What used to be our Chinatown has now become Penn Quarter. In 2004 I remarked that it was starting to look like Times Square. Well, the transformation of hideousness into tourist appeal central, gawdy capital of our city, is complete. It’s been Disneyfied, Manhattanized, all the things I hate.

Old City near the Hill is quickly following in the footsteps of U Street NW, using its black heritage as something to put on a wall in a picture frame and then discard as easily as the residents who actually remember Black Broadway are being displaced by all this nonsense. Biggest difference being, Old City has become Joe EnglerTown — former mayor Williams and current mayor Fenty might as well have handed him the keys to the ‘hood by now.

D.C. is now overrun by Michelin star ratings on restaurants, paid parking on streets, designer clothing boutiques, Food Network chefs roaming around taping their shows, “residents” who don’t know who Mayor Washington was or why D.C. doesn’t have the vote (“What do you mean, our votes don’t count?”), more chi-chi frippery for the discerning yupster than affordability, etcetera. The diversity keeps bleeding out into the suburbs. I’m tired of seeing young, upwardly mobile people (not all white — there is definitely a fair percentage of Buppies

I keep writing, then deleting, because it’s all been said before so many times. Sometimes by me, sometimes by others. But I just don’t know D.C. anymore, I’ve come to realize. It’s like waking up in a bed that’s been shared with the same person for all my life, only to realize that other person has become not just a stranger but a stranger that I don’t want to know.

Matt feels the same way about Silver Spring. I don’t feel quite as vehement about SS as I do DC because I only visited a couple shops in SS before 2001. Matt, on the other hand, has been here for pretty all of his 38 years. He hates going into SS’s city center, where the Armory used to be. He misses the old shops, the old character and feel. He hates all the neon, the droning people milling around the shutdown square on weekend nights, the bad traffic, the continually rising costs of real estate, the lack of parking, the loss of the boutiques and open spaces, etc.

I think I’m just particularly bitter today because our second house offer got turned down. Also, last night the massage parlor two doors down from where I work was raided by the cops. The raid brought the neighborhood kind of to its knees, clearing out the people hanging around on the streets, closing the nearby sandwich shop early (of its own accord), emptying the street of parked and loitering cars, and just sort of scaring out the customer base. Over the past weekend, our resident dealer got busted by the cops and is now banned from the bar. This has led to a sharp drop in our customer base (with people coming in and shouting “where can I get some fucking coke?!”) and has sort of put everyone in a sour mood. It’s been pretty dead for the past few days, so no one of us are making money. To top it off, one of the dealers walked in the bar last night and started screaming (loud enough for anyone to hear) that he was going to shoot my boss.

There’s got to be something wrong with me and how I’ve lived my life if I prefer the company of drug dealers and working in a neighborhood with massage parlors, pimps, and crack addicts, to the company of yupsters in a neighborhood of gastro-pubs and chi-chi boutiques.

Every night, I listen to the varying sounds of the passing vehicles. Sometimes a few hours will pass with almost nothing but the hum of passenger vehicles gliding by at 40-50 mph in a 25 mph zone. Every hour yields the rattling of a metro bus, stopping at the corner where my street and Georgia meet. A few times a night, the roar of police cars with sirens, fire engines, and ambulances rush past–some to an incident, and some away from an incident, but many heading to nearby Howard University Hospital. I always wonder how many people in the back of those ambulances ever make the trip home again. Once or twice a week, the soundscape is broken by the raw whirring of a helicopter–sometimes on its way to Washington Hospital Center, sometimes coming or going on federal business, but sometimes its just the police, out doing their thing.

When the police are making their presence known, which isn’t really very often, the sounds from the people recede into the night; where they go, I don’t know–maybe home, maybe into the neighborhoods’ many abandoned buildings–but the din dims to hardly an audible murmur from my window. When the po-po disappear, despite their station only three blocks away, the street chorus proliferates. There’s the sounds of the crackheads making their way through the alleys, empty lots, and abandoned buildings: a somewhat incomprehensible choir of muttering, profanity, and a long list of demands that usually include “where’s my fucking [any personal possession], give me back my fucking [stuff] or I’ll fuck you up.” Those are the sounds the adults make. The children are more frightening.

At times, Matt and I have ventured down to the Asian-American carry-out on the corner, which has the unfortunate position of being in front of the bus stop that heads into the city. As such, this carry-out gets the most foot traffic of any of the five carry-outs open within two blocks north and south on Georgia. It also gets the most diverse crowd. It’s not uncommon to be in there in small hours of the morning and witness lady crack fiends sizing up potential clientele. “You ain’t too young; just a dollar, just a dollar’s'all I need; you ain’t too young, honey.” The boys she hounds for services don’t give her the dignity of ignoring her: they call her a bustdown and worse. She pays no attention and continues to try and get her fix from the carry-out patrons. “Can I have a dollar? Gimmie a dollar. How about you? For a dollar.” Meanwhile, the boys–one of whom can’t be any older than twelve–are harassing the guy behind the bulletproof glass because their food is coming out slow. The harassment turns from “Where’s my fucking food,” to “Get me my fucking food, you flat-faced bitch, or I’ll put my gat in your fucking face and kill your pussy ass.” French fries for your life, baby. But they do make the best motherfucking egg rolls I have ever eaten, shitfaced or sober.

On the walk from the corner back to our building, we pass the neighborhood drunks, passed out just feet from the warehouse doorway. They don’t leave much during the day time, either. The sidewalk is their table, chair, bed, and toilet. It’s not uncommon, even in broad daylight, to see people dropping their pants to piss and shit right in our front yard. The human excrement mixes with the dog shit and the rat feces. The smell from the various bodily functions is covered by the smell from the textile cleaners next door, the numerous mom and pop carry-out joints greasing up the air, and the large quantities of spilled alcohol that is continuously spilled on the street. Empties line the curbs and trash covers what should be grass medians along the sidewalks. Used condoms, half-eaten meals, torn clothing, and the odd shoe compliment the bottles. Sometimes, an entire person’s life is discarded on the side of the road–from an eviction, or from a homeless person somehow parted with their possessions, it’s often hard to tell which. And sometimes a person’s actual life is left there on the side of the road, the blood flowing onto the pavement from the gunshots or the multiple head and chest wounds. I once even saw a man forced onto his stomach in the middle of Georgia Ave, two cops pointing their guns at his head while a third kicked his body; I don’t know what happened to him, as it never made the crime reports, and certain people are better at cleaning up after themselves than others.

Not the late night crowd, though. As last call pushes folk out of the neighborhood late night drinking establishments, rowdiness ensues. The crowd from The House, our local strip club, make their way the two corners down to the aforementioned Asian-American shop, looking to get some grease in their bellies before heading on home. More often than not, the grease and the booze come back up before the consumer makes it onto the bus or into the car, and it’s the sidewalk, street, and storefront on the corner that’s worse the wear. Other times, the patrons just dump their unfinished burgers, sodas, noodles, or wings onto the ground before going home…but not before singing, shouting, starting fights, and drunkenly declaring personal vendettas on half the people they come across before the final commencement of the evening. The hollering back and forth can sometimes get so loud as to drown out the sounds of the revving engines of the minibikes and the souped up automobiles. Silence in the city is a commodity for the gentry.

Matt and I, we don’t close the windows when we sleep. We keep them open for the sweet breeze, coming in from the park at the Old Soldiers’ Home a few blocks away, but most of all, we keep it open for the street sounds. When we go home to my place, just five miles north, we keep the windows open for the breeze off Sligo Creek Park and put on some music to play in the background, because the calm of the birds twirping and the crickets chirruping is a silence that is raucous and unsettling. The only audible parallel between my apartment in East Silver Spring and his in Pleasant Plains are the sounds of the trains in the distance. Late at night, when the neighborhoods are quiet(er), I can hear the cars move through the old B&O Station at the intersection of Selim Road and Georgia Avenue, more than a mile from my apartment, and here in the city, I hear the trains moving further south on the same train line, but a full mile and a half east of our bedroom windows, over on the east side of Catholic University.

It is now 3:30am. My apostrophe key has stopped working and I smell rain coming in from the west. One alone is a good enough reason to call it quits for the night, to pull the covers up over my flesh and to curl into the body laying next to me. But sleep will not come, not yet, not really, because I am still waiting for some sort of resolution to the problems facing this town I call home. Cannot sleep; the gentrifiers and politicos will eat me. Only clear method to bring on rest is to leave this place and get some peace by settling away from here. One day, next spring, when my lease is up, it will happen. Until then, my mind will not let me be calm.

Im still twitterpaited, after all these years.

But I fucking hate this town. It’s changing in ways that make me feel sick to my stomach. I used to think that I was just going to stick it out here; as a local, I didn’t want to be one of the many scared or forced out. But I look around now, and I’m disgusted by all the changes. It’s getting worse with very little to outweigh the negatives.

Recently, Rebecca Dana wrote the following in the New York Observer:

The “Dupont Circle-Adams Morgan-U Street corridor area,” a group of abutting neighborhoods in the city’s northwest region, essentially contains the District’s entire panoply of night-out hotness options. A few local clubs have even started to offer bottle service-just like New York City!-said bachelorette celebrant Katherine Martin. “That means that instead of buying drink by drink, you can get a whole bottle of alcohol for $160 or $200.”

Which may seem cheap to New Yorkers, but in Washington, they explained, it’s not money that matters. “It’s power,” said Ms. [Erika] Orloff, to nods all around. “It’s where you work. It’s who you know. It’s what committees you’re on.”

A few weeks ago I was at work at a bar in the so-called ‘U Street corridor area’ — the area is neighborhood, it has a name, and it’s called Shaw, but Shaw has negative historical references, and as such, the developers have desperately tried to drop the name of Shaw from the now trendy areas — when two young female students from Trinidad-Tobago waited at our front door for a very long time until we could approve their foreign ID cards. Once into the bar, they tried to order full bottles of wine, which we don’t serve. They left in a huff. Honey, it ain’t that kind of joint. We don’t offer Tight Pussies, either. What we do have are crackheads dropping their rocks in our mailbox, and the neighborhood roughnecks beating the crap out of our staff when there’s a blue moon. We have to keep one eye on people doing coke in the middle of the bar and another eye on the homeless crackheads trying to come inside and panhandle the customers. That’s the east side of Shaw. Go west a few blocks, and other than the shootings over parking spaces and the bricks being dropped on white bicylists heads, yes, you can order a full bottle of alcohol. Good for fucking you.

Looking at my city, here in 2006, I’m reminded of 1968. I’m currently reading Hard Revolution by George Pelecanos, guy who grew up in DC before the ’68 riots. The book is novel based on the rising racial tensions prior to and during 1968. I wasn’t there then, obviously, but between all the history reading, talking to my elders, and reading this book, I feel like the city is tensing up in the same way.

Look at the crime statistics in the city over the past few years. Between 1993 and now, the city has definitely improved, but In some neighborhoods,

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.

Last night started out with a dinner party in Dupont Circle, at the home of one of the young Democrats I’ve been hanging out with recently. He’s working on a Congressional campaign for a representative in Florida, as well as working with a young-Democrat organization. The party was full of young do-gooders drinking wine and eating dinner from paper plates balanced on their laps; fifteen people crowded into a studio apartment with only eight chairs. It was good to see a party that wasn’t being put on the “company” tab; in otherwords, this was a private affair that happened to include all the folks from the various official mingling events that get paid for by tax payer dollars. But I’m not knocking it, truly. I got to have an amazing conversation with the youngest chief-of-staff to ever be on Capitol Hill (even being Dick Cheney’s famous entry at age 34 by a full seven years), Casey O’Shea. (Yeah, I know — ew, namedropping — but this is relevant, I swear.)

O’Shea’s district is the one hardest hit in Louisiana by Hurricane Katrina. The guy has stories like you wouldn’t believe, about how his constituents are still living in tents, how the local economy has been completely destroyed with severe long term consequences, how there are still missing people, how so many people working in the recovery offices even in his campaign have committed suicide, how the banks and lenders are being forced by the fed to hassle now-homeless and still shell-shocked people for money they obviously don’t have, how all the insurance companies are kaput… Really harrowing stuff. But, of course, what’s big news? Two coal miners lost in a mine shaft. Iran’s dangerous. The Superbowl is around the corner. Clearly, our minds are focused on a different picture.

After the dinner party was my impromptu frou-frou fest. I brought the last guests home at 4:30 in the morning — four very drunk young men sitting on the straw covered floor of my dad’s contract work van (formerly the family’s minivan back in 1992), bluegrass overnight blaring on the stereo, plastering himself to the back windows a la ’28 Days Later’ in an attempt to disturb a woman in a vehicle behind us (mission accomplished), three other pairs of hands whooping up in the air in time with the music, all culminating in a foot-stomping, hand-clapping blow-out down 13th Street. Laughter, hollering, screams of pleasure, and none of us smelled like ashtrays the next day. When I woke up at 10 this morning, I didn’t even have a hangover. Nonetheless, I decided to skip the Cap City side of the world and forgo my usual Sunday morning pundits, to crawl back into bed and enjoy some more of the morning, District style. Brunch with the young Dems on U Street at 1pm, $1 mimosas and bloody marys, with the lot of us doing our best screaming queen impressions (“Another drink, another drink, dahlink, I plan to be drunk before three!”). Then the young Dems went back to bed and I went back to work with the District kids.

I live in-between the two worlds in this city. Not everyone in this city does, but I prefer the company of those that do. I like it here.

Now that Maude is really gone, I’m listless. I’ve severed the ties and no longer feel the desire to whoop it on up. No celebrating here. Don’t feel like doing anything but staring out at the city and listening to my poorly neglected record collection, alone. Last night — Maude’s last night in town — my mobile was ringing incessantly with folks wanting me to come out and play. No could do; though I wanted to, I had promised Maude I’d stay the night in with him. Now that he’s gone, though, I don’t want to see anyone or do anything but be numb by my lonesome self. Turn off the phone, close the inbox, pretend I don’t hear the knocks on the door… and change my mind by tomorrow, I’m sure.

I’ve never been alone like this before. It’s an odd feeling; trying to give it words but I don’t have them ready yet.

Of course, once a year the IMF and World Bank have their meetings. Then, on top of the usual Presidential, Vice-Presidential, and visiting dignitary motorcades that we face year-round, we local-yocals also face the high security of the international bank people. Mobs and gangs have nothing on these guys: the security lockdown during IMF-World Bank meetings is brutal. Not just because the big boys are in town, but because protesters from all over the country and world descend upon the city to crowd the streets in an attempt to stop the meetings. Every year there is more security than the last; and with more security comes more bullshit.

This year…this year has been a real pain in the ass. I’m already sickly and insomnia-stricken, so I’m particularly bitter about the enormous descent upon my residence and the general noise factor. Most of my neighbors left town for the weekend; their parking spots in the garage have been vacant since Friday morning. Most of my neighbors are ‘smart,’ or at least wealthy enough to escape the city while it becomes a political traffic jam.

This weekend the annual IMF-World Bank meeting and protest was enlarged to also become an anti-Iraq war protest, upon which people also tacked an impeach Bush protest, an end imperial occupation protest, an end classist and racist oppression protest, a ‘our government is stupid and we are embarrassed’ protest, a ‘Hurricane Katrina, et al. effects and consequences suck’ protest, and a free twelve hour concert in front of the Washington Monument (headlined by acts such as Le Tigre). This was to be the weekend of our Velvet Revolution. But it’s also the weekend of the Green Festival and the National Book Festival (hosted by the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, and First Lady Laura Bush). The result of which was that this weekend the city was full of liberal idealists who conveniently decided to jam up the city with their cars, their loud noises in residential areas all night long, and an enormous amount of litter.

Here in upper-Caucasia, perched up on Connecticut Avenue, looking down on the Capitol building (which looks closer than ever this weekend due to my insomnia and the unearthly pinkish-yellow hue the sky has maintained these past few days), I long to hang an enormous banner off my building that might just be seen from further below (as we’re on one of the highest points in the city). It would read: “excuse me, but some people live here, and we are trying to sleep.”

Around four-o’clock Saturday morning, the siren-screeching motorcades started escorting officials down from swankier northern locales, past my apartment, and further into the city toward the mini-towers of doom (the IMF and World Bank buildings). Some officials get wailing cop cars, motorcycle cops, unmarked vans, two bulletproof and window-tinted luxury vehicles, and a partridge in a pear tree. For the past two days they have come and gone — first into the city, then out, then back again, ad nauseum — all day and all night long.

I long for Monday night to be here and gone. Officials: go back to your villas. Green Festival attendees: go back to your group homes. National Book Festival people: go back to the suburbs. Protesters: go back to all the above. Us residents would like to get on with our lives. How would you like it if we did this to your town?

The older I get, the more jaded I become: I’m starting to feel that non-violent protest in this society seems like a waste of time. When we have to get a permit to speak, to amass, to protest; when they pat us on the head and say, yes, go on now with your sanctioned dissent; when they put up barriers to keep us in, that is how they prevent others from listening. We have to break out to be heard. That, and I still believe that using phrases like “overthrow imperialism” and “we are all Palestinians” and “free all U.S. political prisoners” not only alienates many people who might otherwise agree with the main cause, but dilutes the issue with the cross-pollination of peoples’ pet social justice protestations: if we’re going to protest the war and Bush’s incompetency, then we need to do that, and not show up with a giant pot leaf and demand that 4/20 be a national holiday and that marijuana be legalized.

Gimmie back my city. When Jello Biafra and a bunch of white girls singing about Patrick Dorismond are the rallying glue behind a disjointed protest, who are you speaking for? It is no wonder that the rich superpower bureaucracy is still not taking us seriously when we file for our permits, make our protest movies, sing some angry songs, write some scathing commentary, and then go about our way with our shopping, paying taxes, keeping the economy afloat — good little citizens, every one of us, even though we disagree. Do we disagree enough to put a wrench in the system? Stop being comfortable in our own lives? Give up our niceties like personal freedoms, hygiene, food, etc.? Live like what fear, live the way the people we “fight” for and “protest” for live?

Quite honestly — very honestly — no, we are not. I’m not: not anymore. I’m angry, but I’m not 19 anymore; I’m not going to go risk what little I have to make what I see as a microscopic dent and no difference. Like everyone else, I’m struggling to keep my head above the water (above the bullshit), to take care of myself and get beyond the nasties. That means not losing what I have, not jeopardizing my options, my health, my freedoms, my securities, my future, and my potential. Most of us are the same way, and that’s why this (this protest, this idea for a new future, this struggle for equality) isn’t working: because we’re not willing to truly risk ourselves for what we want. That brings to mind the question, how much do we really want it? I suppose this is why idealism is for the young or the well-off: because those are the ones who can afford to live per their morals and beliefs and not for their health or their family or immediate future.

What’s that phrase? Be the change you want in the world? Something like that. We might be disenchanted or even angry, but most of us are still not ready to be the change.

Aside from stating how I really feel about this (other than pissed at my jadedness toward local violence and my strong desire to return to a country with vastly lower homicide rates), there’s a few things I think ought to be pointed out:

#1: The Response From Local Hipsterati

Urban Bohemian felt moved enough to rhetorically query his friends about the shooting in two different places. Why shoot a man walking his dog? Such a thoughtless crime! Indeed, I’m sure many people echo one friend’s comment of “Wow, that sucks.”

Over at my least favorite local blog, DCist, ‘staff’ bloggers gave a morning news roundup for Monday, Sept. 19, by mentioning the murder of a white guy in gentrified Mt. Pleasant (NW), but failed to mention another fatal shooting that took place in DC on Saturday night — that of a man in the decidedly non-gentrified neighborhood of Barnaby Terrace (SE).

#2: The Response From The Washington Post Newspaper

Let’s just say that if the man killed in Barnaby Terrace this past weekend had been a white man, the story would have received more coverage–more notice, more attention–but a black man killed in SE DC? Shit, honey; haven’t you heard the Washington Post publishes out of NW themselves? The white man killed in Mt. Pleasant has so far received two full articles in WaPo, as well as received leading local news coverage on televised news. The man killed in SE I have not heard mentioned on the television, but he did receive a full fifty-odd words of coverage in today’s Washington Post’s Metro Section — B3 under ‘In Brief.’

#3: Meanwhile, Back In Reality

The always succinct Babylon on the Potomac logged both Sept. 17^th DC killings this morning. As any visitor to Babylon’s site today can see, there are a great deal of grizzly events going on in DC all the time. There was a man beaten to death just two weeks ago. About a week prior to that, another man — this one a lawyer — was beaten, put in the trunk of a car, and then burned to death after the car was set on fire; this was also in SE. On Sept. 3^rd, a man was found on a NE street after having been fatally shot multiple times in the head and body; as of three weeks ago there were no known witnesses, suspects, or motives.

Furthermore & In Conclusion

DC is always like this. Most crimes don’t get the front page or two minutes on the news unless the victims were either white, young, well-paid professionals, or who have vocal advocates who harass the media into carrying the story. This city has had a stupendous influx of more than 60,000 new residents in the past year alone. New residents try to live in the so-called safer neighborhoods, but they often fail to see that their new area is not as squeaky clean as they had previously suspected.

Granted, violent crime rates in DC have improved: we’re no longer officially the nation’s leader in homicide numbers, though I doubt those of us who are long-time residents will ever be able to shake the mental imprint of Homicide Capitol of America from our heads. So far in 2005, this little city of sixty-eight square miles has had only 137 homicides. This time last year it was 141. At our most violent peak, we had a whopping 482 homicides in just one 12-month period — ah, the heady days of 1991, when Sharon Pratt Dixon was mayor and the Mt. Pleasant riots shook the city with the fury of hundreds of pissed-off, mostly immigrant youth and 1,000 riot police.

* * *

I had a point to this but then had a hot flash and have not been able to focus since. Eh.

Wise up, yuppies: the city might now have a Crate & Barrel in Tenleytown, a Whole Foods in Logan Circle and a Giant Food in Columbia Heights, but despite it looking more and more like a sprawling suburban strip mall every day, the city is still more dangerous than Crackertown…unless, of course, you look like the people in DC who are usually violent crime victims, in which case you’d find yourself being forcibly removed from the street by the private neighborhood security faster than Paris Hilton can make a fool of herself in front of a camera. Race and class issues in America? Naw, man, naw. But we’ll co-opt and fetishize another man’s culture, then marginalize and subjugate he and his people any day of the week.

Big buisness carpetbaggers are having a field day with New Orleans. It’s going to be a big, white-washed, faux-neighborhood oriented mall. And if (when?) they succeed and see how ‘well’ they succeeded, where will they set their sights next, for the next great Reconstruction? Two places come to mind: clear the hub of black southern culture (Atlanta) to make way for more sprawling highways and a larger oil pipeline system, or clear the mythic northern mecca of hope (Detroit) to make way for a restructured automobile industry and its employees.

Watching the speech last night, I couldn’t help but wonder, the way I always do, what would happen if — or rather, what would it take for — people (“the people”) just decided we’re not going to take it anymore, stood up, walked up to our so-called elected officials, and physically removed them from office? From a legal stand point, what are they going to do, shoot all of us? They might start, but if people keep coming forward there’s got to be a point where they either retreat, give in, or decide it is a full out war on their own people…which reeks of the southern succession. But it’s already been demonstrated that our civil liberties mean diddly, that the Constitution is good only for butt-wiping (they even took away legally owned guns in Nola; so much for the right to protect yourself and your property–sounds like emminent domain wins out over the second amendment), and that lives mean nothing until big business is at stake.

Australia deported (oh, sorry, REMOVED) some poor American anti-war organizer from Melbourne last week without giving a legal reason. He was just a high school history teacher taking a sabbatical and helping the anti-war movement in Oz while he was there. The Howard government shipped him back to the US and charged him upward of $10,000 for his enforced armed escort and his stay in solitary confinement. People are beasts. There is no escape. The influence is spreading like a virus, and virii don’t have cures. The only way to stop them is to kill off the host and hope it doesn’t spread any further, hope that everyone else grows immune. It kind of reminds me of Garland & Boyle’s 28 Days Later, though not nearly as drastic. If rage was the disease in the film, what would we call it in today’s reality? My bet would be on Greed vs Sloth.

This is amusing: According to DeadlySins.com, “the Christian Church assembled a list of seven good works that was included in medieval catechisms.” They are called ‘The Seven Corporal Works of Mercy.’ “They are: feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, give shelter to strangers, clothe the naked, visit the sick, minister to prisoners, and bury the dead.” Granted, it’s been more than 10 years since I stepped inside a church, but my Lutheran mother assures me that the above list are seven points that good Christians hold dear.

I propose a new game: every time the Bush administration fails to meet one of The Seven Corporal Works of Mercy, call the White House (202-456-1111) to tell the operator that the Bushies are being bad Christians and that as a member of the Moral Minority and/or a keeper of The Seven Corporal Works of Mercy, you’re keeping track. Then tell a friend who isn’t in the know about the game and have a drink (or two).

The Hitchens vs Galloway fight is on tv tomorrow night. That’s my big Saturday night right there. A bottle of whisky, two self-important British intellectuals arguing on my television, and praying for some rain. But tonight, ah, tonight–tonight we dance while the city swelters.

Sprog is reading over my shoulder.

The past week has been damn heady and confusing. Even when attempting to balance the jet lag out of the equation, I’m still spinning in circles. We touched down first in LA: city of sprawl, smog, greyness, cocaine, everything green having long since decimated… LA digs me to my very core as the epitome of all things I hate about America. We spent five hours in layover at LAX, the last hour of which was spent watching Americans get ugly because the Burger King had run out of food. Cocaine clears the ugliness away, but at the same time, makes you apart of it.

The observations I had from the USA to Australia were mostly along the lines of how much more similar Oz is to the USA than to the UK; I was surprised. Some Australians I discussed this with, such as , disagreed with this synopsis. On the return trip, I realized my mistake. There are a lot of similarities, to be sure, but whereas I found Oz strangely like home, I now find America to be disconcertingly unlike Australia. Things I had prior overlooked or just not cared about or had taken for granted are now blatantly and disgustingly obvious to me. Everything from the extreme rudeness of people (I miss hearing “no worries” twenty times a day) to the incredible obesity. I remember feeling uncomfortable that people in Australia seemed to be much skinnier on the whole, but doing the reverse trip I’m appalled by how fat the majority of people here are. Maybe it was the jet lag, because usually I don’t give a damn so much about that sort of thing, and I am well aware of the vicious cycle of poverty and obesity, but sitting there in LAX, watching people waddle around with their enormous plastic Starbucks coffees with extra whipped creme… oh man. Then watching the redness in so many peoples’ faces as they walked down the over-air conditioned terminal, people huffing and puffing in their hundred dollar designer running shoes that have never stepped on anything other than a man-made surface… oh god… back to happier thoughts, please!

So yeah, America, the beautiful. It is beautiful, a really beautiful landscape. Enormous. I miss Australia so much it hurts, but America has a different natural beauty that Australia made me forget about. Kind of like my trouble with lovers: each one makes me forget the last, so that it becomes so easy to love the one you’re with. Until I made my way home from U Street Tuesday night, I had forgotten how much I love DC. The city, you know, the essence. Not the politics, not the gentrification, not the activism, not the ‘scene’ or any of that, but the soul of the city. Sitting in the back of a cab at one in the morning in mid-August, the cabbie blasting some Ethiopian disco as he cruises through Rock Creek Park, the smell of the damp woods wafting up and settling into my brain. My bones relaxing with the humidity of another late summer on the swamp. Sitting on the balcony, sweat dripping down between my breasts just like the moisture dripping off my beer. Feet up, legs bare, smoggy night air, listening to the cicadas on a non-infested year. Love. Hot times in the city. I’m having a love affair, all right. Just a quickie, just a few months before I head back to Australia. Mmm, Brisbane. Still gotta hit that one up, too, so much, so much to divulge, but still no time. My parking meter is up and I have to go.

DC PEOPLE: PLEASE COME TO FORT RENO TONIGHT. WE WILL BE GOING TO THE DELI AFTER FOR MOTZAH BALL SOUP. See previous entry for cell phone number.