Greetings! It seems apt that my first official post goes up just before midnight since this is about the only time I can find to write. The CD player has just shuffled — Johnny Cash, “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town” to the Nevilles covering “The Rivers of Babylon” — on some logic of its own and I’m headed for bed my ownself, sure to be asleep long before my daughter and her cousins who are upstairs watching MTV, which doesn’t seem to actually show music videos anymore.

The weather in New York is dank and humid, fog like steam is obscuring the top of the Williamsburg Bank clock tower, which will not be the tallest building in Brooklyn anymore if Bruce Ratner has anything to say about it. Ft. Greene has changed since we moved here, almost eight years ago. Some of the townhouses on my side of the street have been selling for over a million dollars, which means the people who bought and renovated them don’t actually have to be here when the weather is like this. They have summer homes, I suspect, leaving their stoops to be inhabited by the crackheads and winos who usually congregate in the little park at the end of the block. Things, in other words, have changed to remain the same. At least locally.

I got an email from our old neighbor Ishbel the day of the London bombings. She had relocated there after 9.11, in search of some sense of safety; you can read her story in “Escaped from New York” on the Articles page. She is expecting another child and is no doubt reconsidering the wisdom of her move. Meanwhile the local Brooklyn paper declared our local subway hub, the Atlantic Avenue station, “a prime target for terrorists.” The cops and National Guardsmen on duty down there seem to agree.

The stereo has shuffled past Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys (“That Old Steel Guitar Rag”) to Richard Thompson doing “You Dream Too Much” (“All my life I’ve been like this/I start thinking of a perfect kiss”) — “It’s gonna end bad,” he assures us but I just saw RT, playing for free right across from where the World Trade Center once stood and he was doing all right. Dressed all in black on a sultry summer evening but there wasn’t anything mournful about it. Even his signature signoff, “The Dimming of the Day,” didn’t sound so sad.

Y’all come back now, here?