So I've had this photograph hanging around in assorted drawers for like, forever. A few months ago, I found it while rummaging around looking for something else and I thought I'd display it on my dresser, AKA the aborted before it was even a true idea surface I'd designate as my art station.
Here's the problem. You would ask me back, oh, some 10 years ago to tell you the exact date that this photo was taken, I would have been right on that, spitting out that information like a die-hard TRS80 Radio Shack computer. Ask me now? I can hone it down to a year or two but I wasn't really sure of the date at all. It seems when you get on a little in years some memories tend to blend a bit.
Full disclosure here... As I picked up the photo just a while ago in order to place it in the scanner, I looked on the back of the paper holder the picture is in and lo and behold, handwritten no doubt by the developer, is the date February 3rd. Until I peeked at this just now, I'd forgotten that there was even a date on it, and my first and strongest impression before seeing that, I wouldn't have guessed that date. Again, funny how memory is.
All right. The known facts. What's the picture all about?
The place is Pat O'Brien's in New Orleans. Back in the day, a very touristy restaurant bar like this would have a roving photographer making their way around the place inviting tables to pose together for a photo. I'm kind of thinking they took the picture without any hard set obligation for you to buy it, with the idea that, of course, you would. Now this is back in the film days. So unlike digital, they couldn't really dick around and just take a million pictures of whatever, that'd waste film. The camera they used was this big old fashioned looking contraption and I literally believe it had a big conical shaped flash bulb. Not super sure on that, again, the indifference of memory. I might be mixing it up with old tyme photo journalists in the noir movies with their bulbs popping, and the photographers ejecting them out steaming hot onto the floor. I kind of doubt it was like that at the time this picture was taken.
The people in the photo. From left to right, me, Jay Richard, Regan Robinson.
Now, when was this taken? There's the gray area.
Prior to Koyo, I had been to New Orleans precisely two times. The first time, as noted here, was when I got wrangled into driving a Ryder panel truck to move Jay, his cat Matthew, and all his dusty old cat piss soaked shit back to his hometown of New Orleans as he ecstatically fled the evil state of Florida. The second time was a few months later that year when I'd visit Jay and Regan at their new house in the Bayou St. John neighborhood of New Orleans for a few days.
The date on the back of this cardboard frame pins it to the first visit, in early February.
Unfortunately for me, as you can see, the photo studio didn't bother to put the year. And that's kind of the problem.
I'm writing this post without cheating. Cheating would mean I would go back to the post I'm referring to here in this blog where I probably do mention the actual year. So just going by my memory as it is right now, I can't 100% nailed down the year precisely. I know it's either 2000 or 2001.
My memory used to be so good with dates and times of events. I remember my mother commenting on more than one occasion when the family was chit-chatting around the table, or reminiscing the good old days at parties, and I would always be able to snap out whatever date they were referring to without a fault. Birthdays, weddings, funerals, anniversaries, all sorts of events in the lives of people around me, but admittedly, mostly events that I was affected by, and especially things that happened directly to me. They were all stored in this bloody blob of fat in my hard noggin and could be recalled in an instant like a trusty old Timex Sinclair zx81.
All right. Moment of Truth. I'm going to go check that post. Written back in the early days of this blog when my memory wasn't so foggy. When my brain was a downright Commodore 64. Why am I making a running metaphor with these old cheap ass computers? Cuz I'm an old cheap ass, bitch!
It says 2001.
I posted that in 2013. Back, like I said when my memory was a bit better. But take a look at the pictures that I placed in that post. Here's the link again in case you're lazy. One of the problems, according to my janky memory, is trying to figure out how many nights I had stayed there during that visit. For some reason, if you ask me today, I'd have thought it was only one night, maybe two. But according to the photo evidence, the three of us apparently did our Bourbon Street bar crawl more than once since what we're wearing in the Pat O'Brien's picture is different from what we're wearing in the photos I snapped with my disposable camera in that 2013 post. As I mentioned in that post, Regan had a really dismissive attitude about doing the lowly touristy thing so I have trouble thinking she got dragged down to Bourbon Street twice in one weekend.
This is yet another thing about memory. If my previously ever dependable memory is in question and I'm confronted with a conflict in physical evidence, my mind actually wants to defend itself and I start to think that may be the photographic evidence is wrong, not me! This is how conspiracy theories are born baby.
So either I'm getting old, or the multiple glug glug juices over the years have degraded my biological Altair 8800, or maybe, just maybe, some shadowy government agents broke into my house and substituted the photo seen above. Heck, now that I look closer, is that even me in the picture?
EDIT: More problems. I document in this FLASHBACK post about the infamous moment of "passion" between Jay and me at my Park Central apartment and label the date as Early February 2001. But we now know that we were in New Orleans then. So the actual event in the FLASHBACK must have been before February. Probably January 2001? But I posted this in 2009, You'd have thought my memory of events only a few years prior would have been MUCH better. Am I to now call in question the timeline of all my FLASHBACK posts? I do admit that this is one of the reasons I stopped doing these kind of posts because it did start to get foggy as to when certain events of the past took place. Oh man, the rabbit hole gets deeper.
SIDE NOTE: Gee, I guess I thought V-neck, sleeveless sweaters over T-shirts was the "in" look. Maybe it was. I can't remember.
Well, I guess this is what I think I looked like in my head. Um, yeah, I wish. Or maybe I did? Maybe this pic below is really me and that starting-to-look-chunky dude above is fake? Dream on Michael, dream on.
