6.16.03 1731 hrs: I’m standing here at the pseudo-bus stop nearest my job (1944 Goldsmith) and whoop, the bus came. On cue.

6.16.03 1745 hrs and Bus 21 has hit the end of its route. The kindly tired driver is taking a three-minute cigarette break and then telling me I should take 23, not 17, to get home.

6.16.03 1759 hrs at the stop in front of Taco Bell. This is rapidly degenerating into the kind of minute-by-minute narratives I would write about every six months in grade school, when I got a diary for my birthday or Christmas and get inspired, sometimes for a whole day.

As pulling out the notepad has failed to magically produce a bus this time, I can talk about my situation a bit. I ride the bus now, or I say I do, since it’s my first day doing it and I’m not even home yet. As someone who’s depended on the kindness of strangers for transportation his whole life, though, I kind of like it. The buses are clean and, so far, uncrowded, and they have a neat acronym. TARC. It makes me want to rename this thing TARCblog (Ken gets that).

6.16.03 1808 hrs and I’m on 17. What the hell, it got here first.

So this is how I go from place to place now, here, being someone who lives on Bardstown Road. I’ve plunged into this and I’m glad, because I LIKE it. I am infatuated with Louisville. I want to understand the Highlands. I want to grok TARC.

6.16.03 1919 hrs: home, showered, redressed, finally posting again. And here’s this: I MADE IT THROUGH MY FIRST DAY.

Talk about the last week point five (a million years) soon enough. For now I have to get back out and do things, here, in this bright green shoppy place where I am. I have a boss and a cubicle. I have a kitchen stuffed with food. I have the interweb on cable. I can walk to the ice cream store and the comic book store and the CD store, and I have friends and a phone and summer.

I am unjustifiably lighthearted. I can’t believe how good it is to have this, my big new happy perfectly ordinary life.