Captain Beefheart as a Homeless Woman

We were about to catch a bus. From about 30 feet out, we could see a cop stopped at the bus stop, prodding somebody. It was a homeless woman sleeping on the bench. She had two milk crates, which he confiscated. That was awfully nice of him. Way to serve and protect! He liberated the milk crates and woke somebody up! After she sat up, he drove off. We stood at the bus stop and waited for the bus, paying her no mind. As she slowly found her way to consciousness, she started spewing insane poetry, just like Captain Beefheart. She even kind of had his voice. This is what she said:

“My body controls this world! We’re all just looking for our pussies.”

“Hey big boy, wanna give me a try?” (This while apparently trying to solicit a boy who couldn’t have been more than 13 years old.)

“I don’t want you either, Michigan Secretary of State!”

And my two personal favorites, both aimed at my wife:

“Take it up with fucking Jennifer from 90210!”

“Fuck the tall whore with the long brown hair! Fuck that skinny bitch in the purple sunglasses! Look at her boyfriend! Isn’t he a physical specimen? He can put his dick right up her broad-backed ass.”

All of this came out over the course of about five, maybe ten minutes. Each sentence was spoken individually, with wild, angry gestures, and followed by a short pause. Then there would be another. Once the bus showed up, we got on, and a black woman got on with us. She was laughing, and said to my wife, “I wouldn’t have stood for that, honey! I would have told her to shut her damn mouth!

The Chophouse

The Chophouse is a brew pub. My wife and I love beer. We stopped in and sat at the bar. They had a stout beer brewed in old whiskey barrels, which are made from oak. There were other styles of beer on hand as well, but I wondered why. The Russian Imperial Stout is clearly the greatest style of beer there is. Period. Once it had occurred to people that a Russian Imperial Stout could be made more potent by brewing it in oak barrels, giving it a bourbon-like flavor, why did they waste their time and resources brewing anything less? If Slayer were a beer, they’d be a Russian Imperial Stout brewed in oak barrels. Anything weaker is kind of pointless. The Chophouse’s Bourbon Stout was good. Not the best I’d ever had, but good. It was a little thin, just not quite as dense as it should have been. No fatal flaws, though. It was cask-conditioned, so it was room temperature. My wife got a nut brown ale. It wasn’t bad either, but it wasn’t Slayer in a glass. There was nobody else at the bar, so we started talking to the bartender. People in DC must not talk to their bartenders, because he seemed a little unnerved by it. He warmed up though. We made idle chit-chat for about 20 minutes and left.

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.