After basking like a porpoise in the glittering New Zealand summer, an all-consuming orgy of the freshest ingredients, the snappiest wines, landscape-worship and sun-phobia, the return to a wintered-out, debt-ridden America feels a little like being cast onto a barren shore.
Okay, that island does happen to be Manhattan, and crossing the Triboro bridge at about 11.00pm on a Saturday night in the back of a yellow cab (the driver not speaking; it is New York taxi etiquette for both passenger and driver to observe Trappist conventions) offered a refraction of the migrants thrill.
Surveying the towers, and lights, the electrified hubris of the city where ambition rules above all, you think, "I live here?"
Last night, it looked more like an ocean liner than ever before. I'd been put in mind of cruise liners, walking at the bottom of Queen Street, and watching them in Tauranga harbour and Akaroa.
Forgive me P&O, for I am about to sin, but cruise ships, I think, are giant mausoleums, huge floating buckets of death that convey geriatric zombies through the seven seas of over-eating and over-drinking.
That excess is an American mode, identifiably pugnacious, refusing self-control. Yet (cholesterol aside) what goes up, must come down. Despite the news today that Gen X film director Kevin Smith was booted off a Southwest Airlines flight for being too fat, the American obesity epidemic seems to be leveling off. One may never be too rich or too thin, but you can be too fat, and too broke.
Today, on the phone to my editor Max while on 86th Street, I looked up, and saw three stores were empty, available for rent. This hadn't been so before I'd left six weeks ago.
I went and brought Valentine's Day chocolate for my beloved. Everyone else was using credit cards (even for purchases as little as $10). I paid cash.
I needed a belt. The old man in front of me at the counter was asking for a senior citizen's discount.
"But you've already got a 25% discount for Valentine's Day," the clerk observed sadly.
Even winter seemed to have run out of puff; the monstrous snows of the past weeks reduced to dirty archipelagoes of ice on the footpath. Melted snow dripped from shop awnings.
The previous day, I'd been in San Francisco. It felt like a pleasant stopover; Eltham to New York's New Plymouth. I met a couple of pals, and - after walking far too far - we parked ourselves in Zoetrope, a bar in the building where Francis Ford Coppola edited several of his best movies. We ordered a round of drinks out of desperation, and left quickly. File alongside restaurants that revolve.
Decamping to Bing's cocktail bar up the road, we were served by Bruce, a phlegmatic Chinese guy with the tired eyes of someone who may have seen everything, but dislikes grand claims.
"What happened to Bing?" asked my pal.
"I had to let him go," answered Bruce.
We watched the opening ceremony for the Winter Olympics: A messy miasma of Canadian self-congratulation. I pounded the bar and chanted "Shock and Awe! Shock and Awe!" Canada-baiting is as reliable a sport in the US as Australia-baiting in New Zealand. The one Canadian in the bar didn't take offence (they never do); the Americans looked at me with resignation, as if I was someone they used to know.
On the plane, I watched comedies in which the characters extracted laughs by making one another feel awkward. Ricky Gervais is the new Ricky Martin.
Okay. Stop me. You've heard this before. Something about airline travel, and missing the friends, family and ease of New Zealand life puts me in a valedictory mode. May I offer the following distinction?
There seems less animus, less struggle, less optimism this time around. New Zealanders like to twit Yanks for their boundless, often unjustified enthusiasm. It is eminently easy to satire. It makes us more self-confident, realistic. But without that foolishness and naivety the United States feels like an ebbing tide.
Read more of Tim Wilson's blogs.
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