I had hoped it wouldn’t be as hot here in Washington, DC as it was in Atlanta. Sadly, it’s every bit as hot and humid, and walking around outside has become unbearable.
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This is literally the first and so far only frame taken with my new camera in its assembled state. It’s IMG_0001.CR2, which is likely enough for Rob and Shiva to tell that it’s a Canon and, most likely, a 40D.
Roz will note - presumably with delight - that the photo’s handheld, arm’s-length cropping makes it look as though I have only a mustache, which happens to be in the sharpest focus.
Since some last minute meeting plans came apart in San Francisco, I’m headed back to Los Angeles half a day early. This has involved two new experiences for me: flying standby, and secondary screening. Believe it or not, the former is more intimidating to me, because it amplifies the disconnect I feel between what is happening and what I knew I could expect.
I got to San Francisco Airport roughly 14 hours early for my hour-long flight, intending to move it up as early as possible to meet Roz in Los Angeles. The woman on the phone with me last night at the airline assured me that this would be fine, and that there was lots of space on an early flight, and they would work it out for me. Obviously, though, when I asked about the same ‘wide open’ flight this morning, it had been cancelled. Nevertheless, I was issued a standby ticket, then allowed into the security checkpoint, where a very cool guy in airport security indicated that I had been selected for secondary screening by scribbling on a line of SSSSSS’s on my ticket with a pink highlighter.
The most recent story I had heard about secondary screening at an airport was from Roz, who was confronted in a private interview by US Customs about her travel plans when it was revealed that she had no fixed date of return to Canada. No one ever seems to have a story about an easy session at security, but, for the record, here’s mine:
Another cool guy in an official jacket in the screening area asked me where I was headed, looking at the pink highlighter on my ticket.
“L.A.,” I said.
“Through there, please. Close your eyes.”
What?, I thought.
I walked into a small booth which looked like a metal detector with clear plastic doors, closed my eyes suspiciously, and was showered in compressed air from all directions. Then, the doors opened, and that was it.
I was frisked by a pneumatic robot.
I looked back at the screening area before walking forward, through the plastic doors, but no one was even looking at me. The robot had evidently determined that I was not a threat.
My last night in Canada for a couple of weeks, and it’s steadily snowing on Kingston in a lazy, big flake way. If I were a Douglas Coupland creation, I would call it ’snow globe snow,’ half-ironically. As far as I know, though, I am not. It’s pretty. I like the way it feels as it freezes my hair into a snowball and my beard into a melting, freezing, melting facecicle.
Once I’d packed for my trip to California, this evening, I decided I should go for a walk in the snow as a precautionary measure, so that if a conversation fell flat in the next couple of weeks, I would be able to save it by enthusiastically claiming, “You know, back home last week, I had a facecicle!”
Anyway, a couple of blocks from my front door, I happened upon a snow-covered wreck of a Honda Civic from the early nineties. I’ve seen it parked downtown several times in the six months since I sold my own Honda, normally crushed under six or seven sheets of 3/4″ plywood or, in this case, three relatively light folding closet doors. This time, it happened to have roof racks, though I judge by the deep dents in the roof that they’re a fairly recent addition. Needless to say, it’s one of these stubborn wrecks which won’t die, and is most likely driven by someone similar. Its default attitude is to sit bottomed out on broken springs (and, obviously, broken shock absorbers), so it must be one hell of a rough ride.
Now, if there’s one thing that four years of EK Civic ownership has taught me, it’s how modular successful vehicles are. Because I can’t help but learn it, I am pretty sure I could list in exhaustive detail which parts from any 90’s Honda vehicle will fit on any other 90’s Honda vehicle — which instrument clusters, for example, can be swapped directly (a surprisingly long list), which seats bolt right in, and even which engines will slip in with only minor structural changes to the car. Accordingly, I happen to know that while the cooling system, seats, windows, doors, headlights, etc. all differed on this ‘92, it fundamentally shared the struts, lower control arms and most of the bushings with my old Civic, a ‘97.
You might now rightly wonder why I’ve taken such care to establish such a throwaway point from a story about a fine winter’s walk, so I’ll explain.
My Honda came to me as a third hand, squeaky clean granny car from the classifieds. It had an unknown history, but a clean title, and very little touch up paint. It was also nearly as boring and frugal as a Toyota Prius, only without any of the cachet or CD player. Naturally, like any reasonable owner of a Honda Civic, I immediately tried to improve on it with better seats, better stereo and better suspension. Consequently, there has for a couple of years in storage at my apartment building been a box of lightly-used Honda Civic springs and struts.
Obviously, I had been walking by this car for months, too shy to approach an odd job man with an offer as obscure and condescending as a complete replacement suspension for his car. Confronting him with such a gift was out of the question, but it frustrated me that what I perceived as a problem and its solution should be so close together and not eventually meet.
So, this evening, under cover of blizzard, I left a cardboard box of auto parts on the snow-covered hood of a car.
This, in my notion of Canada, is how we are: determined to do good, as we see it. Preferably anonymously.
In order to meet Paula for a cup of tea, yesterday, I had to walk through a blinding snow storm. It wasn’t a wholly unpleasant walk, though, because it did give me an opportunity to reflect that, in under a week’s time, we’ll be in California with Shiva, Roz and Rob, most likely squinting at the sun and (in my case, anyway) complaining about the heat.
We have a plan to convene at a particular, as-yet unstated location in Los Angeles, roughly 3,700 kilometers from home, in the first of what we hope will be a series of such meetings, each driven by a date, a set of coordinates and an ever-increasing degree of absurdity.
There was a time, recently, when such a travel plan would have seemed indescribably exotic to me; I didn’t grow up flying in airplanes. My highly-nuclear family didn’t get farther than 300 kilometers from home, so my perception of travel was that it meant loading all the firewood, life jackets and left mittens you could lay hands on into the eternity of the Volvo’s trunk, buckling into a big, Swedish seat, and emerging from it three hours later with sore knees and the shakes from too much sugar. This was travel when I was seven.
Twenty years later, I fly in airplanes, carry a computer, and am invariably on my way to a series of partially-planned meetings, mindful of the good impressions I have to make and hands I have to shake — I should work on the plane, but I always end up staring out the window.
In the car at age seven, I made believe I could drive, and that we could turn corners and stop at my every whim to look at funny mailboxes and rusting truck chassis. Now, looking down from the airplane, I wonder whether this or that stretch of land is flat enough to land on, and what my reward will be this time for being good and sitting still.
Since I’ve never left the continent, I have certainly spent my share of time in the hotels of North America. I’m now in Atlanta, where I’ve been for about 48 hours, as of this writing, and I’m staying at the Ellis, whose four star rating is seriously conservative (owing, probably, to the fact that it doesn’t have a driveway for limosines). It’s right in the best part of downtown, has actual, wooden furniture, really good fixtures, and the sort of art gallery washroom you associate with photography studios and, well, art galleries. It’s also nearly the cheapest hotel I have ever stayed in, owing most likely to the fact that it’s in downtown Atlanta, and not in New York City.
It may also be owing to the fact that it was home to the most deadly hotel fire in America, in 1946. It was then called the Winecoff Hotel, and 119 people died because it didn’t have fire escapes. Georgia Tech student Arnold Hardy won the Pulitzer prize for his photo of a woman jumping from the burning building, and the fire triggered a national requirement that buildings have fire escapes.
While in DC this week, I stayed in the Hinckley Hilton, where President Ronald Reagan was shot by John Hinckley, Jr., who was attempting to impress Jodi Foster. Immediately after the shooting, Reagan was driven by limosine to George Washington University Hospital, where it was discovered that he had a punctured lung. He went immediately to surgery, and made a full recovery. The shooting happened at the rear entrance to the hotel, which is unchanged — it still looks just the way it did in the news footage.
I didn’t know about all this when I was booking these hotels, and I fear that having written about it here will make it seem as though this is some sort of morbid vacation.
Now that I’m not as annoyed at the internet for deleting my nerdlog, I’m going to try this, again, by detailing my Washington-Atlanta adventure. It’s probably better that I’ve sat on it for a day, in fact, because to report on it yesterday would have been to belabour the disadvantages of flying and Americans.
Anyway, I’m writing this from my hotel in Washington, DC, on the eve of President Bush’s last State of the Union Address.
Between interviews this afternoon, I asked a woman in public relations at the hospital whether, in Washington, politics is the local sports team. She affirmed that it is, certainly, and added that the real politicos follow their favourite players around when they tour, having tailgate cookout parties called, “primaries.”
Regrettably, I’ve totally struck out on food, so far. Lunch yesterday was something from Newark Airport, and Dinner was from a pan-Asian place called Banana Leaves at Connecticut and Florida ave. It wasn’t pan-Asian enough for me — I wanted Phanaeng Kai (#1). They had Pad Thai, so I ordered that and some spring rolls. It was all brutally oily, and not in a fresh-tasting way.
On a related note, I shuffled into the cafeteria this morning at the hospital where I’m working (which, because it’s an embarrasingly well-funded National Center, sells Starbuck’s coffee in the same serve-your own arrangement where most cafeterias serve swill).
While considering which designer roast I wanted to haul me back from the brink of death, I noticed a well-dressed, fairly fit-seeming woman deliberately adding sugar packets, one at a time, to her extra large, half-full cup of tea. I stalled, pretending to be having trouble selecting which lid to put on my cup so that I could see how many she was adding. I counted six, and at least one caught my attention before that. I have a feeling she stopped only because she caught me looking at her. I don’t know what she planned for the other half of unused volume in the cup, but I can only assume it would be filled either by cream or bacon.
The story about the woman is important for two reasons. The first, obviously, is that she either already has, or will soon get diabetes. The second is that she, like everyone else I saw in the waiting rooms of one of the best medical centres in America, was at least middle class. The only old pairs of shoes or work boots were on the service staff. Kids wore new Air Jordans (or their more recent equivalents) and Ugg Boots.
The poor, it seems, don’t need specialists. Now, it’s time for me and this revelation to watch as America’s President tells us what he’ll do with all his light, sweet crude.