Last weekend I had what I consider the perfect weekend.
On Saturday, I got up and wrote for a while. Then I picked up some beer and went to a party, where I watched the Red Sox-Rays game and played beer pong in my friend’s man cave, a detached garage outfitted with televisions, a stereo and a refrigerator. The next day, I met a couple of friends and drove downstate to the Storm King Art Center, a 500-acre sculpture park in Mountainville, where we wandered the sprawling, landscaped grounds looking at art.
In retrospect, none of this seems particularly special. As weekends go, it was pretty run-of-the-mill. But I’ve always found deep satisfaction in mixing highbrow and lowbrow activities. It’s why I like New Orleans so much. I haven’t visited the city since Hurricane Katrina hit, but my parents have traveled there several times to do volunteer work, and report that there are still lively options for tourists. You can gorge yourself on food and drink and take in the debauchery of Bourbon Street, and then visit the aquarium or a museum or go on a historical walking tour. Of course, New Orleans being New Orleans, many of these walking tours focus on the more sordid aspects of the city’s past.
When my friends and I visited New Orleans in college, we loved walking the streets of the French Quarter with our open containers; when a police officer told us we couldn’t sit on the curb and drink, I remarked, “That’s about the only thing you can’t do here.” Pretty heady stuff when you’re a college senior, to be sure, but the highlight of the trip was an early morning swamp tour led by Cyrus the Cajun, who took us into the bayou in his boat to look for alligators. Occasionally, he tossed marshmallows into the water to get them stirred up, and when we returned to land he let us photograph ourselves holding his pet alligator, Lucy, who lived in a whirlpool in his garage.
In some ways, New Orleans became my template for the perfect vacation.
It was cultural and enriching, but also excessive and, at times, unrefined. The swamp tour, for instance, featured all of these attributes. We learned a lot. We saw a part of the country we’d never seen before. But there was something a little crude and uncultivated about the way Cyrus grabbed an alligator sunbathing on the shore with his bare hands and lifted it up in the air for us to gawk at. Looking back, I’m really not sure this is the sort of activity I even condone, because I’m all for letting alligators sunbathe in peace. At the time, though, it blew our minds. We loved it. We thought the whole thing was hilarious. My friends even named their pet snake Cyrus.
Nothing about last weekend was anything like a trip to New Orleans, other than the fact that it involved things I consider unintellectual and even kind of dumb (watching sports and drinking beer, playing beer pong), and things I consider thought-provoking, creative and healthy (looking at art, going for a long walk, writing). On Sunday night, I felt pretty pleased with myself. How on earth, I wondered, had I managed to cram all this stuff into two days? Then I sat down and watched the Rays finish off the Red Sox.
Too often, I encounter people who seem to think that you can’t mix highbrow and lowbrow activities. Like if you’re into poetry, you can’t be into sports, and if you like to read Tolstoy, you can’t like action movies, too. This sort of attitude drives me crazy. If someone genuinely dislikes a certain activity or pursuit, well, that’s one thing. But if someone is simply conforming to an arbitrary set of rules and expectations, based on some idea of what it means to be an artist or a sports fan or any other type of person, that makes me a little sad, because it indicates a certain closing off, and the voluntary acceptance of outmoded stereotypes.
All I know is that when I’m talking about something and someone says, “Oh, that’s not the sort of thing I’m interested in,” and then directs the conversation back to the handful of topics he or she is interested in, I get frustrated. It strikes me as oddly stubborn, a weird refusal to fully engage with the world, and it becomes very boring very quickly. Perhaps I just like people who are eclectic, and can open my mind to things I don’t already know about. And I can never predict what those things are going to be.
I mean, I’d never played beer pong before last weekend. Those guys in the man cave taught me something new.
Foss Forward makes a weekly appearance in print, in The Gazette’s Saturday Lifestyles section.
