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[From: private blog, January 12th, 2006]

Delta = change over time

I head out for New Orleans tomorrow, and rarely have I been sadder about leaving my stifling Mississippi cubby-hole. Returning from Ithaca on a clean air and frostbite high, I was anxious about seeing the South with clouded Northern eyes. New York was so much the ideal metropolis -- a giant steel and concrete octopus whose robot arms reach as far as the Catskills to carry the pulse of modernity into even the most remote mountain communities and ex-hippie communes. After experiencing the mess of organic tentacles that is New Orleans, the Holy Shit factor was high. But what I'm starting to figure out is that cities are simply the abstract ideal to which people in the region aspire. New York, being America's archetypal city, is this country's urban poster-child: immaculate cultural programming, fluid mobility, and a hermetical seal over a self-contained yet fully integrated system. This description not only applies to the city itself, but to the myriad of communities contained within it. However, to stretch that characterization onto each individual resident is ridiculous. Nobody is all New York, all the time. While many of us are indeed striving for that kind of automated efficiency, we still have to face the fact that, sometimes, nigiri at Nobu and an opening at the Met does not hold the same appeal to carnal pleasure as Popeye's chicken and Will Ferrell.

Which is where Mississippi comes in. When I stay here, I feel like I can let my rigid posture slump a little. Every city I've lived in has left some sort of imprint, but this Southern burg is like a lopsided down pillow placed at the small of my back. What it brings is bittersweet relief from progressive pretensions, as well as a unique chiropractic realignment. My mutant power has always been adaptability. This has not come by nature, but by a hell of a lot of painstaking nurture -- on the part of personal dedication, but mostly due to outside influence like the fall of the Soviet Union, cutbacks on governmental scientific spending, and one giant fucking hurricane -- and I think I've finally gotten a goodish grasp on the art of smelting and refining to suit an endless variety of molds. A lesson for a goddamn lifetime. When I come here to this itty-bitty backwater and enjoy myself so thoroughly, and when I'm mature enough to refuse the label of "slumming it" to describe my visceral enjoyment, this is when I know progress has definitely been made. Mississippi is not a slum. It is the other side of the coin, the broken backbone on which places like New York, both mentally and physically, are created.

If nothing else good comes out of this year, I've walked away with quite possibly the most important discovery in all my twenty-one years of life: the ability to keep myself sane and satisfied. And that, ladies and gentlemen, beats manic ecstasy in four out of five blind taste tests. Peace out, Mississippi. See you in the spring.