Welcome to The District of Catastrophes

I live in DC. DC is complex in ways that other cities with their own complexities are not. A patterned relationship with Renaissance and Ruin, the city’s coveted corner castles wear it plainly: some them are occupied, others are abandoned, each one crestfallen: broken windows, eastern-facing, broken spires topping the turret tips — blackened eyes to see the sun rise, unfit heads for proper crowns.

Such are the characteristics that bespot the narrative of modern DC: people come and people go, changing some and changing none along and against the contentious grains of gentrification, transience, and strongholds. They leave bits along the trail for others to find while reaping other bits to take along with them.

DC is an experiment in totable veneers, a kind of performance art in which its inhabitants orbit one another without colliding, less such an event should prove to increase the standing of one’s network. We suspend disbelief, but perpetuate beliefs, for the preservation of our own orbits, but perhaps to the detriment of our real and authentic selves.

The complexity of the human spirit is otherworldly. I fall in love with the persistence we exude in simply living, and in living with one another. I fall in love with the pain we exude in living through our travails and trespasses, as victims and perpetrators. I throw dinner parties for strangers. They come to my table because they want to be themselves, with others. They come to my table because something is always amiss in DC.

It’s hard to be human: cognitively biased, hypocritical, disdainful; open, accepting, sympathetic, understanding; desiring of love; hungry.

Once on the way to a restaurant, I traded thoughts with my Uber driver on the consequences of technological ubiquity on Gen Z. I love DC. At the restaurant, I watched as four servers intentionally walked around a patron’s coat that had fallen to the floor, multiple times without thinking to replace it on her chair. I hate DC.

“Tell me I’m over the threshold; everything’s gonna be totally OK until oblivion. I still got my fears.“

I am DC.