What A Year Does

After the girlfriend drove me home from her house this morning, I had about 45 minutes left until I was due at my home office, so I abandoned my coffee in the fuzzy styrofoam cup and hit the bed ... hard. I woke up sweating, saw that I was supposed to have been working ... oh... an hour ago, and made a beeline for my air conditioner's "On" switch, which, incidentially, I'd just been dreaming about.

Had I been in NYC this morning, I would have dragged my AC unit back into the closet about two weeks ago.

Had I been in NYC this morning, I also wouldn't have been napping because I wouldn't have had smashing sex with my girlfriend last night.

A little over a year ago, I had no idea what was down here, except for an enthusiastically idealized vision of New Orleans as the Dixieland paradise. Whenever I was smacked by another oversized imitation Channel bag as I squeezed past a frenzied workaholic on the midtown subway, I'd envision myself in Big Easy Bliss.

And not just regular "oh, where I live is pretty cool" bliss, but what-the-Heaven's Gate-followers-must-have-been-told-the-afterlife-felt-like bliss.

All I had to do, I told myself, was drive a car south on that fateful morning and all my earthly (read: NYC) problems would melt away.

It took a year of living in Nirvana to watch all my original reasons for moving here go down the shitter -- they've got fake Channel bags here too.

I've now got new, mature, more-earthbound reasons:

-Law school in NYC would mean having to live in NJ and commuting on its transit system every day. (read: hell)

-I want an excuse to drive a six-cylinder taupe Buick and outfit it with ridiculous hubcaps.

-I can eat without a stomach ache, don't get panic attacks, and my hair isn't falling out anymore.

-I've escaped becoming one of those fanatic Insular New Yorkers who thinks the rest of the country is an expanse of strip malls and stupid people.

- There's no girlfriend like the one I've got.

- I get to feel cooler than everyone else when I walk out of a bar still sipping my drink.

Those Heavens Gate moments -- I still have them.

Like riding my bike underneath a row of trees whose branches stretch across four lanes of traffic, and I'm like " How do you even do that?" And the trees are like, "We just do, okay?"

And then my bike hits a pavement chasm and my basket flies off the handlebars into said traffic.

Here's to a year.