All of the above

I've mentioned A's blog before (rantautology.blogspot.com) but I'll plug it again because he wrote a good post from New Orleans a couple of days ago. And again I wish I was there, but instead it seems I'm going to DC, assuming I pass the background check.

Miss S is going back next week, but only to get her stuff. She is right and sensible and wise when she says that era in New Orleans is over. That time in our lives is over, abruptly, and we have no choice but to move on.

I want to be in New Orleans with the hipster holdouts, but my life is going in a different direction. I'm glad of it, but want to hold on to my old life while I start a new one. I want everything. I want to be a New Orleans music slacker and coffee-shop boho and a great, prolific writer and a workaholic environmental lawyer doing my part to save the world.

But I'm not sure it works that way, that you can have it all at once. Maybe you can have it all, but you have to have it one thing at a time. Maybe the golden age of hanging out in the land of dreamy dreams is over. Maybe now is my personal age of ambition and working like a maniac.

Still, I'd like to be doing the work in New Orleans as it was two months ago, fueled by coffee from the Rue and lunches from the Oak Street Cafe, listening to good radio, commuting by bike and blowing off steam at the Circle Bar and the Dragon's Den, still rubbing elbows with the freaks, musicians, artists and hipsters.