I had a 3 hour layover at JFK. Just enough time to grab a cigarette and meet my nephew for the first time.

Walking off the plane, I was immersed in a sea of people, all blissfully unaware of the existence of anyone else. "Ahhhh," I thought "New York".

Being able to maneuver your way through city crowds, NYC crowds specifically, is as much an art as a talent. Many people make the mistake of caring about the rude individuals who cut you off in a seemingly desperate rush to their final destination. The mistake of caring, of course, lies in seeing them as individuals.

You'll never make it to where your going that way.

New Yorkers, though it might not seem it, do in fact work together in a buzzing mass of organized chaos. The weaving in and out is a combined effort. You'd better be able to accept getting bumped into, cut off, and cursed at quietly at least a half dozen times per 5 block radius. And you need to be able to do it yourself.

In any case, it's certainly nothing to take personally.

Eight hours of flying, and I made it back to the very state Id fled from so many years ago.

After years of complaining about the humidity of the east coast, I realized my body had lost its favor to dry heat. I can feel myself dehydrating. I imagine Ill be needing to drink much more water while here. And I doubt ill be able to continue getting it solely from coffee and beer.

I'm trapped now in a retirement community while visiting my mother. People tooling around in golf carts, eying suspiciously the hooligans under 60 that prowl the streets past the ungodly hour of 8pm, when all decent folk here are sleeping. But its a fine place to decompress. And I've many fabulous mother-made-meals to look forward to before heading out into the real world, if the Valley can so be called. I don't know if I'd use that word, but I'm sure someone out there would.

And anyway, its at least partly more real than Sun Lakes.