The Planets All Lined Up, so We Went Impressionistic

4/29/2002

This entry is a continuation of the previous entry about my trip to D.C., but then there’s more stuff at the end about the Acela train to Boston.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, D.C., and the big protest weekend. I all ready wrote about Saturday, but now I’ll tell you about Sunday. You can see pictures of some of the things that happened here.

Sunday Dust, Will, Michael, Kati and I awoke rather early in order to help everyone get on the road. The four Tennesseans had to get on home for work and school on Monday. We rode the Washington subway – it’s called the Metro and has big “M” signs instead of “T” signs like the Boston system. The Metro stations are concrete and cavernous, but what really made me admire them was their lack of advertising. Boston T stations are wallpapered with ads for Lemon Coke, gyms, and employment services. The Washington stations are almost sterile in comparison, but I didn’t mind.

We rode the trains out into the countryside of Virginia, where the Tennesseans had parked their car. It was a rainy spring morning, and the south was lush and green. I hadn’t seen countryside in almost a year and I kept exclaiming about how verdant everything was. That was just the right word, verdant, green and growing in fertile soil. It actually freaked me out a little, to see the grass and trees and weeds reaching for the sky, eating the dirt below them so hungrily. In another way, it made me want to take off my clothes and run around in the wet fields with a special somebody for the rest of my life. I haven’t got a special somebody; it’s been a year since that, really, and watching Michael with Kati and Mat with Emily reminded me of that. I asked Kati where I could find myself a beautiful protest boy who would put up with my crazy shit. And Kati said: “They’re at the Taco-Bell drive thru window.” No, I said, that’s where your beautiful protest boy was. I’m still looking for mine. I think he got lost somewhere.

I said goodbye to my friends and rode the train back to DC alone, watching all the flowers pollinate with each other shamelessly, right outside in the open.

Saturday night the planets had lined up, and Sunday afternoon Devon and Erin knocked on my door.

It’s still odd for me, as a writer, to socialize with people who have read a lot of my stuff. Even stranger is the getting to know another author in person yourself. So it’s easy for me to say that hanging out with Devon and Erin was a little awkward at first. Devon and I have read each other’s writings for almost 3 years now and worked with each other on Scribbling Mob for about that long as well. I suppose I started reading Erin’s stuff about the same time I came to Boston, and because I enjoy her style I’ve never stopped.

So. Hm. They knocked on my door, and there we were. I was in this very meditative blissed out state, because the day before I had screamed and screamed and screamed in the streets and then laid around with people who loved me (not that way) all night. Erin was in that place where you go when you’re doing too much and haven’t slept properly but you’re happy. She was pale and drifting, wearing snadals and an oversize shirt. Devon was wrapped in a shawl with moons and stars, had a gleam in her eye (Dust had told me about her eyes, once, on a night when we watched falling stars) and a floppy hat.

It was all a little odd. We went downstairs and I checked out of the hotel while we waited on Mat and Emily. I gave them a power bar and explained valet parking to Devon. Erin had a way of putting me at ease somehow, so I tended to keep her in the corner of my eye. But only because Devon and I kept looking at each other. Like we were physically opposite representations of the female psyche. Or something like that…

Mat and Emily took us to Chinatown for Dim Sum. I watched Devon slowly fall in love with a city. I know what that feels like, and DC is an easy city to fall in love with: it’s easy to navigate, there’s a lot of green space, and none of the buildings are more than 8 stories high. Mat said that was a rule, because nothing in town could be taller than the capitol and the Washington monument.

I watched Erin try to score concert tickets from scalpers. She definitely knew what she was doing.

We decided to go to the Smithsonian, and that’s where the whole day just became…surreal…Mat's pictures are blurry, not just because of style, I think, but because that's the way it really felt.

Did you ever have those dreams where you’re constantly shifting surroundings with a bunch of people you sort of know but really don’t? Like your surroundings and companions are indistinct, sort of blurry, and your surroundings keep changing dramatically? That was what happened next.

We ended up at the national art gallery. The five of us wandered through rooms of modern art: Rothko, Warhol, a room full of mobiles like Picasso paintings hung on strings. We walked through tunnels and gift shops and giant round rooms with black marble columns. We saw a small Da Vinci, painted on both sides, and many statues of John the Baptist as a boy, petulant and angry-thoughtful. We all enjoyed the impressionists and Dutch much more; Van Gogh, Cassat, Morisot. There was too much art, too many beautiful things. Emily and I talked about a naked native girl bathing in a river of red flowers. Were the flowers of menstrual significance, or just decorative populist crap? Erin, in front of a fountain’s end, said: Taxidermy is the opposite of waterfalls. I knew where her head was. I said, I think swimming pools are the opposite of waterfalls. Devon said: Parking lots are the opposite of waterfalls. The three of us stood and looked at the water for a few seconds, and moved on to the rooms where Emily and I would debate the red flowers.

Then everything shifted, and we all drifted apart. Devon and Erin went to the concert, and Mat and Emily saw me to the train station where I boarded the Acela back to Boston. I hope Mat & Emily visit before the summer’s out; I feel certain they will. There’s no telling what random wind will throw Devon, Erin and I back into one another’s path; perhaps I’ll never see them in person again, and we’ll continue to be electronic voices that call one another over the internet, or words on page, telegraphing to each other in print that we’re on the same odd wavelength, that our lives will continue to overlap for some time without ever coming into physical contact ever again. Dust talks so much about Aisling that it’s easy to think that I know her and Devon, but I don’t. We kept staring at the improbability of each other. Your friends tell you stories about faeries, ghosts, and amazons, but you never expect to see these creatures in person, to shake hands with mythical beasts. And then one day the planets line up, and you do. And they’re everything everyone ever told you they’d be. But you have to take a while to get their physical beings inside your space, to line your idea of them with what they really are right up in your head. It’s very disorienting, even when it’s pleasurable.

But once I was on the train, I was back in my own world. The Acela is the super speed train that runs up the eastern seaboard, all the way from DC to Boston. I got to the station at 4:45, got my ticket from an electronic booth, and was in my roomy and comfortable seat about seven minutes later. The train left the station promptly at 5, and I was in Boston by 11:30, in my door at midnight. There were no lines, and no guard who had to frisk me because my underwire made the metal detector go off (again). When I go to NYC, this is definitely how I’ll travel.

Ride the train. The Acela was fun and fast and Logan airport has become its own special kind of hell in the last year – not that flying has been fun for years. But the trains, man – on time and super roomy for tall people. Plus, there’s a café, so no waiting on the drink cart. Yea.