Trans/plant/portation

When I was in college, I went with three of my best friends to a queer student conference at the University of Delaware, three states away from our university. We were happy to meet up with other student activists, but it was arguable that we were more delighted to get a break from the snowy winter of Central New York. Once we were there, reality swept over us; some of the workshops seemed more than a mite problematic. One panel discussion on finding common ground between lesbians and bisexual women failed almost from the outset, with the facilitator asking rather loaded questions, like “So, what do you fear, Patty, about dating Marcy, because she’s bi?” After putting pressure on the facilitator for exaggerating the “danger” of bisexual people in relationships—for surely, it hurts just as much to be dumped for another woman as it would for a man—we walked out of the workshop, trying to figure out how to regroup. And within ten minutes a friend of ours came into the lounge where we were, with tears in his eyes. I asked him what was wrong. He said nothing, he’d just never been in a space before where everyone was gay and black, and he didn’t have to listen to anyone’s racism or homophobia. And realizing how often he’d been ducking between those things, well, now he was frustrated and angry.

In this 2010 midterm election season I’ve been struck by all of the assaults, left and right, that zing at us on a daily basis. In the midst of what feels like a violent, national food fight, I’ve learned to let a lot of things go, mostly for my own sanity. But one issue I don’t think I can dodge anymore is the transphobia within my own beloved LGBT community. Read More…

As a fan of popular culture and politics, I find political rallies intriguing. They’re another instance of storytelling, albeit with an interest of some measurable outcome, the citizen’s vote. Living in DC for more than a decade I learned to eschew most political gatherings—I could have been at an event 24/7 if I’d wanted such a thing—save for the occasional march for a cause, or a major event like an inauguration. But the closest I ever got to the Capitol was to have my engagement photo session on its grounds, and to take a tour with my soon-to-be inlaws who came to town for the wedding. We sat in the public gallery for the House, which was empty at the time, and had to imagine the posturing, bickering, and dealmaking that went on at the bottom of the chamber. Read More…

My premiere gay parade took place in Syracuse, New York, in the early 90s, heralding the theme of Out*Rage*Us, which hopefully is self-explanatory as a message. We were 300 brave-enough-to-march souls: the owner of My Sister’s Words, the feminist bookstore, several students and staff from Syracuse University, a few employees of Carrier air conditioners, a few more from the local Phillips Magnavox factory, and some other locals. We took all morning to ready some jury-rigged floats and signs, and marched down what was likely the shortest parade route I’ve ever seen—four blocks in Syracuse’s downtown. The actual marching was over in minutes. We didn’t even have a chance to get bunched up as paraders, and that never gets avoided. It would be a couple of years before I would march in New York City’s Pride parade and if this was a triumphant moment for a newbie gay, that was like being dropped in the middle of Mecca at pilgrimage time.

Many years later, I moved to DC and grimaced every time I saw the “Capital” Pride signs. It’s Capitol, people, like the place, not like the investment. Whatever, they stick with this egregious error like it’s a tradition. Maybe nobody wants to buy out whoever owns capitolpride.org.

I’ve gone to this DC parade at least a half dozen times since I moved here, and it’s always the same:

• It’s totally over-commercialized. I swear I have heard an MC at the musical stage, next to the actual Capitol building, proclaim, “Welcome to DC Pride, sponsored by Absolut! and Bank of America! Because every LGBT-identifying person needs to be drunk while wielding a checking account. What? This year they even had a “float” for Frito-Lay. Frito-freakin-Lay, people. This “float” was a Frito-Lay delivery truck with some rainbow flags duct-taped to the sides. This is what Susanne refers to as a “phoned in” float, cuz I know that truck just ditched the flags and turned the corner onto Massachusetts to make deliveries to the Giant Foods store like it’d never been throwing bags of Doritos into the streets for free. Damn closeted Frito-Lay truck.
• It’s too hot to cheer. I understand the Stonewall Inn riots happened on June 28, 1969. It was New York City’s finests’ problem that they pissed people off in the heat. And now it’s every queermo’s problem, as we stand around fanning ourselves with moist paper, waiting for an interesting float to pass by, or at least the DC Cowboys. They shoulda done better at the America’s Got Talent show. If they can stay synchronized on a moving truck bed, well, that would throw people like Susan Boyle, I bet. The heat melts us all so quickly, even with the parade starting at 6:30, the best we can do is attempt to remain vertical, although clapping does generate a pithy breeze.
• There are too many straight people. I can tell that DuPont isn’t the gay central it used to be, because I saw a hell of a lot of confused-looking straightniks yesterday, walking across the street, some of them in the middle of say, marching bands. People, that is rude as all get out! Pretend just for this evening that you’re afraid of us, okay? Next thing you know they’ll be pushing their baby strollers through Robert Novak’s funeral procession. I bet that actually happened.
• Too many politicians come a’calling. Every single person running for every single office in a 40-mile radius was in the parade yesterday. The current mayor. The wannabe mayors. The folks running for council. The council-at-large contenders. Sheesh, I just wanted them to go away. Ain’t nobody gonna vote for them just because they showed up for the Big Gay Parade. It’s a Democratic city, you better be gay-friendly! Walking in a parade is the least you can do, especially when your GLBT Affairs Office does nothing for the community (I’m looking at you, Fenty).
• Confusion regarding what kind of parade this was. All of the aforementioned politicians brought with them mardi gras beads, each some kind of color that was supposed to indicate which politician one supported. In this regard, it was coincidental that many of the folks running for office had colors for surnames: Orange, Gray, Brown. But clearly, the most gay-friendly pols were the ones who tossed us rainbow-colored necklaces. Susanne remarked that no way was she going to flash anyone for beads.

We watched, we waited, we saw all manner of church groups trolling for more congregants—excuse me, recruiting, excuse me communicating about their services—and we began wondering where the leather-clad men wearing chaps were all at. It’s not a gay parade without furry butts to avoid seeing.

At some point, our feet began signaling their discomfort, but there was nary a bench or spare spot of curb. The parade was in full tilt, bands of PFLAG people, united Methodists, gay foreign service workers (only in DC’s parade), and the always lively Different Drummers. Very few activist groups, and certainly none of the intentional freaks of the April Fool’s Day Parade in San Francisco graced the asphalt. If conservatives like Rush and Ann Coulter are concerned for the revolutionary potential of this assembly, rest assured they need not be.

The parade was drawing down, and I heard someone near me catch their breath. Up in the sky, a rainbow. A real rainbow.

Apparently God showed up at the event!

Of course her goggles and irises match!

I mostly bit my tongue when 30 inches of snow fell onto our house during the winter of 2009 and after which no plows visited our neighborhood. Scratch that, no plow, as in singular, moved any snow. Susanne and I understood a little bit better why people in this corner of the state and country act like they don’t need government, because hello, government isn’t, or wasn’t, there for us.

Fine, I get it. One doesn’t feel the pulse of the Capitol this far away, which means, one doesn’t have any reason to think that any government worker in the entire 2.6 million-person force actually cares about the average human walking around in this country. That such an idea couldn’t possibly be true doesn’t stop folks from generalizing what the U. S. government is and what it does. So they generalize. And then do it some more.

Sensing a problem here? At some point, our assumptions about government intent and capability take us off the rails entirely as we try to get our 50-train car over the river with no bridge.

Over time, we’ve gone from “alert your police to suspicious behavior” in the wake of 9/11 and the anthrax-mailing assclown to “pass laws so we can carry our guns into church” because apparently we’re now better at policing than the police. Osmosis? Or maybe strapping explosive metal to your thigh infuses your quadriceps with law enforcement knowledge and then that is carried up to your brain so that you know at any given moment who to shoot and who to leave alone. Damn those police academies for keeping us in the dark.

Well, wherever there’s confusion and hysteria, there’s someone looking to make a few bucks. I was ignorant of a lot of this until the other night, while watching a rerun of NCIS, I saw a commercial for a 72-hour disaster response kit. A what? I went back with my DVR. Yes. I’d understood correctly. Flashing images of the Katrina hurricane, the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, and the Chili earthquake, a deep-voiced, threatening voiceover told me that government wasn’t there for any of these people, and I should not sit around waiting for 1. a natural disaster nor 2. the government to bail me out. Bail me out? Wait a New Jersey minute.

Bailout is from seafaring, as in bailing water out of a sinking boat. It’s taken on a negative connotation because it’s used when the Feds have given money to a struggling company or industry. And the negativity has branched out to the struggling entity. So don’t call me a bailoutee in waiting! I haven’t asked for anything! I’m . . . I’m . . . I’m buying this nonsense, aren’t I? Of course it’s fine to expect that at least the national guard will roll in if half of Walla Walla blows away in a dust storm, leaving only Walla. That’s not a sign of weakness, that’s a sign that I’m an individual and not an institution, that’s all. Sheesh, for a minute there. . . well, I don’t want to think about it.

Okay, so this ad is comparing the non-Katrina response, the Haiti and Chilean earthquakes and saying they’re equally devastating, and suggesting the next one is around the corner and buying their $100 worth of plastic-wrapped product will what, be like having soldiers bringing me clean drinking water and tending to my wounds? Will it pull me out from a crumbled building? Is it like a Roomba on steroids with self-extending grappling hook? I had to laugh at the ludicrousness of this. I laughed, and yet my chuckles were laced with nervousness. Someone will buy this. Of course many someones will buy it. We bought Pet Rocks. We bought Snuggies. We bought ShamWOW!s. We’re Americans, darn it! We buy what we feel like buying! If I’m not spending money on insurance against Armageddon, I’m not a patriot!

I went online to see what was in these kits, anyway. And I was astonished to see how many different Web sites are hawking this schlock. Go on. Google it. 72 disaster kit, that’s what I typed. Open another tab and check it out, I’ll wait.

See? Holy preparedness, Robin! There is a lot of selling of crappy stuff! Light sticks, freeze-dried food, first aid kits, water pouches—I’m sorry, pouches? What’s wrong with water in bottles? Does it have to be so militaristic? I’d rather just put a case of Evian in the basement, okay?

I can buy pre-packaged kits or I can learn how to make my own from one of what, a dozen or so Web sites that have painstakingly put such content together. I’ll be good for 72 hours!

Doing the math, I see that that’s three days. Three days, really? Seriously? And then what? The earthquake ravaged buildings are renovated? The landslides are packed back onto the mountain? The flood waters recede like the hot air at the end of a car wash?

Oh. The government comes into town. The do-nothing, help-nobody government. We want to condescend enough to suggest we’ll need to sort out ourselves for up to three days, but then, we want our government to come to our rescue.

Let me know when any of this starts making sense. Maybe I’ll strap a banana to my thigh and walk into a church with it. That seems less kooky.

Reflecting on all of the intersections within Walla Walla, I can’t recall a single NO LEFT TURN sign. Not by the Bi Mart, south side of town. Not at any point on Isaacs Road, which is a straight shot east into the Blue Mountains and which is littered with fast food shacks, auto parts stores, car washes, and oodles of plain gray parking lots. Not in the small downtown, even though every other city I’ve tromped through has boasted at least one stubbornly red sign.

It’s a small thing, I know, but it takes on a bit more meaning once one ventures into a large city with any kind of traffic issue. One finds oneself in a strange place and on the wrong street, and once the first battle with orientation is settled, realizes that the quickest way back to the tiny quadrant one does know is forbade by the local powers in charge. And then one is faced with a decision: break the law and feign innocence, or try to find another way over to the relief zone.

In DC, drivers could find themselves hitting a series of NO LEFT TURN signs, their frustration building quickly as they creep along, stuck behind other tourists, bicycle messengers, and a lot of men in suits with big briefcases.  And here the visitors thought government was trying to go paper-free. Little do they know that those are more likely the private sector guys. There are 50,000 practicing attorneys in Washington, DC.

In DC, defensive driving means watching out for all the Lexus owners texting while driving, the cars with fake paper license plates in the rear windows that add the important note, “STOLEN,” and the truly clueless in RVs. Who the hell RVs to a major city? Sometimes I would stand on a corner and laugh while they circled the block, trying to find parking. I wasn’t trying to be mean, it was just such a great pastime. Twice in DC my car was hit while I was idling at a red light: once from a guy who slid into me on black ice, and once when a driver in front of me backed up, trying to make room for a turning tour bus. These things just don’t happen in Wallyworld.

In Walla Walla, defensive driving means looking out for small children who’ve broken free of a parent’s grasp, slowing down for momma and baby ducks, and watching the red light runners, which I’ll get to later. These things tend not to happen in DC, although there is a street over by the army hospital with a goose crossing sign, and the two days I was on that road, I did in fact have to stop for crossing geese. It was almost as if they waited for my car just so they could cross, which I’ll note is the logic most pedestrians in the city, use too.

I’ve been made aware of the split between this corner of the United States and the world inside the Beltway that ensnares everything in the District. It has come in the form of massive snowfall. And it has come in the total lack of snowplowing afterward. It’s shown its face in the 5-minutes-to-anywhere nature of the city confines, a distinct difference from DC, in which most things are at least 35 minutes away, no matter how one travels. 2,800 miles away from the Capitol’s epicenter, how government really functions is invisible to people, who have en masse decided to decide that everyone in government has their worst interests at heart. And I try to explain as gently as possible that the government is just like every other office they’ve worked in, with all of those personalities working against and with each other for 8 hours a day.

These discrepancies remind me that we fear what we do not know. I’m not a subscriber to the “if we educate, we’ll have world peace,” because I’m far too cynical to believe that bigotry, oppression, and anger are only the result of ignorance. People have stakes. People earnestly believe their group (read: race, nation, state) has stakes that are threatened by some of other group. I could no sooner “educate” Rush Limbaugh and inspire him to be a bleeding heart liberal than I could teach a worm to fly, and I say this feeling pretty certain that even Rush doesn’t believe half the crap he spews out into his microphone. But Rush has a stake in his persona, and like everything else, if he’s not being increasingly conservative, he risks becoming irrelevant. And so he spews.

In the same way, people dig their heels in about what they think government represents, who they think it represents. It’s been a long time since I heard anyone say they feel personally supported by the Federal government, even as they drive on interstate highways, take their kids to the public library, call 911 when their kitchen’s on fire, or go to their child’s high school graduation. Instead when they make the pilgrimage to DC they get caught with one-way streets and NO LEFT TURN signs and it signals to them that they’re unwanted, when all it really means is there are way too many cars on the roads in the city and someone is trying something to make the system keep working.

Walla Walla is a place where people run red lights all the time. I was astonished when I saw the first runner, because I’d been conditioned out of it from all the ticketing cameras that have grown into the East Coast traffic system like kudzu, and because I’m such a law-abider, my exception that of speeding. I never saw a speed limit that 7 more miles an hour didn’t make better. But going through a red light, to me, was just jaw-dropping, in the same way that any minimally suicidal tendency is, like intentionally gaining 500 pounds, or BASE jumping.

But maybe it says something about the garden variety Walla Wallan. As if the rules don’t apply out here. Or that my neighbors and fellow car drivers won’t mind. It’s just one light. It’s just today. It’s just that it’s 3AM. It’s just that I see other people do it all the time.

In this kind of context, what else can the government represent but an angry nanny, an everything-is-rules custodian who seeks to end pleasure and red light running, out of spite? I shouldn’t be surprised at the level of distrust, I suppose.

I wonder what 20 months in Walla Walla has done to change my perspective, what new kinds of things I’ll see as we drive back across the country, and what I’ll miss that I wouldn’t have before. I am the guy who wants to discover the hidden world in the sidewalk crack, a focus on fascination that I’ve carried with me since I was 3. I want to start seeing where we come together because I am damn tired of seeing how far apart we are. I want people in DC and Walla Walla to know that they are closer than they think: in both towns I was a regular customer of several businesses, laughing with them about inanity. Both towns boast big, tree-covered parks. Both towns struggle with caring for their elderly, face cutbacks to their education budget, struggle with aging and fading infrastructure. We could learn a lot from each other.

I am not looking forward to being told I can’t make a left turn. But I won’t blame anybody about it, either. I’ll try to take the laissez faire attitude of the Northwest to the Type A personality of DC. I’m a peace ambassador.

Crazy right-wingers have to ask themselves: bang the birther drum or change rules to let guvenator run for prez. decisions, decisions.

Clearly, Arizona and Virginia are in a thumb-wrestling match for Biggest Assclown State.

Sometimes I just have to throw up my hands and ask why. Today’s pats of butter: http://wp.me/pQHmS-DE

@gwenners but he was an episcopalian minister! they’re out of their gourd to call him evil.

Sherman Alexie makes a joke about pooping his pants and everyone laughs. I make a joke and get called Mr. TMI. Damn you, Sherman Alexie!

cheesy grits, wilted spinach with garlic, and pan-seared pork chops; I’d say we’re over the stomach flu around here.

@snarkysmachine that’s why I own a Cup-a-cake. www.cupacake.com/

@snarkysmachine mmm, cupcakes.

damn, if Sandra Bullock can hide a black baby adoption for 4 months, maybe they need her in Wash, DC, to tell them how to kill leaks.

I grew up in a place blandly referred to as “Central New Jersey,” an area of only a few counties, caught between aging farmland and boomer-driven suburbia, outposts that crept away from the two behemoth cities, matching the invisible demarcation of property values affected by those urban centers. Lower prices here, put up a development. Lower prices further away, put up a development there. So in the late 1960s, that line was Mercer County, home to the state capitol and a rather well known Ivy League university. I went to elementary school in that town, the once was national headquarters for politicians, before they moved it to its final resting place of Washington, DC.

The nuns taught me to love the sinner and hate the sin, to separate bad behavior from the innate goodness in people, and even though these messages were fraught with many contradictions and a near-constant failure of memory on the part of their congregants, I tried to buy the principles. I asked many questions, and got a lot of non-answers, such as:

“What do you mean there’s always been God? How could there be no beginning?” This was met with a “It is a divine mystery, my child. You must take it on faith.”

“How can there be three beings but only one being?”

“It is a divine mystery, my child. You must take it on faith.”

And on, and on. There was that point my senior year in high school during which I finally figured out the grand logic, much to the chagrin of my erudite instructor, but for many years, I attempted to content myself in the not knowing.

But I did get older, and I expected better answers than I’d received from lazy-minded or otherwise resistant grownups. I could tell that there were competing schools of thought on all kinds of philosophies, although I didn’t really know how to boil them down.

As I approached 18, I asked my Mom how she voted, generally speaking. She looked at me with a curious expression, somewhere between disheartened and cautious, as if she were talking about a close friend who had The Consumption.

“We vote Republican in this house,” she told me, a little above a whisper. Maybe it was a stage whisper, though that would have been silly as we were the only two home at the time.

“Why is that,” I asked, not really surprised at her answer.

It was, she explained, because my father was a small business owner, and he steadfastly believed that the GOP was more small business friendly. And this may have been true at the time. But what interests me is that I didn’t, in all my years of grooming to be a conservative, feel a burning hatred in my heart for the Democratic Party, even if I may have laughed at a liberals joke here and there. But hey, there were a lot of inappropriate jokes in the 1980s, many revolving around who blew up where and how in the Challenger accident.

I made it to college, spending the first few weeks either not believing my good fortune, or decrying my random roommate assignment, a privileged kid who actually told my mother, to her face, on Moving In Day that Syracuse had been their choice because of its reputation as a party school. I sought the refuge of new friends, minimizing the time in my own dorm room.

One of those friends was in a new club called the Campus Crusade for Christ. She had convinced me that they were a better way of understanding God and spirituality, that there was a fantastic benefit of not having to find meaning through the priest-God conduit. I figured I would check it out.

It was not for me. It was really, really not for me. Now I’d gone from getting no answers to having answers all over the place—explanations for everything under the sun. If some question didn’t have a ready made answer, it was only for the fact that nobody had thought of the question yet. All of these answers were supposed to arm us when we went out as missionaries to convert other people to the Walk with Christ. I was beyond uncomfortable. I pulled away from the group.

One of the things that troubled me the most was that even though I was reading the Bible more than ever before, we as a group were listening to it less and less, and giving more credence to the CCC leader. And it wasn’t long before he started delving into politics. Which politicians we should vote for, which party stances for righteous, and which were the devil’s own design.

There was no more split between behavior and personhood. People themselves were good or evil, saved or under the control of satan. For me, this had gone off the rails.

But here we are, a score of years later, and many, many people buy these messages part and parcel. I am left scratching my head. Is the anti-regulation push good for small business? Not if it means the banks collapse under their own greed and the credit market tightens past the extreme most business owners can handle. But we don’t put those things together, we limit any cause and effect conversation to what bad people are doing to us. The illegals. The gay agenda. The terrorist Muslims. We stick awful names on communities to make them seem even more hell-bent on the destruction of society, even though the vast majority of undocumented workers have been here for decades and in jobs that other people won’t take, even though people under the GLBT umbrella can’t agree on what movies to list in their film festivals, much less have an actual agenda, and even though the people committing terrorist acts aren’t actually Muslims, but opportunists who are ripping off a few passages from the Quran. Let’s paint the world in hate-colored glasses, and we can see whatever we want.

There’s a Tea Party group in Walla Walla now, and they have an earnest, if not grammatically challenged Web page, filled with lots of anger-inspiring invective, as invective is designed to do. The contradictions are many, but this one is the best:

The government is distant and does not care about you.

The government is too big and too into your business.

They also spend a lot of screen space on rhetorically assuming that because the US Constitution says we have inalienable rights, that this means we have the right to “own the fruits of our individual labors.” This vague, intentionally archaic language could mean, really, any of the following:

We get to keep the Ford trucks we produce as car assembly line workers. No wonder the Big 3 are in trouble.

We own the children we have birthed ourselves, into time eternal. This almost seems pro-choice to me.

If we are landscapers, we now own the lawns we’ve groomed and the plants on them. It’s like 40 acres and a mule, all over again.

I could go on, but I’d rather see more examples in the comments.

Here’s the thing: if none of my income went to taxes, I would have no government, right? Unless they’re thinking about taxing businesses more. But I don’t suppose that’s the case. I’d just have to hope that if I have a medical emergency, I won’t need an ambulance, that if my house catches fire, I can put it out with my own hand-held extinguisher. Or that when my kid wants to go to college, some bank will give her a loan, after all those years of home schooling, since there’s no more public education. Maybe when my mother loses all of her marbles we’ll just drive her to downtown Omaha and tell her to hope for the best.

I think the political landscape has gone off the rails, or if it hasn’t, that it sure looks like it has, and I wish my Dad’s brand of conservatism were back. At least he didn’t drive around with bumperstickers on his car saying “Up Yours, Obama.”

After a full week of overcast skies, Susanne and I decided to venture away from the Walla Walla Valley, hoping that we could pierce the cloud layer and see the sun. Now then, there are three ways out of the city, in basically a T formation: Highway 12 runs east-west at the north of town, and Highway 125 runs due south, toward Oregon. We headed east toward the little village of Waitsburg, remembering that it has a cute, pioneer town quality and gives one a chance to take in the Blue Moutains, which were considerably more snow-capped after this weekend than before. The drive was nice enough, although we didn’t escape the clouds. Given that the east coast was caught up in yet another heavy snowfall, neither one of us was too grouchy about our own weather, depressing and blase as it was.

We were curious to see a small crowd of people waving at us as we came into town—”city center” would be an overstatement, as the downtown is two blocks long and one street wide. I smiled, thinking they looked happy and small-towny, until I saw the signs they were waving. “She regrets her abortion,” one declared. I started looking for an arrow to one of the women, a la the “I’m With Stupid” t-shirts that were popular among the geek set 20 years ago, but it did dawn on me that they meant some proverbial, collective “she.”

I was not amused. I’m coming to your town, presumably to spend dollars in one of the 9 stores you house and you’re going to alienate me with pictures of aborted fetuses? Not such a smooth move, Waitsburg.

I contemplated sharing my disappointment with the throng-ette. Susanne knew where my brain was going, and helped me ascertain that expressing my opinion would probably not make the situation any better. I turned, blinker on, and drove into downtown, because I am a good liberal who follows proper traffic laws. So there, anti-choice, sign-carrying people!

We moseyed along the main street, stopping in to a curious antique store that had old Coca-Cola bottles, snowshoes, and kitchen ware, as if someone cleaned out his grandmother’s house and opened up a store with everything he’d found, minus the linoleum, but not the kitchen sink, which sat in a corner in the back room. I suppose any copper pipe he’d stripped had already sold, because that stuff goes fast.

We happened along a creek with a Lewis & Clark sculpture in front of it. It clearly was modeled after the countless “Lewis & Clark” highway markers that dot the roadways out here, in the still-wild west. My question erupted out of my brain and through my mouth.

“I always wonder which one is which.”

As we passed the sign, I turned and saw the back, as well as my answer:

Question answered.

Finishing our short walk, still out of the sun’s light, we ambled back to the car and drove out of town. I flipped off the line of activists, figuring it would give them renewed energy to hold their signs proudly in the rain.

During the last mayoral election cycle in Washington, DC, I couldn’t walk ten feet before some campaigner would come up and accost me. Shopping at Eastern Market. Walking down H Street in Northeast to catch a bus. Drinking coffee at the tax-thieving, now-defunct Murky Coffee on 7th Street SE. It was at this last location that one of the candidates herself, Linda Cropp, came up to me to stump, one-on-one.

“I’m here today because I want to tell people that this is everyone’s city,” she said, a bright red baseball cap sporting her name perched lightly on her head, presumably so as not to mess her hair too much.

I wasn’t sure what she meant by everyone’s city. Back in 2006, home prices were skyrocketing and “everyone” was getting priced out of living in the expensive District.

“It’s a great time to live in DC,” she went on, explaining that city residents have a median income of $82,000.

“Actually,” I said, “that’s the median income for the DC metropolitan area, including Montgomery County in Maryland and Fairfax County in Virginia. The DC-only median income is under $30,000. And I disagree with your vote on the ballpark last year—that thing is going to cost us taxpayers way more than  $800 million.” I smiled, like tacking on a gold star to the end of a painful root canal.

She smiled thinly, thanked me for my time, and moved on. But I wondered about the catering I’d just had. Cropp, an African-American woman from Georgia, many years in DC politics, and she was reading me as another white gentrifier of a historically black city. And how could I argue with that? Wasn’t I white (as per the US Census), and wasn’t I making my home in a refurbished (well, kind of) 1930’s-era apartment building? Why shouldn’t she stump to my perceived interests?

Except they weren’t my interests, even as I called 13th Street NE my home. And I’d overheard plenty of entitled conversations from new DCists who thought that their mere presence was bettering the city around them in something like a 5-block radius. “I just got a raise, I’m so glad DC will have a quarter of it in taxes,” “This is my city now,” and other comments not worthy of the time it takes to type them.

Watching the racial demographics of the city shift, other conflicts began to rise up in the late Williams-era/early Fenty years. Let’s put microphones in “residential” areas so police can pinpoint where gun shots have been fired. Let’s crack down on kids lighting fireworks on the 4th of July—hoodlums! Let’s crack down on prostitutes, because Giulliani had the right idea. Let’s reassess homes, because a lot of people seem to own their houses outright and they shouldn’t get to skirt their contributions to the city.

Fifteen years ago the city was 70 percent African-American. Today it is barely above 50 percent. Twenty thousand people of color left the city last year, and approximately 40,000 white people moved in. With them have come the Harris Teeter groceries, a Target store, loads more coffee houses (still no Pacific Northwest-style drive through espressos, though), and plenty more overpriced little bistros and eateries. During our vacation last week we shared one salad and each had a tea and a small dessert. $45, no kidding. I’d plunked money down like that before, but my salary was strong, so I didn’t flinch too much at it, even as a nagging doubt that I was getting ripped off could be heard in the recesses of my retail-addled brain.

Is this the city for everyone? Is this anyone’s vision? The gay strip bars of Southeast are gone, having been displaced for the brand-new, immediately awful Washington Nationals baseball team. Loads of condo building are still in some state of erection, all around the stadium. Where they’ve knocked down historic row houses they’re now putting up old-looking, new townhomes, a Rockwell version of DC. The people who staff services in the city—the hotel housekeepers, the baristas, the employees at that gleaming Harris Teeter—can’t afford to live in the city anymore, so they find 60s-era apartments in neighboring counties and ride into town, where they used to live. Crosstown buses aren’t as crowded anymore, with the white folk driving in carpools or biking. Whatever it takes to feel Grrrreat! about taking up city space.

If there were ever a bill that expressed the dire financial condition of a DC and the revised alignment of its politic, it’s got to be the nickel surcharge for all plastic and paper bags that went into effect this year. Doesn’t everyone have three or four Whole Foods canvas bags for their groceries? They’re only $10 each! Don’t we all love our planet enough to get rid of plastic bags? As for paper, well, you’re too far gone if you like those, or you’re trying to hide your 40-ounce malt. Those people should have to pay more, anyway.

Hey, DC’s H Street commission banned buying one 40-ounce a few years ago, even as they didn’t ban buying a six-pack of microbrew hefeweisen. I could see where things were going even then. Interest-only mortgages were the hot item, and the new owners didn’t like seeing drunk guys in Carhart jackets standing around on the sidewalks. It ruined their views of the other new apartment buildings. I’d moved into the neighborhood myself, a bit north of Lincoln Park, a couple blocks south of the H Street corridor.

“It’s up and coming,” one lady on the sidewalk told me as I was moving in. She was standing next to a woodpile. I found this odd because it was early September.

“Is it? That’s nice,” I said, sweating. September in DC is akin to the fourth circle of Hell, for those of you who have never experienced either. I can’t really recommend it.

I asked her why she had so much hardwood on her front lawn. Her brown brick house looked tiny compared to the apartment building that abetted it.

She explained that she’d thought she was paying for it to be stacked next to her house, but that the deliverymen had just dumped it and left. So I stacked the cord for her, and split several—okay many—of the bigger logs for her. Unbeknown to me, all the little old ladies of the street watched me, probably with one eyebrow raised in question as to my integrity. I passed the test, and I noticed that they—I was told to refer to them as old-timers for their age and longevity on the block—would always give me a head nod or hello when I saw them. I wasn’t sure I was very different from any other neighborhood newbie, but I tried to be respectful and appreciative of the history they had here. I was probably going to be just a blip in the time span of this place, and as it turned out, 5 years does equate to blip status. When I needed help a few months later getting a new mattress into my 3rd floor walkup, one of the old timers sent her grandson out to help me. He did look a little perturbed at first, especially upon seeing the narrow stairwells, but he and I got the mattress to the top and I gave him 10 bucks for his trouble. And two brownies, one of which I told him to give to his grandmother.

I miss having a neighborhood. I’m certain parts of Walla Walla have them, with their little give-and-take agreements: your kid can play on my lawn, do you mind if I park my car here this week, how about going into building a fence with me. But living right next to the campus recycling center, and a student building, we are not primed for friendly neighbors. So I wonder what has happened to 12th and 13th Streets NE, where I lived by myself and then with Susanne. I wonder who lives in my old apartments, and if they’re as tentative about the space they occupy as I was. I wonder when it will be when I have real neighbors again. And I wonder what is happening to DC, and if it is losing itself as it loses the people who have held its history for so long.

Back at the beginning of the year, I posted 5 predictions for 2009. I’ll just note that I was unequivocally correct on numbers 1 and 5. Number 4 is kind of right, in that I think Mrs. Obama has been putting herself out there as a champion for children, especially children of color and in the working class. She’s not sticking to uncontroversial events like book expos on the Mall (much as I appreciated having the chance to get my Sandman #1 signed by Neil Gaiman himself, so thank you, Laura). I still think Jon Stewart might leave the Daily Show, since there are other big gaps in the late night time slots now—can anyone argue that 5 nights of Jay Leno at 10 o’clock aren’t 5 nights too many? As for number 3, well, I think the health care bill in Congress is testimony to the forces against abortion, but I wouldn’t call them quiet, and I wouldn’t say they rise—yet—to the level of vitriol we’ve seen against getting gay married.

What I absolutely failed to understand last January was how ridiculously insane and ludicrous everything would get. It was one thing to blame sub-prime borrowers for the housing market failure. Who doesn’t like to pick on people with bad credit, after all? But really, death panels? “You lie!” shouted in the chamber during the freaking State of the Nation address? The entire Fox News staff schlocking gold as an investment for the masses? Hannity’s time-lapse magic to exaggerate the tea baggers’ crowds at a rally in DC? And hell, the Tea Baggers? I couldn’t dream this crap up!

Or could I? Okay, I’ll take a stab at it. I’ll try and springboard off of some of the more outlandish headlines from 2009. Feel free to chime in with your own flash forwarding stories for next year.

1. Glenn Beck, Tom O’Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh officially begin a new third political party, called the Gold Fox Party getting Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney to agree to run again in 2012. All kinds of donations come in, most in the form of gold, which drives the Federal Election Commission nuts as the price of gold keeps climbing and putting donors over the maximum donation limit. After 6 months, the party collapses when Glenn and Rush are discovered receiving kickbacks and prescription painkillers from a laid-off worker of ACORN.

2. Sarah Palin’s own political career is finally dismantled when the public learns that Trig is the offspring of her and Levi Johnson, Bristol’s now-ex-boyfriend.

3. The US media goes crazy with tons of stories about the new “green economy,” even though the GDP is only up 0.4 percent and there’s only one new factory for producing solar panels that because of NAFTA, has opened in Mexico. The Mexican government is dismayed to find out that all of the physical barriers we’ve erected in the last 5 years aren’t any good at keeping illegal US citizens out of Mexico.

4. An independent study comes out revealing that 72.4 percent of people previously detained at Gitmo know nothing about al Qaeda’s operations from 2001, much less anything that could help counter-terrorism officials now. They have, however, secretly formed a support group with tips on making their prison lives better, including  how to make a lovely bisque from ephemera, though they can’t find any in the middle of Illinois. They turn to Martha Stewart for advice on working with dandelion greens.

5. The CEOs of AIG, JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers, and Countrywide Mortgage take their latest year salaries, pool them together, and buy an island in the Carribean, setting up a new government with so many tax shelters for the rich that they make a fortune in taking other people’s money at their new banks. They also send out a message to Roman Polanski that he should find a way to get out of Switzerland and come to Moneytopia so that he can direct a film about their story. It wins 8 Golden Globes and 2 Academy Awards and is hailed by critics as an “opus of epochal storytelling, delivered by the master storyteller himself.”