Old(er)

I found this on my computer last night, and it rekindled some old memories of places I´ve been. I thought I´d post it for a little DC love.

At night, Baltimore effuses an incandescent glow, rising up out of spires that oddly sprout out from the low brownstones and industrial machinery. In the daylight, the city appears dirty and somehow incomplete: a block of brightly colored doorways offset by the boarded-up wreck on the corner. The slope of Charles Street, born in the bright glare of the Inner Harbor, past knots of black youths on the street corners, rises upward towards the sedate, tree-lined promenades that surround John Hopkins University. This is a city marked by its differences, black and white, poor and rich, somehow stitched together to form this patchwork city that alternates between seemingly-safe and frightening, eliciting a nasty reputation that makes visitors from Bethesda lock their doors as they drive down these streets.
Today, I bought a ticket at Penn Station, boarded a train bound for DC, and watched as the Baltimore brownstones gave way to the lush green of early Maryland summer. I find it funny how these trees and vines all look the same as they did two years ago, still sedated despite their natural disorder. This is not the explosion of chaotic fauna that somehow harmonizes in the Hawaiian tropics; this is the oppressive air of disciplined order. This is Maryland.
It’s no better in DC. What once I took to be completely natural now seems stifled, as if a giant hand is slowly pushing down on the entire city. Everyone looks pressed, pressured into his or her respective compartments: DC professional, DC-East Coast college student, DC poor, DC anti-establishment rocker/bike messenger. Even though they are different, they are each carbon copies of their peers.
Perhaps it’s like this everywhere, simply replaced by paradigms that seem more natural and acceptable to me. But walking around Dupont Circle, despite the racket of the DC Guerilla Poets in the Circle, the chatter of the metro/homo/fashionista men in sunglasses on cell phones, the general flow of traffic from work-to restaurants-to home-to Metro-to wherever, I couldn’t help but feel that this is a place completely devoid of diversity.
Which is silly, I know. Walk the half-mile to Adams Morgan and you see the colorful neighborhood dynamics reflected in the restaurants: Ethiopian, Mexican, Middle Eastern, Chinese, McDonalds Team America. We settle for the Diner, tip extravagantly as our own personal thanks for the simple human friendliness of our tag-team waiter and waitress. I eat French toast for dinner because, dammit, I can. My own rebellion in the heart of American conformity? In some weak way, perhaps.
I’m exhausted beyond reason, but my mind is chewing and mulling over the whole day. I love talking with Mark, who bubbles over with anecdotes and ideas and a pure, unadulterated excitement for life and his work. I can’t help but be enchanted by his contagious enthusiasm, and passion for politics. We go by Poets and Busboys after a marathon walk around DC, I buy James a present and lovingly open the pages of these radical, revolutionary, fervent books. This is the most segregated city I’ve ever seen, a weirdly repressive and stagnant one, but you can’t stop flowers from growing through the cracks. The cacophony of the streets nourishes this quiet, somewhat stunted revolution. But it’s what I’m here to bear witness to, what I’m here to do. And I’m thankful for every minute of that.