National Art Museum

We took a look around the National Art Museum in Washington, DC. It was wonderful to see my tax dollars doing something so awesome. It was great to see my tax dollars not invading and occupying another country or jacking them for oil. The museum is split into East and West wings. They look entirely separate above ground, but they’re connected by a tunnel underground. They share a bookstore, also underground. After we finished up the first wing, we hit the bookstore, and I spent some time rooting around, looking for awesome, overpriced art books. There was an incredible book featuring some of Anselm Kiefer’s work. He’s one of my very favorite artists. I flipped through the book a few times, thought about buying it, and put it back. I was sure I could order it online for less money. I started to walk off. Then a beautiful young girl, probably in her early 20s and fresh out of art school, walked over to the books and picked one up, right where I had been standing. I stayed in the store, fiddling with some inane souvenir coffee cups so that I could get a better look at her. She stood about 5’ 10,” lean. Her hair was straight and brown, and pulled up in a bun, peaking out from underneath her faux-military hat. She wore glasses and had perfect skin. I looked at her looking at a book, and wondered which one she had picked up. I wondered what the voice of a girl who looks like that’s would sound like. I thought she might be British. Christ, if she had been British, I would have clubbed her over the head with an oversized art book, slung her over my shoulder, and run for the door. I got a little closer to her and saw that it was an Edward Hopper book that she was thumbing through. I winced. It hurt. Fuck Edward Hopper. His work is corny, dreamy, idyllic, Americana bullshit. It’s art for calendars. You couldn’t make me care about Edward Hopper at gunpoint. I had really hoped that she’d been looking at the Anselm Kiefer book. I would have wept if she had a British accent and it had been the Kiefer book, but such was not the case. My attraction to her relented, and I felt a sort of pity. I felt like I should help her out, illuminate her folly, and explain why Anselm Kiefer is so far superior to Edward Hopper that it’s ridiculous that they should be featured on the same shelf. I didn’t, though. My wife found me and told me that we’d need to get moving if we were still going to make it to happy hour. We took off down the people mover.

Dirt Bowl

Everything was filthy. The festival was in a giant dirt bowl. It was 95 degrees Fahrenheit and humid. There was a hot wind blowing. Everything was dirty and dusty. It had been a long day. There had been an art opening the night before for some of my new work, and I had gotten drunk. Then we had woken up at 6am to drive here. We’d been at the festival since noon. I wasn’t complaining. It’d been fun. It’d been good. During the evening, about 7pm, Interpol was playing. They were good. They sounded exactly like Joy Division, and they were nearly headlining this huge festival. Joy Division never could have played this festival. Interpol’s good though. There’s nothing wrong with resembling your influences. It’s not like Joy Division are around anymore, anyway. And you can’t blame Interpol for having fans. They make good music. There’s nothing wrong with that. As they started playing, the sun was descending. Right on queue, it started raining. The effect was beautiful and improved the experience further. The world cooled, and the dust in the air was weighed down by the moisture. I wasn't drunk. I hadn’t had a drink. There was a group of people in front of us who had clearly had more than a few. They looked like they were in their late 20s, all trashed, and seemingly dancing to music with a totally different beat than the music that I was hearing. Their group was comprised of three girls and one guy. All of the girls looked good, but one looked especially good. The guy looked like he could really fuck you up. He was about 5’ 10, and probably 240lbs. Frat boy attire. He didn’t look especially aggressive, just like he lifted substantially heavier than me. Regardless, it seemed like he was an extremely friendly drunk. I could identify with that. He was waving around a camera. Each time he got all three of the girls together to take a crooked, pseudo-suggestive picture with him, he double hi-fived everybody around him. They must have taken no less than a hundred pictures during the band’s set. We stood far enough back that we were left alone. He primarily danced with two of the three girls. The exceptionally beautiful one rarely interacted with him. She mostly kept to herself, and was clearly in better sync with the beat than her friends. She was tall and lean, blond, blue-eyed, and had a Cheshire cat smile. She was wearing very short running shorts and a spaghetti strap tank top, barefoot. Apparently she had known it would be a dusty, dirty event, and thus hadn’t dressed up. She was a gorgeous thing to watch. Her dancing and the rain both enhanced the experience.

Pimlico

We rode the subway to the bus station, and took the bus out to Pimlico, home of the Preakness. I don’t even know what the Preakness is, and I’m pretty sure I don’t care. I only know that it has something to do with horseracing. It made me think of Charles Bukowski. I liked to think that it made me more like him, but I’m sure it didn’t. We weren’t going to see horseracing anyway. We were going to a music festival. The track housing the festival is surrounded by what appears to be a pretty rough neighborhood. The tickets to this show were $100 a piece, for just one day. They were $180 for both days. We got the one-day tickets for the second day. It seems safe to assume that everybody attending the festival is relatively affluent. If you’ve got $100 or $180 to blow on a festival, you're clearly not strapped for rent money. Most of the people on the bus were headed to the festival, and thus most of those people were white. In the back of the bus there was a group of three frat boys who were extraordinarily loud. They thought that they were hilarious. They weren't. They were just loud. They were obnoxious, laughing white asses on a bus riding through a ghetto, on their way to an expensive day of leisure. When the bus stopped and we got out, it became apparent that we’d need to walk about a half-mile around the perimeter of the race track to gain entrance to the festival. The frat boys left the bus immediately behind me, and become strangely silent and well-behaved as we all proceeded down the sidewalk. It was fucking glorious. I wanted to turn around and applaud. Nothing shuts up privileged, self-absorbed, obnoxious, Caucasian, suburbanite frat boys like a walk through an all-black housing project.

Sleepwalking Night Terror

Occasionally I have night terrors. Normally, about once or twice a week I’ll wake up yelling. My wife is very used to it and rarely even notices now. As a child I used to have trouble with sleepwalking, but it has been years since that was a problem. Last night, however, I had an episode of both. I remembered nothing of the event until I woke up. According to her account, this is what happened: I shouted out her name, and said, “Holy shit! Look at it!” while pointing up at her dresser. This woke her up. She looked and didn’t see anything, so she asked, “What?” I responded by jumping out of the bed and crawling around it like nature show host tracking a wild animal, and again pointed up at the dresser, shouting, “Up there!” At this point she came to the conclusion that I was still asleep, and dreaming. So she instructed me to turn on the lights. I reached up to the spinning ceiling fan, pulled the chain that turns on the lights, blinded myself, and woke up in a fog, kneeling at the foot of the bed. It was utterly disorienting and fucking terrifying. I didn’t remember any of the dream. I had to walk around a bit in our room with the lights on to get my head around what had happened. My sleep was terrible for the next hour, as I kept falling back asleep into nightmares and waking up panicked. Eventually I fell asleep, and the rest of the night was uneventful.

I Made It!

In the past year my wife has begun making crafts. They’re very cool, punk/DIY crafts. Her sewing machine has given her a new lease on life. She takes apart and reconstructs rock t-shirts. She makes purses, bags, patches, and all sorts of playful accessories. It’s all fun stuff. I’ve built her a website, and she’s joined a local craft group of like-minded younger women. They’re all pretty great people. She sells her work online and at craft fairs with the rest of them.

Yesterday she participated in a craft fair in Braddock. It was called “I Made It!” I had never previously been to Braddock, but I knew generally where it was and that it was a broken-down steel town. No shortage of those in western Pennsylvania. It’s kind of in the city of Pittsburgh, right on the edge of it. The craft fair was on a Saturday. My wife had to be there somewhat early, and I didn’t want to skip my Saturday morning leg workout. On Saturday mornings I do heavy squats. Then I come home from the gym, shower, and I’m ready for the day. Normally we go get lunch together once I’m ready, but since she was going to be at the craft fair already, I’d have to get my own lunch. No problem. We had determined that she’d go early and set up. Then I’d show up as soon as I could after my workout. Everything went as planned. I hit the gym, came home to an empty house, had a protein shake, showered, and left. Finding new places with Internet directions makes me nervous. So I decided that I wouldn’t eat lunch until after I had found the place. I’d drop my things at my wife’s booth, then strike off to find food. My expectations were low. I would have been content with McDonald’s. I left the house. The directions weren’t clear or especially accurate, and I got somewhat lost, but found the place without incident. No real problems. However, as I entered Braddock it was immediately apparent that Braddock was broken-the-fuck-down. I didn’t see so much as one fast food place on my way in. I parked and went in to see my wife. She was sitting happily at her booth. She looked wonderful, and was talking with the girls sitting in the adjoining booth. I plopped my stuff down and was introduced to them. They were all very cute, young, and nice. I quickly surveyed the room and asked my wife if there was any food to be had in the place. She said, “Cupcakes.” A few of the booths featured gourmet cupcakes. They looked wonderful, but not really like what your body needs after a crippling squat session. It was about 2pm and I really hadn’t eaten anything at all that day, other than a protein shake and a granola bar. One of the nice young girls from the adjoining booth said the vegan food booth had some sort of chili that looked and smelled very good. I’ve had some very good vegan food in my time. I don’t judge. I’m willing to give tofu chili a shot. The prospect of driving around Braddock looking for a McDonald’s, Burger King, Arby’s or Taco Bell didn’t really appeal to me. Homemade vegan chili didn’t sound too bad. Certainly it would be healthier than the cheap, greasy fast food that I would likely eat otherwise. I found the booth without difficulty. The line wasn’t long. It was being run by a tall, very skinny white girl with a nose ring and dreadlocks down to her waist. If Perry Farrell had been born a woman, this would have been her. These sorts of people don’t always respond well to me. I’m 6’ 2” tall, 210 lbs, kind of muscular, and have long hair. I look almost like a studio wrestler, but not quite big enough. Compound that with the fact that I normally dress in mostly black, in this case a Napalm Death t-shirt, and a crusty pair of ten-year-old Dr. Marten’s boots, and I really don’t look like a fan of vegan chili. I look like I should be eating raw meat and jacking off to snuff films. So I approached the hippie as gently, apologetically, and non-threateningly as possible, smiled and said, “I hear you’ve got some ferocious chili,” while eying up the Crockpot of what looked to be chili. She replied, “Oh yes, but it’s not warm yet. I just plugged it in. It’ll probably take a little while. Are you hungry now?” I replied, “Yes, quite.” You can always count on hippies to run a tight ship and fire on all cylinders. “Way to execute!” I could feel my blood sugar dropping by the second as my stomach growled, and I thought to myself that even if the chili was ready, I could easily kill the entire crock of it by myself and would likely still be hungry after I was done with it. Beyond that, I didn’t want to look like an asshole by buying all of it. She cheerfully offered, “Here! We’ve got some breadsticks and some marinara dipping sauce. You get one breadstick and one little Dixie cup of chunky marinara for a dollar.” God bless her ethical little heart. I responded, “Sold. I’ll take two.” In that moment I decided that I’d have to go food hunting. I didn’t want to just fill up on bread. A breadstick would be adequate to stave off the fainting that I knew was imminent. I gave my wife a breadstick and cup of sauce. I ate mine in a moment. It was very good. The bread was somewhat dry and stale, but the sauce was incredible, some of the best I’ve ever had. I ate everything but the cup, and asked my wife if she wanted me to bring her anything. She said she wasn’t hungry. I said, “All right, wish me luck.” I got back into my car and began driving around, hunting for something dead and cooked that I could eat. Braddock is not very big, and it didn’t take long to come to the conclusion that there wasn’t any fast food to be found there. I stopped in the only open store I could find, a flower shop, and hurriedly explained my plight (sans the part about the vegan hippie and her cold chili) to the frightened-looking women running the place. Based on the looks they were giving me, my composure must have been waning. The one who must have been their leader explained that there was a Kentucky Fried Chicken at the top of the hill. She gave me some brief and concise instructions. “Magnificent! Thank you so much!” I exclaimed and left their store with renewed vigor and conviction. Her directions were accurate, and at the top of the hill I saw a KFC. As I crested the top of the hill, the clouds parted, angels descended from the sky with horns and harps and the sung to me, my eyes filled with water, and I began to believe in god. Just beyond the KFC, I could see an impoverished, run-down little shopping plaza. I began to entertain the notion of trying for something a little better. I’m not a terribly big fan of KFC. It’s good, but not really the most portable food in the world. I drove past it into the shopping plaza and began looking for other eateries. A Chinese place! Jackpot! Quick, cheap, good, and big! I parked, ran in, and ordered a Kung Pao chicken lunch to go, while suppressing my desire to embrace the little Asian woman at the counter. My food was prepared with clockwork precision and speed. I was out of there and back into my car in minutes. After parking the car, walking back into the fair, sitting down at my wife’s booth, and explaining why it took me so fucking long to find food, I ate. It was incredible. It was probably almost 3:30, though I didn’t bother to check my watch to see what time it actually was when I finally got to eat. At that moment, it occurred to me that it would be fun to walk over to the vegan chili booth, exclaim in my best death metal growl, “I eat suffering!” and then sit down and eat my chicken in front of the vegan hippie and her fucking Crockpot of cold ethical chili. My manners and sense of restraint won out, though, and I just sat back and ate behind my wife’s booth. Then I got a cupcake and quietly read The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry.