Capturing the Mississippi

I am sometimes dismayed to learn that some things I count on as constants are not necessarily so.  Like Polaris being eternally set as the North Star, the June Gloom blanketing the skies of Los Angeles during the month of June, and Pixar inerrantly producing near-perfect films (well done, Cars 2).  Neither is something like the course of the Mississippi River as reliably fixed as I had thought.  It turns out that every thousand years or so since the end of the ice age, the Mississippi River overflows its riverbanks and stakes out a new course to the Gulf of Mexico.  And, according to a book I just read (don't ask me why I chose a book on this topic, I really couldn't tell you), the Mississippi is long overdue for a course change.

Were it not for the efforts of the Army Corps of Engineers, a tributary of the Mississippi, the Atchafalaya River, would have captured the Mississippi decades ago.  It would have cut a shorter, steeper path to the Gulf of Mexico that completely bypassed Baton Rouge and New Orleans, leaving them economically irrelevant: vestigial monuments to the river's former course.  The effort is ultimately futile.  Whether it is through a devastating flood, neglect or the fact that humans aren't going to be here forever to keep the Mississippi at bay, the Atchafalaya is destined to capture the Mississippi.  Until then, shorter term economic viability will trump long term inevitability.

I suppose it's merely another iteration of an old story: short term thinking versus long term thinking; change versus the status quo;  economic stability versus chaos; the ideal vs. the problematic; and the somewhat-predictable vs. the unknown.  On occasion I find an odd congruence – either literal or metaphorical – between what goes on in the pages of something I'm reading and what happens in my life.  And a few weeks ago, it happened again with this story.

Because a few weeks ago, I was offered a job on a reality TV show in Atlanta.  It was a chance to jump the riverbanks, and plot a new course to my destination.  The hope is that the new course would be a bit more direct, but, in the uncharted river that is life, that's never a guarantee.

I thought the decision to take the job would be relatively easy: it's a job in the film industry (or at least the film industry's bastard cousin's bastard cousin); it's a job I think I would enjoy doing; and it's a job in a city that differs considerably from New York.  But there were some serious downsides as well.  For one, it's a job in a city that differs considerably from New York.  And, as exciting as working in the industry might be, working in reality TV is not exactly living the dream (and could, in fact, make it a bit more difficult to cross over into fictional – or as I like to think of it, "real" – filmmaking).  Also, apparently outside of major cities, Southerners don't take too kindly to gays, which may be a product of our "live and let live" attitudes, good manners, and unquenchable thirst for the destruction of their marriages.  But I'm just speculating here. 

New York, the "concrete jungle" and Atlanta, the "jungle jungle"

For many reasons – some of which were perfectly rational, some of which were, admittedly, not – I stayed in New York.  I got the feeling that, although I'm certain to jump the banks and strike out a new course to wherever it is that I'm headed, now was not that time.  For the moment, the economic assurance of a steady, reasonably well-paying job (and a job that allows me an enormous amount of flexibility for my own projects) deterred me from making that jump, taking what may have been a shorter and steeper course to my destination.  And there is always that lingering doubt that perhaps the course I'm on is the course I'm supposed to be on – that opportunities here in New York will unfold in a way that I couldn't have taken advantage of, had I moved to Atlanta.

So maybe it will take me a little longer to get there (and maybe not), but when I do arrive, after meandering through life's equivalents of Baton Rouge and New Orleans, I hope I'll have some interesting stories to tell.  And I wouldn't mind some mardi gras beads, too.