![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.2){kind=small}
My favorite neighbor growing up was this man we called Mr. Conrad. Mr. Conrad was a natural artist who loved painting on unconventional surfaces like old saw blades and toadstools. He had made a kind of stained glass window in his front door that he had constructed out of old soda bottles. I remember him and his wife as the kindness and most patient people imaginable; we kids would play games in his driveway and even backyard without eliciting even the slightest hint of irritation from the Conrads. Mrs. Conrad would even surprise us by bringing out lemonade on hot summer days as we trespassed on her property.
(I also remember seeing the Joy of Sex for the first time sitting unabashedly on the their living room bookshelf, which was my very first inkling that sex was something that was supposed to be enjoyed—a notion that ran counter to everything I had intimated about the subject to that point.)
I remember one time our family visited Mr. Conrad and we sat on his patio, which wasn’t as much a patio as an open room with a roof floating over the top. He explained that he had built the house himself from a kit he had mail ordered and that it was designed to blur the line between the outside and the inside. He used the word “organic,” a word that seemed both ordinary and alien to me, but as I looked at the house I had a sense of what it meant: it meant that nature was invited inside.
I thought about Mr. Conrad on the second day of our Great Appalachian Weekend, when we decided to visit Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, about 90 minutes north of Cumberland. Despite having grown up two hours away from this masterpiece, I had never visited before.
The festival occurs each year in the Allegany County fairground outside of the western Maryland town of Cumberland. A majority of people who attend camp in tents or RVs on the campground for the whole three days. Yoko and I decided we were mostly interested in testing the waters; besides, we are at the age in which a cozy bed and cable TV appeals to us more than camping in the mud with 5000 other people. This gave us an opportunity to schedule numerous side trips in what became Our Great Appalachian Weekend.
We stopped for a late lunch in Frederick, hoping to have another go at steak a kidney pie at Cafe Anglais. The place was closed so we opted for a rather more American meal of BBQ. I was again impressed by the cuteness of Frederick, with its prosperous main street filled with groovy little shops in tidy brick row houses.
We arrived in Cumberland around 5:00pm on Friday. The contrast to Frederick could not have been any more stark. Driving in, the town looked similar to any number of faded old New England mill towns. Cumberland is one of those towns that makes it hard to decide if old brick is quaint or oppressive. We checked into our hotel, a Holiday Inn built of the cheapest possible extruded concrete. Behind our hotel was a major street with a railroad track running next to it. The tracks obviously once divided the prosperous downtown from its more industrial neighborhoods. (I later read the not surprising statistic that the Cumberland metropolitan area is 305th out of 318 metropolitan areas in per capita income.)
Our hotel was a block away from the Queen City Creamery, a frozen custard shop that sells the eggiest, creamiest frozen custard possible. Totes delish. Take note Philadelphia: this is what frozen custard should be like rather than that glorified DQ they sell on Ridge Avenue.
After our butter fat injection, Yoko asked me what I wanted do. I heard music coming from the center of town a few blocks away and said, "I want to be with the people!" I would almost immediately regretted my desire to mingle with the hoi polloi. Just two blocks away from our hotel was a brick paved pedestrian mall that ran the length of town. A couple of music acts were set up at one block intervals, including a country band whose lead singer was woefully out of tune. A large portion of the audience seemed geriatric. These folks sat inertly in lawn chairs; I sensed that you could have shoved them in front of old episodes of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom and they would have been equally entertained.
As we walked along, the scope of poverty became increasingly apparent. It seemed that almost everyone we passed had either a physical or developmental disability. The young men were all scrawny and tattooed; their expressions seemed almost stereotypically uncomprehending. An inordinate number of people walked with a limp or could not move one of their arms. A few clumps of teenagers lingered along the walk, the boys with patchy blonde facial hair, sullen expressions and Slipknot t-shirts, the girls mostly just looking bored.
In the center of the pedestrian mall we say this cheerful, clean cut blonde boy of about 21 surrounded by a large crowd. As we walked up, he smiled and asked into the microphone: "Anyone here like Johnny Mathis?" He sang in a strong, clear voice--it's clear he loved musical theater--and he gave off the painful vibe of being the sweet, well-behaved gay kid that every adult adores. I whispered to Yoko: "He needs to get the hell out of this town."
I needed a few things so we walked over a strip mall a few blocks away. All of the stores seemed to be dollar stores. We walked into what looked seems to have been a failed K-mart which is now become a sort of super-dollar store. I found refurbished Wrangler blue jeans for $10. They had a rip that had been stitched up but, hey, just ten bucks? We also bought two cheaply made $10 lawn chairs.
We walked back through the dystopian crowd, which reminded me (and this is wholly judgmental and ungenerous of me) of some sort of mutant apocalypse. Back on the fifth floor of the the Holiday Inn, we laid in bed and watched television. (For some reason, we get stock on those horrible prison shows, which perhaps did nothing to dispel the vibe.) After a short while I realized I was hungry. But I let me stomach gurgle. It felt safe and relatively clean inside the room--and I had this paranoid notion that if we bought food in town I would get food poisoning.
But then we ventured out for a surprisingly upscale Italian meal at a placed called Ristorante Ottaviani, an encouraging sign that the town was more diverse, and less dismal, than first contact suggested.
My people are clods.
One thing I never understood is the willingness of Americans to stand in as proxies for the French when it comes to debates about British food. You would think by all the mockery of British food from this side of the ocean that we live in a paradise known for its its gustatory refinement and delicacy. After a childhood shredding my palate on 10,000 servings of reheated pizza and tator tots, however, I have my doubts. I can remember when Sizzler seemed upscale because it had a salad bar and the silverware did not need to be first removed from its plastic wrap.
I think honestly prepared bad food trumps mass produced bad food--which is why, on a whole, I consider American food to be more polluted and befouled than British food. As with everything else in this country, rampant corporatism and consumer infantalization has ruined our food culture. (Though I recognize in the age of Whole Foods and locavore restaurants, plenty of green shoots can be found.) Yes, the British have invented such execrable comestibles as jellied eel and steak and kidney pie--but at least those food are likely to be locally sourced and prepared in mom and pop pubs. If massive conglomerates have taken over the British jellied eel industry, please do not tell me. I don't want to know.
Last Saturday Yoko and I got a rare chance to explore British food. We traveled about an hour north of DC to the very pretty town of Frederick, MD. In a red brick row house in the center of town there is a British we stopped at a placed called Cafe Anglais. We had made reservations for high tea and the owner took as through the kitchen to a garden seating area in the back. I read the menu which explained that the owner was from Lincolnshire. A blurb on the back of the menu noted the owner's "British charm," which I thought was rather dubious marketing. People with genuine charm rarely have to call themselves charming. In person, the owner answered the question: "If Phil Collins has a less vibrant younger brother, what would he be like?"
Charm is overrated anyway. He seemed considerate and thoughtful, which matters to me more and more. Even more importantly, the man showed a definite care when it came to the matter of making crispy, buttery pastries. Talk about charm! He also brought out finger sandwiches, which had been daintily shorn of crust as if prepared by the feckin' queen herself. They were a smashing success in they weren't filled with the sickly, oily mayonnaise that ruins most American sandwiches. I also have to say one more thing: my people know how to properly slather heaps of clotted cream on a fresh scone. The experience made me want to take up gardening or buggery or whatever it is that upper crust Britons do.
Next time? A report on the steak and kidney pie...
I've recently gotten it into my head to try my hand at writing really crappy genre stories. My idea is to write absolute junk merely to amuse myself. I've also realized that reading geniuses like Coatzee can do little to help you write good crap.
I recently read Terry Pratchett's "The Color of Magic," which is also not a good model because Pratchett may be the single most inventive writer I've ever read. But as I was googling for background information I stumbled upon a quite similarly named book that perhaps represents a more instructive model:
Something tells me this book will either be dreadfully entertaining or dreadfully dreadful.
I probably won't start it until May, but expect a very thorough exegesis.
The 50 miles itself went quickly, and then after a restorative shower and nap, it was time for the Dogfish Head Brewpub for a sampling of simply stunning beers. Our friends were dyed-in-the-wool beer snobs who were happy to trade and I came home with a new favorite: World Wide Stout, and 18% abv super-barleyed beer that's aged in a sherry cask and resembles a combination of Belgian stout and port wine.
It was my first trip to Rehobeth, a town that feels like a combination of nicer Jersey shore town and Provincetown. Rehobeth feels much more like DC than Philly; it's just somehow feels more affluent and professional. I have to say after a year of griping that DC lacked Philadelphia's "character," I think I've come to prefer the more upscale orderliness and cleanness of DC to the rougher and grittier charms of Philly. I really like DC a lot now--it's just SO DAMN EXPENSIVE HERE.
This afternoon our program manager came handed out tiny little pins with the words "CREATE THE FUTURE NOW" cast in them. The phrase "create the future now" is a corporate initiative being spearheaded by the Vice-President of Strategic Some Impressive Sounding Bullshit or Another. I already had to sit through a 90 minute webinar and learned that the CTFN strategy boils down to two objectives: make our customers happy and make money for our stockholders.
What it means for me: keep punching that clock.
After he left, I regarded the pin in my hand. My officemate, a quiet Nigerian man who grinds his teeth and each day tells me in extensive detail the story the day's commute, laughed and said: "Aren't you going to put the pin on? Come on, Rob, aren't you a company man?"
I dutifully put on my "create the future now" pin, grabbed my Cthulhu coffee cup(*) and wandered down the hall to make some tea. I passed the offices of the impressively smart developers who work on our floor, who somehow manage to appear to take an interest in their work, even though the work here is mindblowingly segmented. Everyone has their subset of some little piece of some small widget, and everything is managed according to elaborate processes.
I have moved into a (soon-to-be) higher paid role of quality assurance; my job is to make sure that each "artifact" specified by our "software development lifecycle," a highly controlled and very carefully constructed engineering methodology called the Rational Unified Process, is in the right form and in the right location.
Of course, the phrase Rational Unified Process is so portentous you'd think it held the secrets of the universe. Trust me, it does not. What it does do, however, is overwhelm people like me who lucked into an IT job at a time when hundreds of thousands of people each month were losing their jobs with arcane jargon and terminology: product readiness review, requirements traceability matrix, iteration plan, use case models, supplementary business specification, test evaluation summary, etc.
In case you're wondering, this is "model" represents the "high-level design architecture" of the the Rational Unified Process:
Sadly, I can actually explain the significance of this chart.
Needless to say, if you can learn this jargon, you can get jobs. Fifteen months of hanging around the office occasionally editing documents but mostly browsing the web--have I mentioned that in a federal contracting position no one really seems to care if you're busy or not?--has given me the breathing space to learn the things I pretended to know when I interviewed for the job.
I suppose I'm the luckiest bastard in DC but on the other hand... fuccckkkkk.
As a man of indeterminately white origin--though all signs point to Irish/English--these kind of events put me in a bind. So how do I best represent the majesty of my people's food? Kidney pie? Jellied eels? Deep-fried Mars bars?
In order to solve the riddle, I've done some recent Googling. I think I've discovered a dish that promises to be both visually stunning and pungently flavorful: Stargazey Pie.
It is a pie made of god-knows-what (some sources say it includes potatoes) with two whole pilchard fish sticking out of it. According to Wikipedia, it is a delicacy originating in the perfectly named town of Mousehole in Cornwall.
This is just the type of dish to remind my coworkers of the majesty of the British people.
There is invariably a moment shortly after I begin my ride when I ask myself why the hell I'm huffing and puffing through these city when there's a perfectly cozy subway I could be sitting in. These questions are most keen on cold winter days when all I really want to do is curl up and snooze somewhere toasty and warm. Having begun the habit of riding into the city--we'll see if it sticks--I have to say that I am grateful to Yoko for dragging me along on her biking obsession. It's been a really terrific addition to my life. Thanks, Yoko!
Some of the benefits are obvious. Typically at this point in the year the trajectory of my cardiovascular health resembles one of those charts depicting a stock market crash. Down, down, down. This year I have a good three or four months of fresh air in my system, meaning I no longer get winded on my way to see what's in the fridge. I also think the exercise has been good for my mood and sleep (insomnia being the bane of my existence.)
I also have to say, however, that the experience of riding through the city is giving me a new appreciation for Washington, DC. My route cuts through a huge cross-section of the city, from the working class northeast through neighborhoods like Columbia Heights and the U Street Corridor, which are gentrifying faster than you can say "Whole Foods," through the Dupont Circle, one of the nation's trendiest gay neighborhoods--ending up cutting through the section of Pennsylvania Avenue behind the White House that was closed to traffic after 9/11. As I traverse the city, I watch the architecture slowly become more stately until I find myself surprised be travelling through tidy streets lined with handsome brick row houses that remind me of what I like about Boston.
It never gets old biking past the White House. Closed to traffic, I can bike leisurely down the center of Pennsylvania Avenue, dodging only the occasional clump of excited tourists and a few stray federal workers shuffling off to work. Finally, about 50 minutes after I leave out the door, I arrive at 17th and F Street, where I lock up the bike and start my day. This is the view from that corner:
He also signed is book for me, Getting America Back to Work.
