Lost

What does it mean to be a part of the sea of humanity?
John Donne once said "no man is an island," but if one tries hard enough, they CAN become an archipelago. A disconnected yet still somehow tethered grouping of happenstances that makes one feel as if he is touching the mainland...but no. It is just another isolated hoboken, and the way back to the braying herd has become lost.

Notes From An Inauguration Concert

walking downtown...and it was worse than THAT.
so many people, crowds and crowds... and this wasn't even the big shebang...
jumbotrons...and immense mass of people from the Lincoln memorial straight down to the Washington Monument, and thousands more between there and the Capitol...
Even Garth Brooks rocked the District today.
And I hate Garth Brooks.
So many out of towners...everybody in the nationalist uproar. Flags and free drinks. Traffic like you wouldn't believe. Like trying to get across New York City on December 31st.
Amazing and enthralling and Obama even sang along to Brooks' rendition of "American Pie." Here's a guy with some spark to him, not just the same old sagging governors. D.C. flags everywhere, too.
Sheryl Crow ruins the Wailers, thank god Marley wasn't here to see this...
Goold ol' Sheryl, just another thing that other races don't get about white people.
Even with my embittered anti-nationalist tendencies, it's kind of overwhelming to be right there, caught up in the whole show of it. Jumbotrons for blocks, the whole of downtown packed in like sardines, or Chinese chirstians trying to escape the Motherland.
And the vendors! Everywhere, Obama-themed pins, buttons, t-shirts, sweaters, hats, earrings, earrings for gods' sake!, gloves, more t-shirts, posters, god knows what else.
Even in the bitter cold, it wasn't chilly, however. The warmth of a couple thousand-strong crowd seemed to allieveate the wintry grip that the City has been entagled by lately. Not a drop of moisture, mind you: snow is still a pipedream, but the wind rips through even the toughest jackets, which sucks for the many visitors who perhaps misjudged the exactly climes of the area before packing, but for those safely in the throng, its' like a winter miracle.

It bugs me, though. When we first saw people walking towards the Washington Monument...
It looked like people heading towards the Rapture.
Figures drawing into Heaven, Bliss, Oblivion.

His Holy Shadow

It's the Saturday night before the much-ballyhooed inauguration of the 44th president of the United States, Barack Obama, who as Pastor David Manning informs me, is some sort of "mac daddy." Certainly worse epithets have been thrown at the President-Elect by men with much more clout than Dr. Manning (no offense, Doc!) and Obama's certainly embraced the turn-the-other-cheek methodolgy when it comes to these remarks.

It's been a hell of a campaign and a terrible shitstorm before that, and I nary meet a face anymore that isn't relieved that Bush will be gone in only a matter of days.
It seems like the entire world is flocking to D.C. for the event, and I've been told that there will be more port-a-potties set up for this event than have ever been deployed at once before in the history of the United States, a fact which really makes me worry.

So here I am, reading Hunter S. Thompson's absolutely stunning Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, when I got the silly idea to try to keep all of this down. The whole Obama Presidency, from a guy whose only political expertise is simply having grown up in the shadow of the whole thing, living in the city so enshrined as the "Capitol of the free world" that we gloss over the cameras mounted Big Brother-style in the streets and the indigent who will walk its' cold streets tonight in search of shelter. Obama being in office won't change their lives any more than Bush did, or Clinton before him. And I'm sure I'll only see more cameras as the weeks wane on.

Oh, and also: comic books.
Because I say so.