Rodents are attacking my brain.

I'm dreaming of rats and mice far too much for my liking. Earlier this week, I had a dream in which the wall between our neighbors' house and ours was missing several flights of bricks in the basement and I could see several mice scrambling to get up out of the ditch between the basements. They kept slipping back down into the ditch, but it was only a matter of time...

More disturbing was last night's dream, in which I was walking along a dam made of sticks (much like a beaver dam) and several drowned rats and mice were in the water at the breast of the dam. However, on closer inspection, many of the mice weren't actually dead and were instead beginning to recover and then even worse the rats were starting to recover. I tried to smash one with a shovel, but it got away.

Man I hate rats.

Open casting call for extras in an anti-meth public service spot.

We spent tonight down on ye olde Ocean City pier, or at least the pier end of the boardwalk. Now even as a kid I never really liked the area around the pier, but as an adult I can say I thoroughly despise it. The rides and games are tremendously overpriced ($5 to throw 3 darts at balloons), and then there are the people who hang out down there...

Seriously, tatoos on the neck, half-turned baseball caps, and thin thin facial hair should more or less be enough to land you a bit part in some crime show as "meth addict #2," except there would be so many of your fellow derelicts competing for the role.

And then you have the twelve year old girls wearing more paint than a Van Gogh and looking like they're trying to land the Jodie Foster role in a remake of Taxi Driver. I can only hope that when my daughter reaches that age, we'll have instilled in her a healthy self-respect and ability to sneer at the crowd. Or at least the ability to sneer.

More stories as I get them.

Another day at the beach

So this week I've been enjoying a fine week in the city by the sea, Ocean City, Maryland. You take the good with the bad, of course, so along with the sand, sun, and surf, you put up with, for lack of a better term, the redneck showcase that is OCMD.

Whether it's the multitude of Confederate flag themed t-shirts both in the shops and on the backs of the boardwalkers or the constant parade of jackasses hawking tobacco loogies out of their jacked up pickups, you can't avoid them.

I suppose you could say I'm being elitist, if of course you define anti-racist, anti-sexist attitudes as elitist. Oh well. Seriously, though, the preponderance of racist, sexist merchandise speaks to the market for such trinkets, and that in turn indicates that we've much work to do as a society before we're ready to put the Civil Rights movement behind us, despite what this Supreme Court claims.

Consider the bicycle...

You can love your bicycle, right? I mean, you can really enjoy sitting on that saddle, pumping the pedals, and feeling the air rush by you as you roll you down the street, isnt' that so?

Of course.

So if you love your bike, and have made a relatively substantial investment in the machine so you don't herniate yourself dragging it up and down stairs, chances are someone else loves your bike, although not for the same reasons you do. Others may admire your bike because it represents a small but significant resale value as stolen merchandise.

So if you love your bike, for the love of all you hold dear, don't trust a cable lock. You will end up like this:

Very sad. I spotted this unhappy remnant of better times Friday as I dropped my daughter off at daycare. It was a fairly thick cable lock, but now it's worse than useless. Invest the extra $90 in a strong U-Lock and avoid when possible leaving your bike outside for extended periods of time, especially on poorly lighted/travelled side streets.

We didn't know what we were getting into...

No, this post is not about Iraq, although the headline is applicable, and to tell you the truth, the pathetic excuses coming from the officials are very similar and have their grounding in the same basic truth: when you refuse to listen to criticism, when you brand critics as disloyal or coddling failed regimes, when you push forward without clear ideas about where you're going or how to get there, then you make colossal mistakes.

I am speaking, of course, of Mayor Fenty's takeover of DC schools.

Buried in freebie-rag The Examiner's Friday story about the failure of many DC public schools to make NCLB Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) is the following revealing statement:

But aides to the mayor now say they didn’t realize what they were getting into when they moved to take over the stricken schools and are quietly moving to dampen public expectations for reform.

Huh? All these fools needed to do was ask any involved parent out there and they could have found out the state of DC schools. Did Fenty think he would wave his magic wand, sprinkle pixie dust all over the schools, hire a former school teacher with only three years' experience to run the schools (by the way, it generally takes more experience to become eligible for principal positions, let alone system head positions), and voila! we have school reform?

I actually think he did believe that.

I suppose that instead of studying the state of DC schools, the mayor and his cohorts were out touring other school districts and stealing printed material to pass off as their own. Let's not forget that Deputy Mayor for Education Victor Reinoso couldn't even be bothered to write his own plan for reforming the schools, or that Rhee couldn't substantiate some of the more impressive claims of her resume, not that the city council cared a whole lot.

Critics of the plan who saw the takeover as a done deal still advised Fenty to keep Janey, who remains the only DCPS Superintendent not to run away from the job in the last decade plus. Fenty, you may recall, unceremoniously fired Janey in a midnight phone call.

Now DC parents and students are being told, "Sorry, we weren't actually aware of what we were doing, but you all can suffer because we're pompous assholes. Don't expect much." I am, of course, paraphrasing, as I don't have the mayor's aides' words in front of me.

[I could now launch into a diatribe about the idiocy of bringing business models to education, the ideological failure of libertarian education approaches, the hubris of politicians who believe experience is a liability, etc., but see my last post about the constraints of time...perhaps another day. Additionally, I could include a paragraph about the trustworthiness of the Examiner, which in the very same issue refers to "acclaimed author" David Horowitz...D.Ho is hardly an acclaimed author, unless of course you count ill-researched alarmist right-wing claptrap as worthy of acclaim. If you'd care to see him take yet another verbal beat-down, check here.]

Some information you probably didn't need.

My posts have been falling off lately, and while probably only about two people on this entire planet other than myself have noticed, I feel compelled to offer some reasons.

1. It's gotten busier at work. I've been spending more time at work and as a result I have less disposable time. I'm really hoping this situation is temporary, as I do not appreciate working so hard.

2. More extracurriculars. The summer has been too busy by far. Summer is supposed to be a time of relaxation and recovery, but so far it's been very little of either. Drama at my son's school, illnesses, even a family wedding (yeah, I know, family weddings are supposedly prime blogging fodder, but...I've got nothing) have taken up too much time.

3. Children apparently don't understand, "OK. Time to go to bed." The past few weeks it has been 10 or 10:30, which means I'm falling asleep too and waking up sometime around 1:30 a.m. before dragging myself out of one of the kids' beds and into my own. Not very conducive to that nice evening reflective time (and even productive time) my wife and I used to enjoy.

As a result, I've missed a few things I've wanted to talk about, which I'll list out:

1. Going to see EMERGENCE-See at Arena stage. The show closed last weekend, but it was amazing. Daniel Beaty was high energy and fantastic rolling through character after character as he used the device of a slave ship rising out of the waters near the Statue of Liberty to take on the legacy of slavery on Black experiences in America (experiences plural because one thing Beaty makes clear in his performance is that nothing is singular about Black lives -- or any other lives for that matter).

2. My son's love for Charlie Chaplin films. In the past few weeks we've watched The Kid, Modern Times, and City Lights (thank you, NetFlix). He takes great joy in the physical humor Chaplin brings across and he also asks some interesting questions about the themes. He loves the self-feeding machine in Modern Times...

3. Various and miscellaneous. The usual garbage I write about Dear Leader's latest lies (can you by the way believe Tony Snow? I mean, press secretaries are by definition liars, but I do believe he takes the cake for the ballsiest lying imaginable), the state of education in the District, and other gems.

Logan Circle in transition.

Dinaw Mengestu's novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears uses Logan Circle of the late 1990's as its setting (reviewers who say otherwise probably didn't catch the narrator's mention that old calendars with three years from the mid-1990's still hang in his neglected grocery store (the exact years escape me now, but I think he mentions 1993, 1994, and 1996), which DC residents should realize were pivotal transitional years in Logan Circle's transformation from a run-down affordable neighborhood rife with prostitution to an overpriced hip location that houses one of the busiest Whole Foods stores in the entire chain.

I lived in the Logan Circle area (13th and N) for a year (1994-1995), and I found much familiar about Mengestu's description of the parade of prostitutes and the long line of cars with their solitary drivers looking to make a deal, but a few notes did hit a bit wrong, such as when he placed 12th and New Hampshire only "a block and a half from General Logan's statue." Perhaps he meant 12th and Vermont or 12th and Rhode Island, because 12th and New Hampshire don't ever intersect, and if they did it would be in Columbia Heights, not Logan Circle (12th ends at Euclid Street and New Hampshire is interrupted around 15th Street and doesn't pick up again until 10th Street). This technicality, while jarring for someone familiar with the area, is more an editorial issue than anything else; Mengestu's story is beautifully written and full of significant observations about gentrification and its discontents as well as immigration and its discontents.

The narrator, Sepha Stephanos, is an immigrant from Ethiopia, a refugee from the Red Terror of the late 1970's. While the novel's present is the late 1990's, Stephanos fills in the gaps between his fleeing Ethiopia and his current situation as a small business owner in a gentrifying neighborhood through interspersed recollections. At the age of 19 he finds himself working at a hotel in Washington, DC, and living with his uncle in Silver Spring. After a few years, he opens his grocery store in Logan Circle, but this story is not the stereotypical tale of hardworking immigrant makes good and flourishes in the land of opportunity; to begin with, Stephanos is not exactly hardworking and his neglected store, with out of date merchandise and few customers, is not going to be his for long: behind on his rent, he has been served an eviction notice. He feels himself to be stuck in a rut, and he's confused about his future and not particularly concerned about his present. As for the past, he's neither overwhelmed by it nor free of it.

His two closest friends, Kenneth and Joe are fellow immigrants from Africa, and the three of them spend much time together drinking and playing a game best described as "name the coup," in which they toss out a coup leader's name and the others try to guess the year and the country. It's a sad observation, as Stephanos realizes, that they can play this game forever, because they will never run out of names. Although the three friends met while working at the same downtown hotel (named the Capitol Hotel in the book), their lives have taken different trajectories since: Kenneth is now an engineer working in a small firm, Stephanos is an independent small business owner, and Joe is now waiting tables at one of the more exclusive Washington power dining spots (think Capital Grille or some such den of lobbyists). The interaction among these friends is the highlight of the novel, in part because it allows Mengestu to break up the monolithic "immigrant experience" into several strands and to present competing attitudes toward their home continent and countries.

The title is drawn from Dante, and references abound to the Divine Comedy throughout the book. Some of the references are quite direct, such as Stephanos or Joe quoting directly from Dante, but it's also hard to overlook the fact that Stephanos is 37 years old, pretty close to Dante's narrator, who begins Inferno with the lines, "Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost." Stephanos is indeed lost, not seeming to have any clear attachments to anyone or anything. Additionally, it's not hard to see Logan Circle as one of Dante's circles of Hell, but which one? Lust? Avarice and Prodigality? Fraud?

A second storyline in the novel is Stephanos's relation with a new neighbor, Judith, and her 11 year old daughter, Naomi. Judith, a white professor, moves to Logan Circle to rehabilitate one of the dilapidated mansions that ring the circle, and as such she's a representative of gentrification. Her daughter is obviously biracial, and it turns out that Judith had been married to a Mauritanian professor of economics. Mengestu highlights the relationship between Stephanos and Naomi, who comes to the store after school to hang out and talk with him; they eventually begin a book club of sorts, taking turns reading to each other from The Brothers Karamazov, which is an odd choice for an eleven year old, but they trudge through it nonetheless. The relationship between Stephanos and Judith is less pronounced, leading one to wonder how much of it is actually just wishful thinking on Stephanos's part, and is full of lingering unrealized possibilities that fall apart as class and cultural differences come into play. Judith becomes a target for neighborhood resentment of gentrification, and Stephanos becomes caught in the middle, although it might be more appropriate to describe him as a spectator, like Dante, walking through hell.

Looking down P Street, from Logan Circle toward Dupont Circle.

At one point, in fact in the final afternoon of the novel, Stephanos serves a tourist couple then abandons his store to follow them at a distance as they walk along P Street to Dupont Circle. At Dupont, Stephanos lies down in the grass and stares up at the sky, while his store remains untended and unlocked. Eventually he wanders back toward Logan Circle, but the novel ends with his not returning to the store, instead preserving in his mind a more idealized vision of the store and leaving us with the idea that even if he hasn't found his way forward, his life as a shopkeeper is over.