a brand new start of it

So, two years, almost to the the date of moving to my new digs in Astoria and starting my life over, I find myself having packed up and doing pretty much the same thing all over again. This time, a little more drastically (and dramatically) as I have given up my very precious job (my career) at a major publishing house, and once again packed up the apartment, the cats, the books and music and drove 1,100 miles away from my lifelong home of New York City (my family's, for all practical purposes, ancestral home) to the suburban enclave of Germantown, TN ... a very Southern and very mid-Western part of the country. A state I'd never stepped foot in until I crossed the border a few weeks ago to rest for the evening in a Best Western a couple of miles over the state line. The area is what I have seen in my travels across the country, very much like every other place anyone has ever been. It is not, in fact, all that unfamiliar. There are dozens and dozens of Long Island towns that are more than vaguely reminiscent of the main strip that I must now drive down for groceries and other sundries (and I must drive everywhere for everything now). The malling of America (and there were so many complaints about it happening in NYC, too) is real, but it is also, sadly, comforting. A Target is a Target is a Target (and there are three of them within 5 miles of me now, so I say this with some authority) whether it is in College Point, NY or Cordova, TN.

And so I now find myself resident in a part of the country that I'd more often than not viewed with car-crash curiosity. A state where Huckabee won in the Republican primaries on Super Tuesday. I'm going to take this major shift to begin this blog again (almost tempted to rename it On the Road, but that seemed a little forced and obvious. An in joke and minor chuckle for me ...). I am exploring again. Perhaps I'll wade through the bookshelves, once again reordered in another not necessarily sense-making manner and finally re-find the beat-up copies that I have of Tennessee Williams' plays. There is a local theater set to perform a series of his work, perhaps I will find myself there one of these nights, too. My new location has afforded me a visit to a city I've long hoped to enjoy (one I wished to be in two February's ago, my how time flies ...), New Orleans. And I am happy to say that the sin and decadence of that town is alive and well. It got my heart beating again, if only for a weekend--perfectly situated just after Valentine's Day.

This could be interesting. Or, it could be something very much other than that. Trust in Jesus and Elvis as the graffiti on Beale Street said? I just don't know that I can, I certainly haven't ever before. I am away from my home, from all of my friends, my family, from everything that I know and trust and call my own. I have taken with me all of the things that one can keep during times of change. I've got my aforementioned books and music, and they are enough most days to get me through. Through until what has yet to be determined. My g*d, it's full of stars ...