Death of a Dream

It was like making the long trek to Mecca only to find yourself at Sea World.  It was like taking the stairs to the top of the Empire State Building and looking out over Fort Worth.  It was awful-- an explosion of despair and pain.  The end of an era.  The death of a dream.

I walked again tonight, as I often do, to the most beautiful house in New Orleans.  I shall not go again.  It has been tainted.  Ruined.  Those people who live there, those awful, awful souls have turned their beautiful, majestic delight into a canvas of blasphemy and blackness.  I hate them deeply and with yearning.

Shall I begin by saying that they do not own a cat?  The way the curtains were pushed back ever so slightly so suggested that a feline presence slid in between the fabric and the glass and stared unimpressed upon the world while he licked his paws clean.  This is not the case.  They do own a pet, but it is not a cat.  It is a big, grotesque English Bulldog, fat and stupid.  The size of a pot-bellied pig it lumbers about, all brown and white and ridiculous.  It is so fat it doesn't walk, it waddles.  It is a disgusting beast.  That is lives in such a beautiful house makes me yearn to pull out my BB gun and fire a pellet into it's immensity.  It's so hideous my heart breaks because of it's existence.

But, oh, worse horrors did I find upon my final journey to the once-magical place.  Do you remember, from examining the photos of the house, the flag-holder that hung empty on the front of the house?  It is empty no longer.  The house's lovely visage has been tainted by an American flag.  And, no, not a tasteful, subtle decently-sized American flag-- a huge, tacky unbearable flag just whipping in the breeze.  The kind of flag that murdered John Lennon.  The kind of flag that rapes children and steps on the heads of kittens.  It made me want to vomit.

So stricken with sadness I wandered away with a heavy heart and sobbed into the dark, melancholy New Orleans night.  The world shan't ever be the same.  A little piece of my heart has been rent forth and scattered across the ground like the ashes from an alter to God.  There is no more magic in the world.  It had been replaced with poison and bile.