[Editor's Note: PubliCola's D.C. correspondent is taking a break from the politics beat. He's spending the summer in America's real capital city, Brooklyn, NY.]

It was 3 a.m., and I was walking (maybe skipping) down Flushing Avenue, past shuttered pawn shops and warehouses covered in graffiti. It was Monday morning, and I had a plane to catch in four hours. I should have been at my apartment and in bed hours ago, but I knew it was going to be an uneventful week back home in the suburbs, and I just wanted to wander around drunk for awhile. It was a long walk back from the apartment of the girl I had just walked home and the neighborhood seemed like an infinite maze of signs and closed storefronts and pockmarked ads glowing in Chinese. I felt like I could keep walking forever.

Brooklyn at night. (Photo via Flickr user mercurialn )

I looked down at one point and saw a guy passed out in a dusty doorway, while his friends chatted casually across the street. I moved on, jumping up to touch the street signs, stopping and swaying at intersections like "Flushing" and "Knickerbocker," whose names sounded like national landmarks, but which were only really home to abandoned car washes and some not-quite-trustworthy grocery stores. I kept walking  and generally being all sloppy-romantic about a city that had just recently changed in my mind from a towering Disneyland into a genuine psychic conundrum of weird corner stores, expensive beer, hipsters who kept showing up like recurring characters, and girls.

A few hours later I was in Colorado, amid the sprawl of suburban houses and empty plains, far from strange street signs and the weird castes of hairy young dudes. I'd only barely been conscious all day, waiting for trains and navigating security and sitting on the airplane right as the full force of my hangover kicked in.

Back in Colorado, I was going to bed at ten, listening to George Benson on my parents’ record player, and instead of drinking $8 glasses of beer with the hipsters—I drank Coors Light for $3 and played pool with a Jesuit friend of mine in a wood-paneled Denver bar. And I felt a strange ability to just hang around, and finally read Thomas Pynchon (who I don't really get, I guess) and also a geeky history book about John Wilkes Booth.

It didn't take me long to get restless for New York. The city is like a novel that, despite my best effort, confuses me and never seems to reveal its true intentions, but still—for some reason—I can't put it down. (I'm thinking more Melville than Pynchon). It's addictive, but it takes a lot of energy. I wasn't quite sure I had the stamina to return to it.

But I certainly felt a dose of euphoria last night, as my airplane turned over on its side, and I looked down at the overpowering New York grid. After it landed I took the bus into Manhattan. I got a text from the Brooklyn girl, who still scares me, and I told her I could walk her home again tonight if it was alright. I walked up streets with names like "Bleecker" and "Bedford" and waited for the late bus on a sketchy Lou Reed street corner before I found her. It felt good to be wandering through the maze again.