Cassandra Disque | September 11, 2008
I just had an awful feeling: I realized I don’t know my city at all any more. There are now two bedroom apartments for rent in Columbia Heights for $3,000+. There’s a building on Belmont — one of my formerly most loved, now one of my most despised streets — where studios 185 sq. ft [...]
Cassandra Disque | June 11, 2006
Lying in bed at 2:13, early on a Monday morning in DC’s Petworth neighborhood. Listening to the traffic rushing by on Georgia Avenue, just one floor beneath the bed. Just a wall of cement between my naked body and the outside life, full of strangers and familiar things. Every night, I listen to the varying [...]
Cassandra Disque | June 2, 2006
This is my home town, right here in DC. When I lived off U Street with a bunch of Ivy League yuppies, they delighted in telling me that it wasn’t my hometown because I had been born and raised on the District line. But my mother’s mother was born in Southeast DC, in a house [...]
Cassandra Disque | April 21, 2006
Condos, condos, everywhere, but hardly a grocery store, clothing shop, doctor’s office, playground, childcare, library, nursing home, hardware store, or much else to be found… unless you can afford to have the neighborhood go the way of gourmet grocers and dress code enforced bars. Oh, Susanna, it’s a dilemma of the highest degree.
Cassandra Disque | January 22, 2006
One of the things I love/hate about Washington, DC is how it is very much two separate worlds in one city. One is Washington City — Federal City, Diplomat City, the capitol of the free world — the center of which lies in Capitol Hill and the federal politicos. The other world are the residents [...]
Since 1996, my life has been a long journey of visiting one doctor after another. I look more or less fine, but I'm not. My daily pill count is like playing the dozens with a hospice patient. One doctor will say I'm doomed, and send me to another for treatment, but the treating doctor will find nothing within his or her area of practice that can be treated.
My life is better than a comedy, better than a drama. Anyone who has done this knows what I mean when I say that you have to not only know the rules, but also play the part in order to be allowed in the game. Most people find what we go through in the medical merry-go-round to be unbelievable, which is why I call it "The Drag of Gimp."
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