Real change in Washington

It is autumn in the District of Columbia and at happy hours across the pubs and bars of the city, life is summarized in two minute long sound bites offered up like the contemptible, hackneyed appetizers at Chili’s. It’s like blogging, except you have to balance the plate of food while holding a drink and shaking hands with dozens of strangers who may or may not be infected with swine flu.

Then you wonder whether, in this most unhealthy of swamp airs conjured by the almighty on the planet earth, you are not infecting others with your especially severe variety of rhinovirus. Only here, in the place where mosquitoes thrive impossibly below frost, where the yellow fever nearly wiped out all of Congress can one who survived the crowded, germ-laden buses, trains and vans of Eastern Europe and South Asia relatively unscathed, be pulled under by the American common cold.

Gleaming white temples of government, lined with antiseptic corridors and vats of complimentary vodka-smelling, germ-killing sluice pose no bulwark to a metropolis of disease and infection. Needing no further alliteration, I recline and let the reader carry on with their own metaphors. Still the reader should remember that in the midst of all this affliction and alliteration, there remains a bill on the floor of Congress regarding our health care.

I am here now, as I thought I would be, working in the depths of a cubicle ocean, under fluorescent heavens in the vast dominion of my nation’s central government. Although I work under the waves of bureaucracy, head swimming under volumes of policies and procedures, I am an outsider; a marooned traveler waiting at the docks for my time to turn Fed. But a contractor!

The suspense of if or where I will embark next is killing me. But this now frigid floodplain of a waiting room, this literate dock along the Anacostia River boasts a wet bar and cafeteria, including the finest burger joint yet, Good Stuff on the Hill.

Let the reader not think I tap my fingers in a stagnant pond. Despite the exasperations of right and left alike, real change here is everywhere.

And I’m here among friends. This is the first new town in all my chronicles where I’ve had friends living in some dear place before I arrived. And more new friends seem to be arriving by the fuselage load every week, hailing from Peace Corps Ukraine, the University of Denver and even further back into the Glossary. Welcome to the state of DC; the one with representation of every state and ethnic group in the country, and of every country and political entity of consequence in the world, but a city with absolutely no representation in Congress.

For the past four years, I did dread arriving here. My downbeat thoughts on the District revolved around various self-aggrandizing douche bags of Georgetown I had come across in my past encounters in the place and the various shadowy, slimy figures slinking around the glass buildings of Arlington, ravenous for corporate and legal opportunity I read about in newspapers and novels.

Also – being removed eight years I had forgotten what weather in America’s northeast really feels like. It’s already inhumanly dreary compared to even the iciest winter mornings in Colorado or Ukraine.

Yet affairs of this place are far better than I imagined. My new neighborhood, Columbia Heights, is full of boisterous, vibrant energy. A dull night is not to be had here. Encroaching gentrification may be spoiling the cultural luster of my row-homed surrounds, but the bars are coming off the windows and doors, locals walk down the street singing with a happy spring in their step. Walls are being painted. New Kenyon square was just inaugurated by ivy-capped Mayor Fenty. A new soccer field behind Harriet Tubman Elementary is regularly at capacity, with dusk-time all weather games occupied in harmonious multicultural revelry. Despite the growing pains, the chilly shocks to a still-acclimating system… …it’s quite a good time to be in the midst of real change in Washington.