past them).  But with sea levels rising and wetlands south of town not being restored after decades of devastation, New Orleans will again be hit by another huge Gulf hurricane. It is a matter of time, and the levees here have not been rebuilt to withstand a category four or five storm.

That’s a pity. Despite the crowds of drunken frat-boys staggering into the Penthouse Club and boozing businessmen eying girls young enough to be their daughters, The French Quarter retains something intangible.  These losers are our griefers, though I cannot report them to Linden Lab when they get out of hand.  I just duck into one of the Quarter’s nicer bars for a cigar and a drink.

Incidentally, if you don’t like the taste of licorice (I do) you will not enjoy absinthe. And no gift of Linden Dollars will pry from me the secret of the great neighborhood we found where the locals party.  Come down to the Big Easy and look for yourself.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

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