Spending 48 hours doing nothing but smoking, drinking, gambling, and laying around in the sun is good for the soul. I'm sure there are people who will line up to disagree with me, but I'm here to tell you that getting out of DC for two days was totally worth whatever damage I did to my liver and lungs, and hey, a little sun damage adds facial character. Who wants to look like a forty year old barbie doll anyway?
I sometimes feel like living in Washington is a little like being expelled from a public high school and then finding yourself thrown into the middle of an Ivy League honors program. All around the city are millions of over-achieving, tightly wound, success-driven adults. They were all first in their class at places like Harvard and Yale, and the ones that weren't first, but had lots of family money, are trying to settle some score from 1975 when a freshman girl beat the crap out of them in debate practice. My fellow Washingtonians are so driven, that they actually get up to run at 6am, for no good reason. What would make a person skip an extra hour of sleep in the morning? I personally would get up an hour earlier if someone were making blueberry pancakes for breakfast. The chances of that happening in my house are slim to none. My partner A. can't cook, and even if she could, when she gets to the part of the recipe where she has to fold the blueberries, she literally tries to fold them. When I get up for breakfast, the kitchen is covered in splotches of blue, which would be great for a Jackson Pollack painting, but difficult to remove from the granite counter top.
I truly loved New Jersey. I've only ever been there on business, never for pleasure, and I've gotta tell you, Jersey is truly South Side. I felt so comfortable among these wonderful folks, big hair and all. They were wonderful, they were friendly, and they SMOKED! I'm the only person in DC who still smokes, and it felt good to be around people who weren't worried about cancer or heart disease. People in Washington carry anti-bacterial scrub when they use public toilets, they have finely-tuned immune systems that shut down at the first sign of any alien microbe. I swam in a pool with a bunch of 3 year olds who were probably peeing and sneezing all over the place, but it was fun, and most of the time, it's really just about the fun isn't it? The Jersey girls had big hair, but they also had big boobs and big hearts. What more could you ask for? In Jersey they know how to do Italian food. I had a white pizza with garlic and meatballs that made my tastebuds sing. And at three in the morning coming home from the casino, I bought an ice cream cannoli that was out of this world.
You just can't get that in Washington.
I miss living in a real city. I miss the all night diners, and the old men sitting around on the front porch drinking beer. I miss the sounds of Latin music blasting from the nieghbor's porch, and the salsa lessons from the flirting old Puerto Rican men who would always hold you just a little too close when dancing. I miss the Polish women in their baggy dresses who would always have leftover gnocchi, and Mrs. Jackson upstairs who made the best fried chicken and collard greens in the city. If my old neighborhood in Chicago was a small slice of American urban life, then what exactly does Washington the nation's Capital represent? Housing in the city and the outlying areas has gotten so expensive, that I'm not sure how people with children make it anymore. Old buildings in ethnic neighborhoods are being bought up so quickly and re-habbed to fetch a seven figure price tag, that regular people are either forced to sell, or pay the exhorbitant rent and property taxes that seem to rise every six months. I don't know where the people who can't afford $2000 a month in rent will move, once the nieghborhood they grew up in is turned into a trendy enclave with upscale shopping and a twenty-four hour doorman? If the nation's capital has no room for the poor, where will the working class go?
I grew up in the ghetto. We didn't have a lot of money, but we had a sense of community. I can't honestly tell you that I'd rather go back to the days of poverty and economic uncertainty, but I can tell you that I trusted people from the old neighborhood a lot more than I trust the uptight money driven folks in my new neighborhood. In my old neighborhood, law breakers were put in jail, but in Washington, the laws are merely re-written to legalize theft. What sort of nation will we become? Will poor Americans seek work in China or Indonesia because there is no work here? Will America become a nation of owners and serfs?
And what if the unthinkable happens? What if you try to buy a cannoli at three in the morning, and the one store you can find open is a 7/11 serving only Hostess Twinkies and Cupcakes?
If you find yourself at three am with nothing but a 7/11 open, go to Jersey. They still serve real food, and still have real people.
