You’re probably not wondering why my blogging has been lighter than usual lately, but I will tell you anyway. I’ve been otherwise occupied. Whatever he’s been doing, thank god he’s been keeping his opinions to himself, you’re probably thinking.

Wrong-o!

A few weeks ago, an editor friend of mine commissioned me to write a column for his weekly newspaper, a task that has occasionally distracted me from my duties to everyone’s favorite Upside-down Hippopotamus. I had written three columns and was working on my fourth when my friend called me yesterday afternoon and told me not to bother. He had been laid off from his job, and since he was the one who had championed my weekly masterpiece, I was being laid off, too . . . by proxy.

My column was called “State of Mind” and was about life in New York City. It was limited to five hundred words, which is not very much at all, so I decided to start off writing about life in general and get more specific about my own madcap adventures as I went along. I’m probably not the greatest person to write about New York City, but considering my audience was a bunch of people who had never been out of Tennessee, I suppose my efforts were sufficient.

I’ve decided to post the three columns I actually finished here over the next couple of days. The first one appeared right after 11 September, so that theme is mentioned.

Writing a regular newspaper or magazine column is actually a major dream of mine, so maybe I will get another chance soon. Until then, I give you “State of Mind” . . .

State of Mind: Column One
by David Buscher

When people from the rest of the country find out I live in New York City, they invariably ask what it was life was like here on September 11, 2001. Lately, the question has shifted to “What did you do during the blackout?” I can’t answer either of these questions to their satisfaction. On September 11, 2001, I was vacationing in Ottawa, the capital city of Canada. During the Great Blackout of 2003, I was vacationing in Las Vegas, a city that is never dark. I suppose the message I am inadvertently spreading is that, in order to maintain one’s sanity while living in New York City (and I am sane . . . I think), one needs to leave it often, or at least during epic disasters.

People are less interested, but two years later, I can still vividly recall what it was like upon my return home on the night of September 14, 2001. Driving up the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, I saw lower Manhattan across the East River. The burning rubble sent up a haze, glowing in the floodlamps, that wreathed the surviving buildings like the atmosphere of an alien planet. It smelled like nothing I can describe. At that point, there was still the hope of discovering survivors, and I prayed for them so hard I almost drove off the road. Days later, that hope evaporated, but my prayers didn’t. I didn’t know who I was praying to or what I was praying for, but I wandered around in a perpetual daze and burst into tears at the sight of every photocopied “Missing” poster. Those were the worst of times, made even more dreadful when the politicians swooped in to capitalize upon our tragedy. And though the world changed in an instant, right on our doorstep, New Yorkers held together.

People ask me what it’s like to live in New York City amidst catastrophe, but no one seems to wonder what it’s like the rest of the time. Perhaps, from their hours of studying television programs such as “Friends” and “NYPD Blue,” they think they already know. This is rather like me characterizing the entire South based upon what I learned on “The Dukes of Hazzard,” a position I have been known to adopt. But if I can come to accept that the skies south of Maryland are not alive with leaping cars and screeched “yee-haws,” perhaps I can convince others that everyday life in America’s most amazing city does not exactly follow the script of “Seinfeld.”

New Yorkers often pretend that the rest of the country doesn’t exist, and in fact, there are those of us who could not exist anywhere else and would probably burst into flames if they tried. I have lived in and visited many parts of the country and know that we’re no better or worse than anywhere else . . . just different. Often astonishingly different. Over the next few weeks, I hope to introduce you to what it’s really like here when everything’s going all right.

David Buscher is a writer and graphic designer living in New York City.