Inappropriate Content: Free Association

Speaking of my neighborhood of D.C., Chris Rock said, “It's not the neighborhood with the musuems—it's the neighborhood that elected Marion Berry four times.” That was a while ago. It's like six times now. In this neighborhood, six-year-old girls on the bus dress like Antastica.

Not that I'm about to go off on some moralistic rant. Like I'm going to tell other people how to raise their children. My complaint is that the only people who don't dress in tight pants are the 17-year-old boys.

It's not fair.

I think the heat is affecting my brain. Last year, I went to Durham, North Carolina, for a day in the height of summer. I spent most of that day feverish and semi-lucid on a ratty couch in a coffee shop with broken air conditioning. By the time the temperature was tolerable again, everything had closed down for the night, and there was nothing to do but watch an underage male prostitute wander up and down the street, waiting to be picked up.

Aside from that, Durham was fine.

I say that the heat is getting to me because yesterday, when my bus pulled up to a stop, and the ‘Bus Stop’ sign was just outside the window, I felt some separation anxiety. The sign and I were so close we'd be less than a step away in normal life, a tem which here means “when I'm not riding the bus.” But because of the god-forsaken window, I could never lean against the bus stop sign; I couldn't even lean in close and read when the next bus was due to arrive. I hated the window.

Later I remembered that windows open.

It's not just the heat. I've been stuck on center for the better part of a week. Which is worse on this center than it was in Charleston, because here when you get off-center, you're in Washington, D.C., our age's Imperial City, where the hedonism of Imperial Rome meets the indoor plumbing of Imperial London.

At the other center, when you went off hill, you were in Charleston, West Virginia, which is the other place they manufactured that stuff that spilled in Bophal.

Watching an episode of Law & Order so old, Jerry Orbach is not yet a detective, and Paul McCrane is still playing a one-scene street tough, not dreaming of the E.R. in his future.

Man, I wish the D.A. would warn him to stay away from helicopters right about now.

Heh. That was a meta-joke.

Well, I thought it was funny.

It's too damn hot out.