Home -- and what a journey into myself!

You know you've readjusted to Floridian heat when its fetid wetness moistens long-dried craters of Virginian sweat on your Gap T-shirt (the sunshine in the Land of Jefferson is less damp but more violent).

Anyway, after nearly five days of Beltway blues and Charlottesville's perplexing mixture of yuppie holistics and pastoral insouciance, I'm back in town, with fearsome tasks before me: taming a new group of college freshman; deciding between which used vinyl copies of Aretha's Who's Zoomin' Who? and Tom Verlaine's Dreamtime to play while eating my lambchops; and marveling at the ease with which litterateurs employ the loathesome metaphor of writing-as-journey (in this case, "into a place where I don't simply see 'the police' anymore when I look at a police officer, but I see a man, I see a woman," purred Marita Golden on NPR) as if this time the journey actually had a destination, and wasn't merely a traffic jam or -- worse -- a bottleneck, as it can be for the rest of us.