What is the Hopeslope?
No matter where you are, you know The Hopeslope. You’ve lived it all your life.
It is a universal concept. But, like many great things, the idea was born in New Orleans.
I’ll start there, breifly:
Life in New Orleans can be charted on a sin wave. The absolute best, most joyously hopeful day of the year sits at its peak: Mardi Gras Day. The worst, most brutally hopeless day is nestled in its trough: August 29th, Katrinaversary. The through line is Hurricane Season, and everything can be charted accordingly.
The wave, this cycle, is called The Hopeslope.
If you are not a New Orleanian, The Hopeslope still exists. It’s just different. Maybe a little less intense or a little more individual. But the cycle of a year or whatever your season’s length — from the highest high to the lowest low — that’s universal. It’s something that all of us know.
It is a social theory.1 It is life itself.
I did not create it. A dear friend taught it to me back around 2012. He learned of it on his neighborhood’s porch bar in mid-city New Orleans, where it was written on a whiteboard by another friend who learned it from their uncle. That uncle might have lived in Navarre? Unclear… Further back, its lineage is shrouded in mystery.
Regardless, it’s been a touchstone for my community for longer than I’ve been a part of it. We’ve all added to the concept bit by bit - together and on our own. We tell people and all play with it like putty. You know how it goes.
Some additional housekeeping: Prior to using it in the name of this publication or any writing, I asked consent of those who taught me and of those who taught them - as far back as we could figure. Everyone was fine with the concept being used and shared. But of course they were - that’s the whole point.
But this is the basic concept. And know, that wherever your “here” is, you know the Slope. The Cycle, the routine. And, chances are, you’re working to navigate it gracefully, just like me. Just like us all.
The Hopeslope belongs to us all.
If you want to know more — read the whole write up — you can find it here.
While the concept is very communial, the social modeling behind it is - to my knowlege - my own, original work.
It’s worth noting that some elder acolytes of the Slope wanted me to note that in past versions long ago the through line was Halloween to Jazz Fest. If you’ve done Halloween or Jazz Fest in NOLA and danced your face off on Frenchman Street, it’s easy to see why.
However, when I began working on the (social modeling) mathematics denoting the Slope as a Graph of Hope, I came to the conclusion that Hurricane Season is the way to go when conceptualizing the through line as the axis denoting Time.
If you would like to chat more about the social modeling I’ve done behind this, please let me know! (Also, note, I’m not here to spam anyone with my elementary trig, modeling work, or theories on time [eadem mutata resurgo?] in my articles, but I would be so. stoked. to discuss.)