I Belong To The City
I’m sitting in a strange Starbucks in a strange city watching strange people in suits and ties and sensible shoes glare impatiently at three beleaguered barristas behind the counter. The line of customers goes out the door. There’s a franticness about the city coffee delivery system that differs in both kind and degree from the bustle of your typical suburban Starbucks: it’s more frantic, certainly, but it’s also possessed of a certain kind of paradoxical languor, as if all of this mayhem is right and proper and thoroughly expected, the way things really ought to be.
Today I start the new job. I’ve made a sort of nonbinding decision to document my transition from working in the sticks to working in the city, but I doubt I’ll be able to follow through. I find it very difficult to write about actual events in my life, partly because I don’t do anything particularly interesting, partly because nothing ever seems real to me until I make it up.
I will, however, do my best to keep my narrative sins to simple embellishment.
Here’s what I’ve noticed so far:
People walk really fast down here. I thought I was a fast walker, but on these choked sidewalks people blow by so quickly that they leave little vacuums in their wake, vortexes of nullity that suck me forward with the same neck-snapping force as a rear collision. Happily, I’ve learned how to use these zones of suck to speed my own progress, allowing myself to be slurped from one to another like a frog jumping between lilipads, and have thus been able to keep up with the natives.
Everyone wears dark wool pea coats, or overcoats, or trenchcoats. Clad as I am in stained but stylish gray flannel, I imagine I must look like a fleck of ash in a particulate cloud of soot billowing quickly down the sidewalk. I will either have to invest in a new jacket or spraypaint certain elements of my wardrobe, and soon.
There are a lot of people on foot. Where I now live and once worked, the only people you find outside of cars are joggers, old Asian couples, packs of restless teenagers, and the criminally insane. I get a lot of looks when I go on walks, ranging from pity to amusement to contempt. I’m not saying there’s no cars down here — the streets are choked with them — but the pedestrians are definitely equal citizens.
The architecture in D.C is dramatically non-cohesive. I mostly come down here to visit the monuments and the museums, which, although certainly not identical, all seem to hew to the same aesthetic. This morning in the space of one block I passed metal and glass monstrosities shoved cheek-by-jowel against sagging brownstone pressed against greek classical. I kind of like it, because the transition from one to another startles my eyes out of their habitual laziness and forces them too look.
Anyway. It’s time to pack up now and join whichever throng is going in the general direction of the new building. Should be interesting.
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