01 April 2010

From Washington DC





I'm not quite sure how to manage this blog to get it exactly the way I want it but here goes. On the bottom is is the first pic I took when I got here - pretty lame of me. Warm and sunny forecast for the rest of the week. The trees are blossoming and this pic is a tree in the parking lot. Hopefully I can get some pics of the cherry blossoms in the next couple days.

The second pic up from the bottom is the Turkish flag flying outside the embassy ("Ever been in a Turkish prison, Bobby?"). We drove down embassy row in an attempt to get near the National Mall during rush hour. Not a good idea.

The third pic up from the bottom is the Jefferson Memorial strategically placed behind some bushes.

The fourth pic up from the bottom is the Washington Monument, obviously rebuilt since the movie Independence Day was filmed.

Small Internet Indeed


I just had to check my stupid Facebook this morning. Now my mind is blown and I won't be able to get back to sleep. The pride cometh before the fall is how the old saying goes. I'm usually not such a jerk but sometimes in my life I have taken things for granted, like the affections of a good person. I visited my friends in Edinboro in 1990, taking a bus from Buffalo because that's where I lived at the time. I had delusions of becoming an English professor and I was taking some high-level literature classes at UB, but I only went to class the first three weeks or so. I was in a weird funk. I had just seen Pink Floyd's The Wall for the first time and I knew how Pink felt. He was building a wall around himself mentally. Maybe a month later I saw Taxi Driver for the first time. Travis Bickle was alot like Pink and me. All three of us were disconnected. There is a shot in Taxi Driver when Travis is sitting in the diner and looking into his coffee cup (?) and someone is calling his name but he is just not there. The camera zooms in on the coffee and you know that Travis' mind is somewhere else.

I lived with my friend Ralph that semester (I measured my life in semesters even when I wasn't actually taking any classes). I passed out one afternoon, from a lack of oxygen to my brain presumably, and ten minutes later D.J. called me. I took it as a sign. I took the bus down to see him and met this girl Genienne. She had short red hair and was cute and funny. I remember she asked me what kind of bait I used (that is still funny). D.J. was planning a fishing trip, probably to Cook's Forest, for all the brothers. I told her I liked her and could she please write her name and address on a piece of paper and leave it on the fridge. So she did and we started writing back and forth, then I went down to visit her, she came to NY to visit me, and after that I was a jerk. But she definitely had helped pull me out of the funk I was in that Spring.

She drove her yellow Subaru/Volvo station wagon to come see me that summer. We went to the House of Guitars together, and I bought Blood On the Tracks. How many times did I think of her when Bob Dylan sang "I was wondering if she had changed at all, if her hair was still red." I remember her stepfather mocking me because I wrote to her on yellow legal paper. So that is the story of Genienne, the parts that are flattering to me anyway. I left out me being a jerk and not appreciating her and not really breaking up with her but not calling her anymore either.

So this morning I check my Facebook messages and there she is. Small internet indeed. I am still not sure how she found me but she liked my sign that says "Hippies use the back door. No exceptions." I guess if I owned a place I would let the hippies use the front door. I'm not always a jerk.