After dinner, Nicky, Miles, and I went back downtown to pay respects to Rosa Parks who died this week and who was to lie in the Capitol Rotunda, the first woman to do so. It was the least we could do for this woman from the Deep South who had given us so much. We found the end of the line on the Mall at 6:30 and got into the Rotunda at around 12:30AM. It was a long walk, snaking back and forth in prescribed "lanes" defined with saw horses and police tape, inching along, stopping, waiting, later, resting a bit before going on. But it wasn't Montgomery and it wasn't Selma, and there were no dogs or fire hoses, or tear gas. There was just a lot, a whole lot, of people from DC and from Virginia, and from Maryland, and from New Jersey, and from New York, and even from Chicago, and probably a lot of other places too. We were all ages and colors and faiths. There were a surprising number of school age kids, including my own 8th grader, and I thought that was good. There were a lot of people, mostly women I'd guess, who were close in age to Sister Rose and everyone tried to help them make it over the long hours to see the coffin and to say "Thank You." That's what we wanted to do: just to say "Thank You".

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Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, DC

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Caution! It is usually a good idea to keep off the edge. There is a chance of falling off the edge. There is no safety net here. Only a hard landing.

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He was angry. He realized now that he was always angry. Anger was trapped inside of him and felt like a burning coal in his throat. And he could not swallow it. His anger was unfocused. He couldn't tell you what, exactly, he was angry about, because he himself did not know. His anger built upon itself, growing each day, slowly taking over any other sensation or feeling. He was angry at the world, at himself, at everyone he knew and everything he saw. But he hid it. He hid his feelings from himself as much as he could and, therefore, from everyone else. But it was eating him alive and he didn't feel like he could contain what he felt any longer. He thought about himself as a child as he slipped the blade out from its plastic housing. He thought about life when he was a boy when time seemed to spin on into a forever that would never end.

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It's not about where you're going, but about how you're gonna get there.

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It has felt like Fall recently. I mean, really like Fall. The daylight hours are getting fewer. The temperature is cooler. I just wanted one last opportunity to capture Summer and the beach and the sun and the soothing sound of surf upon sand. Just one more hour before the Fall.

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Il pleut.

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The trees are all lined up, just like they were told to be. There's order here. A kind of utopia for greenery. The lawn is rolled out in perfect strips. This is what heaven will look like. Except there will be more angels and fewer street lights.

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One of the strange things about travel is that, eventually, you get the opportunity to bring back with you something so unique and unusal that no one who lives in the place you've visited has seen, let alone owns the thing you've bought to bring home. Nor would ever want to own such a thing. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone in Washington, DC who owns a pair of "Washington Monument Salt and Pepper shakers", for example. Or a snow globe with a Library of Congress inside being snowed on. Or find anyone here who would wear a t-shirt with our President's face on it. Perish the thought. It is my experience that kitchy chachcas as a memento of a vacation is something that mostly Americans find attractive. You almost never see anyone from "over there" or from "up there" or even from "down there" buying this crap. Its mostly visitors from Oshkosh or Des Moines or Bayside or Grovers Corners that makes a trip to the Souvenir Store a major focus of their visit here. Now this is not to say that this is a bad thing. It's just weird.

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A hard rain is gonna fall. That's what Bob Dylan predicted a few decades ago. Well, guess what? He was right, I guess. It came alright. And, it's still coming as far as I can see. People all over the place are getting wet and staying wet. I don't really know why, but I've been told it has something to do with Hummers. That doesn't make sense to me, but there you have it. It's going to be Winter soon. What's gonna happen to all the wet folk then? What's gonna happen when everybody is wet and cold? It's not gonna be pretty.

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Sometimes I'm neither coming nor going. Sometimes I'm just sitting still. These times usually happen in a car that is either parked or as good as parked, sitting in traffic that is not going anyplace anytime soon. This is referred to as "The Dead Zone". I'm trapped for the time being with nothing to do. The car radio is no help as there is usually nothing I want to listen to that is being broadcast to me. The CD player hasn't worked for months. So, I watch the other people sitting in their cars, even though I was brought up to think that it isn't polite to do so. People do the most amazing things in their cars. Yesterday, I saw a man shaving with an electric razor. He was also talking on the phone. I imagined that he was also typing email replies into his PDA using his feet. But I don't know for sure since I couldn't see his feet. I'm guessing that was a good thing.

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There's a certain geometric logic at work here. I'm sure of it. This is a stairway to the subway from the parking garage at Riverdale, Maryland. They painted the concrete orange this Spring for some reason. First I thought it was ugly. Now I think it sexes the place up a bit, which is odd, because concrete stairways are probably the last place on Earth that would need to be sexed up. But, there you have it.

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I've been thinking, lately, about adding some porn to the site. It might attract some more viewers. The most traveled locations on the NET are porn and gambling sites I'm told. They pull in more traffic than anyone. Probably even more than Google. This site gets a small, but steady, viewership and that's fine. But, in America, MORE is BETTER. Always. No question. No argument. Political rant sites get a lot of traffic, but I'm not that interested in politics. I kind of feel that (pardon the mixing of clichés) given enough rope, they'll eat each other anyway. I'm more interested in the day-to-day quiet strangeness of life on Earth. So porn and gambling would fit into the mix pretty well, I guess. Why not? If everyone is doing it, it must be OK. Watch this space for details.

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Coming Fall 2005

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She parked the car at the far end of the elevated lot and walked away. She just left everything that was her past life as it was that day, drove to the parking lot, and left it all behind: the house, the car, the husband, the two kids, her job, her life. It wasn't like she'd been planning this event for months or anything. She just woke up and decided to make a change. If you asked her, she wouldn't have been able to explain much. This was just something that she needed. She needed a new start, a new life, new experiences. She supposed that she was tired and that her new life would be better, somehow. She'd meet new people, and go to new places. Things would be different.

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There is a thing that they do here that they call "fascadism". It's taxidermy for buildings. How it works is this: when they take down an old building, they save the front skin. Everything else comes down and is thrown away, but the part that faced the street is saved and reused. It's glued onto the much larger building that is being built. The main attraction of this method is that, from the street as you walk by, what makes an impression and what you remember passing, is the old building that used to be there, because that's what you see. You see the old skin and the huge new thing that has replaced the old thing is not visible to you as you pass by. You only see it when you look up if you look up at all. This is a piece of old-building-skin as it is being held up with iron beams. See, now you've learned something new. That's good, right?

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There are two things that I think must be common to every American: We want to be very very rich (and, truly we are), and we want everyone to know it. Like Kings of Europe in past centuries, I want to live in a house that could be home to a small city. I want the house to be decorated with gold so that it glows by candlelight. I will require, of course, a staff of people to sweep and polish and keep the place clean; to do the cooking for my frequent parties and receptions and to do the endless laundry. I will also need an army to keep the grounds clipped, weeded, watered and arranged. I will travel frequently to my smaller, country home that will also have a staff waiting for me. Is this, really, too much to ask? Oh, and I'll need a hunting dog. I almost forgot about the hunting dog.

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Post Industrial Artwork: Green, Red, and all lined up

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Just enjoying the view on a late Summer's evening.

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The same, but different.

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Half there, and half not.

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There is something compeling about having lunch alone. It's a meal in the quiet during the hectic part of the day. It's like a Hopper painting. These faces are not quite in focus, lending additional mystery to who these people are. The lighting is direct. They appear to be looking at each other over several booths. Are they communicating to each other? If so, what can they be saying? After all, it is lunch, alone, overlooking a busy, downtown street. And there's not really that much to say.

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Sunset on the Potomac

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Sometimes it's hard to get "up close, and personal". Sometimes it's hard to get close at all. There are so many layers: there's the "We, the people" layer, then the anti-personnel barricade layer, then the Security personnel layer, then more anti-personnel layers. then the spiked fence, then the lawn, more Security, then the White House where no one is home anyway.

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