Is any place more louche than Joburg on a Sunday afternoon in late summer?
The rasping hangover earned on Saturday night has been burnished to a buzz. Monday morning's traffic remains unthought of.
The air is thick with a comforting sluggishness.
The streets crunch with the detritus of conspicuous spending.
This bubble of happiness, gilt with guilt, cannot last. But while it does, Joburgers will live as if they will never die. And bloody good on them.
So to the citadel of all that, the Wanderers, this late summer afternoon to put another international cricket season to bed.
The third T20 against Sri Lanka, the last of 10 matches they will have played against SA on this tour, will tuck it in.
It's been real, much more than last summer, dazzled as it was by the pyrotechnic pantomime pixie who is Virat Kohli and Dumb, Dumber and Dumbest, or David Warner, Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft.
This season there were visits from a Pakistan team who failed to live up to the reputation of those who have come before - played nine, won three - and a Sri Lankan side who followed doing the unthinkable - winning the Test series - with, evidently, thinking nothing else was doable: they were rubbish in the one-dayers.
The T20s? Who cares, especially with you know what slowly looming into reality over the horizon in England, where the cruel pinch of winter is reluctantly lightening into something like spring.
World Cups are fuelled by fantasy. They are crashing confections of clamour and cacophony that demand of the players to be less like people and more like puppets, their strings pulled from unseen pulpits where pressure is power.
Gary Kirsten is the only South African alive or otherwise who knows what it feels like to win one of these things, and he was wearing an India shirt when Kohli and Suresh Raina hoisted him onto their shoulders and carried him around Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai in the unreal afterglow of that mad night in 2011.
So there's value in the truth that SA will go to this edition of the tournament with their reality in the sharpest focus yet.
There is no Fikile Mbalula to queer their pitch with his braying bombast.
There is no nuclear option in the shimmering shape of AB de Villiers.
There is no longer a magnificent otherness about Hashim Amla, who has weathered into a merely mortal entity after 11 years as a rock of righteous run-gathering.
There is only Faf du Plessis and his seriously sober stare at what is, and not at what was or what could be.
And Ottis Gibson's softening smile a reminder that, hey fellas, it's a game, nothing less, nothing more.
With them will be a squad who could be tempted to believe otherwise; who might want to come at this with faith when what they need is fight. That would be a mistake, as too many South Africans who have come and gone to and from previous World Cups could tell them.
But these are things for a time hence, not for a bubble of louche happiness between a hangover and the hell of a Monday morning on the M1. For now, in these few hours when none of this really matters, when the players are still people and not puppets, get thee to the Wanderers. Failing that, to a television.
Pleasure is promised and fun forecast - late summer afternoons in Joburg tend to end with a bang...