The Zog Blog

I've got a job, hoohaa. I guess. It's not writing headlines for the New York Daily News or NY Post, nor is it covering cops for either of them, but it will do. It's the government and Congressional beat for the American Trucking Associations (nope, the bosses, not the Teamsters, and yes, it's plural). So a week after I sign the contract to sell my house because I can't afford the payments I get a job that would allow me to afford to stay. Karma's a sonuvabitch.

I guess it's for the best. Friends have called the neighborhood "toxic," and while on one hand I want to disagree vehemently, I can see some of the reality. It once was toxic: Junkies and their dealers, winos, thieves, burglars, the occasional gunshots, never a dull moment on 15th Street. Hustlers, schizophrenics, junkies knocking on my door with some new rap that's all the same as the last one. It's not like I'm living in the middle of the city in a vibrant neighborhood full of coffee shops, cafes, poets, saloons, art, literature, and life. Just corner stores (one called "Yoni" what's not to like about that: I'm a half-block up from Yoni, I tell potential visitors). The dope dealers have moved on with a little not-so-subtle help, crime is way down. So now, for all intents and purposes, it's not that different from a suburban bedroom community, except we've got sirens here.

But no more Sunday mornings with coffee and newspaper on the stoop listening to the Gospel music bursting forth from Jesus Is The Way with each crack of the door; no more minor groceries -- bread, milk, etc. -- at either corner of the block; no more entertainment value of the latest laughable hustle. And I'm going to be out of the city where I was born and sometimes raised.

I hated life when my family moved to the suburbs. The lily-whiteness of it all, and yes there were some white picket fences, left me lost in a land I didn't make. Better schools, sure. Crime was a rarity, sure. And no fistfights over bus tokens. But too much naivete, insufferable innocence, spoiled kids, limousine liberalism, and no buzz. Adrenaline was saved for little league baseball and football, not the bus ride home. No menace anywhere, at least not a factor in daily life. People walked the streets without moving their eyes back and forth and thought I was weird because I always watched all around me. I was surrounded by punks.

I have to start getting my financial ducks in a row. Got to do it to get a place to live. Back to punkdom may not be such a bad thing after all.

A take on the weekend, a la country weekly society column.

For some, this weekend was a celebration of Resurrection. For me, it was all ham all the time. Saturday, it was at Lennie's, Sunday it was chez Denise (only a block away from Lennie, but a million miles nonetheless).

We gathered at Lennie's for a Rip Torn cult flick, "Payday" -- if it had been done in black and white it easily would fall into the noir mileu. We gathered with our backs to the fire (It's April, goddammit, why do we need a damned fire!) Anti-hero and B-grade country singer Rip is, how shall we say it, an asshole. Hell, he even boinks a a reluctant groupie in the back seat of a Cadillac while his main squeeze supposedly is catching a nap. He's a drunk, a pill-popper, and he uses people. He's more worried about his dog than he is about his pill-poppin' momma. His is a life on the road, seedy motels, second-rate lounges, surrounded by bewildered psychophants wondering what the hell they are doing with this guy.

It was preceded by Suthun fare: ham, cole slaw and macaroni and cheese (thanks Christina, who also made corn muffins mmmm), and such. Doc Link led off with a discussion of antiheroes (Our country singer was one), vigorously argued by near-Doc Hughes with some sniping pro and con from the others gathered for the soiree. And neither Christina nor Marlis McCollum could figure out how to tie a knot in the stem of a maraschino cherry. They are far too classy for that type of bimbo behavior, but bless 'em for trying.

A good time was had by all.

Sunday, the grey-clad outside is hardly what our mind's eye sees when we say Easter. But I guess all the flowers on the churchladies' hats need water too. I'd be prevaricating if I said the temperature broke 50.

It was ham, green beans, mashed potatoes with a hint of horseradish (mmmmm), and cake and ice cream for Jennifer's earlier natal festivities. Plastic eggs filled with booty were strewn hither and yon, and Doc Link found most of them. It was quite a spread and good conversation, even if we didn't solve all the problems of the world (Bush is still in office, so ...) Jennifer got TWO BRICKS (as in about that size and weight) of nut-riddled fudge for her birthday. What's not to like?

Jim and I got to play Alpha males when Jennifer's truck wouldn't start: "Hand me those jumper cables, Missy, and we'll have you out of this jam in no time .... Vroom Vroom. And she didn't even give up any of the fudge. See if I give her a silver bullet next time.

Monday is the same gray, but that's OK, it's Monday and it sucks anyway. Leftover ham, mac and cheese and such.

Now my riff on ham. It's great. A feast item that makes the best leftovers. You can make sammiches for a cuppla days, then cut scraps off it and mix em up in salad, or mac and cheese or whatever, and then make a hellacious pea or bean soup with the meat-flecked bone. It's best to boil up the bone first, then put the whole pot in the icebox (outside if it's winter). Next day, skim off the fat, take out the bone itself and throw it away. Add onions, garlioc powder, chunks of celery, chopped carrots, a cuppla bay leaves. Then add the peas or beens or lentils. Cook slowly. Eat with a hearty bread, maybe some cheese.

Ham rules. Makes me glad I'm Goyim.

"What fresh hell is this," sayeth the sharp-tongued dame Dorothy Parker. Indeed, Iraq has gone to hell in a handbasket in just three days. A religious zealot leading well-armed guerrillas has put the curse on occupation forces, Americans in particular. And Marines, with little or no sense of humor about people shooting at them, called in air strikes on a mosque filled with Iraqi gunmen. We're going to save this village of we by g-d have to destroy it!

Could the last three days be the Tet Offensive of the Iraqui adventure? By all common-sense measures, South Vietnamese and American forces kicked booty in 1968, but it was the beginning of the end for American involvement; the pictures on the nightly news were too gruesome for the vox populi to take. America may kick booty this time around, too, but the morgue at Dover Air Force Base is going to be busy.

International terror, Gulf of Tonkin, the check is in the mail -- it's just a world built on lies. How long will the memory of 9/11's 3,000 dead last? How much vengeance is needed to balance accounts? And are we going after the evildoers?

OK, enough pissant punditry.

I take Susan to the airport tomorrow morning for her big adventure in Western Samoa. Samoan men have tattoos covering most of their bodies and everyone wears togaesque garb. Apparently there's a strong Mormon presence in the islands, who'd have thunk it? I wonder how the white shirt-clad Mormon missionaries do with their bikes on the beach? Not a bad gig, proselytizing in the South Pacific, when you could get sent to Vladivostok. I wonder if the Jehovah's Witnesses are out there too.

Susan will be gone for two weeks, gallivanting among the bugs and parasitic diseases. And oh yeah, the fish, the fruits and vegetables and all those tattooed dress-wearing men.

Tomorrow the buyer comes through with a home inspector. Good luck, guys and gals, I'll be at the airport. I don't care what they find, I'm not dropping the price. The place works. It could be better, but that's why g-d make contractors.

Enough of this. I can't get down to the nitty gritty so I'll just stop.

M'ahalo

OK, I just signed the contract to sell my house. A yuppie gal is buying it, she's going to rehab it. The house deserves better than I've been able to provide.

But I've got a big pit in my gut. What now? I've got to get the place packed up (ugh) and find a place to live. Settlement is April 26, I'll have until June 25 (rent-free) to move. I'd like to get a place on Greenbelt, but who knows if I'll get lucky? Luck hasn't been on my side lately.

It's a change, hopefully, for the better. This house never resonated with me the way the apartment on G Street did. Sure, G Street was much smaller, but the room I spent much time in faced south and had lots of sunlight. It was a Bohemian hideaway with benefits: I had raspberries and asparagus and tomatoes and lettuce and broccoli and spinach and rhubarb and herbs. I even got a watermelon, a Baby Sweet, out of the yard one year. And so what if it was smaller? "Stuff" expands to fit the space available -- and in my case, to crowd out the space available. The woman who's buying the place mentioned she wanted to put a Dumpster out front to get rid of the ratty rugs and such. I hope she does it soon so I can fill it up with a bunch of my crap.

Whatever happens, Big Guy, in his old age, will have to find new hideaways and range to roam in a new place. Can you teach an old cat new tricks? And as I've learned, the demons in my soul will move with me. The bastards. Anyone want to buy some used demons at a moving sale? I'll let them go real cheap. Maybe I can pitch them into the Dumpster.

I want a functional kitchen. That's important. I'd like to have some sun-drenched yard to plant some vegetables. That's less likely in heavily treed Greenbelt, but I might be able to find some community garden space. A washer/dryer would be nice; it's hard to get psyched to go to a laundromat so dirty clothes fester in piles.

But life goes on, and I hope I can roll with it -- and wind up somewhere with my face turned toward that sun.

wschelt@aol.com

Bathing is good. A good hot shower cleanses the soul -- plus it washes away the funk. Meditation, done right, can wash away the negative waves (Moriarity) and leave a blank slate. But lately I haven't been unable to unfocus on the unfocusedness of my life to get the wash-and-wax of my mind. There's always something going on in the background disrupting the white noise of the mind that's like sticking a hose in one ear and washing all the crap out the other.

If you've ever cleaned a tuba, and I have, you get a good mental picture of what I'm talking about. First, you unscrew and pull out the valves, baring the soul of the horn's tubing. Set them aside in a pan of soapy water. (This sounds semi Martha Stewartish recipesque.) But then, what Martha forgets, get nekkid and take the horn into the shower. Let the warm (not too hot) water rain into the bell, then turn it upside down (Woooo, it's heavy as hell already, now it's filled with water.) and let the water flow back into all the plumbing. Now take your sproingy brush, it looks a bit like a toilet snake but smaller, and run it through the piping to dislodge the crud. Empty. Now, fill again but this time add a little liquid Ivory dish soap. Repeat the brushing but be a bit more thorough this time. Empty it again. Then repeat twice with clear water. Let it dry. Take out all the tuning pipes and wipe them down, run the brush through them. Then slap some vaseline on them, put back in one side at a time and twist it around. Then replace all of them (There's five on my particular horn; one main tuning pipe plus one for each of the four valves.) With a soft non-shedding cloth, clean the valve pistons. Dry them, then give them several drops of valve oil and replace them (I hope you somehow numbered them so the right pistons go back into the right holes. Otherwise, you're in trouble and the horn just won't work. Period. You'll have to play around with them until you get 'em all correct.)

And that "play around with 'em" is what shrinkage is all about. Once you've gotten rid of the crusty junk and dried spit from your soul, you need to relearn how to live, get the valves all working. It hadn't been working before, you just have to putz around, try this, try that. Slap a little Brasso on the bell and shine it up, fine, but it's still nothing until the breath of life can go in one end and around and around and around and come out wafting sonorous. Not just oom-pah, you heathens.

And several months later, do it all again.

I'm back.

Am I getting too damned old? Today is the 36th anniversary (hmm, sounds too celebratory) of Martin Luther King's assassination. He was gunned down on the second-story walkway at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis and a martyr was born. He had been to the mountaintop, he said earlier in the week. His death was a tragedy, as was the aftermath. But maybe even more of a tragedy was this: Some cracker was going to get him anyway. If not James Earl Ray, somebody. And that just plain sucks.

It was a Thursday evening and my parents had gone to the high school to watch the oldest of the next-door neighbor's son's play Arthur in Camelot. The television was on in the background and I heard the bulletin, but just as a break-in to the regular programming, I didn't really notice what they said. I forget what was on. Several minutes later the network broke in again with another bulletin and I heard it: Martin Luther King had been shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.

MLK and Memphis had been in the news that week (Walter Cronkite, of course) because he was down there leading the garbage worker's strike. I was young enough, 11, that I didn't quite grasp the nuances of organized labor and racial issues. I was not yet a year out of DC Public Schools and into the suburbs and I was somewhat befuddled by the way these lily-white uber privileged kids treated the few blacks in the school. I did have sorta an idea that King was a troublemaker because he was always around the police, and trouble followed. It was 1968 and America was deeply troubled.

I scrawled out a note and taped it to the front door so my parents would see it when they came home. By that time King was dead and even though I didn't yet grasp the significance I did know that all the networks and radio stations thought it was big. Maybe that was the first BULLETIN I ever filed; more would come later in my news career, but none so significant.

School let out at 3 the next day, hey it's the weekend. But a pallor of smoke scummed over the city several miles south. The outrage had started.

A short side here: My grandparents lived in the city, on the then-fringes of Capitol Hill. Figuring they might be locked in for the weekend, she trundled down to the corner liquor store (which also had a righteous collection of penny candy, but I digress) and "WAS NEVER SO INSULTED IN MY LIFE!!!" There was a line -- she never went there, so she didn't know what to expect, didn't know that was out of character -- and when she finally got all 5-2 of herself up to the front she asked for a bottle of gin. Martinis aren't a new thing invented by yuppie slackers, ya know.

"Pint or half-pint, lady" the clerk asked.

"Pint or half-pint?" she growled. "What do you think I am, some kind of drunk? I want a fifth!"

And blind-as-a-bat Malvelle Haller who lived down the street from my grandparents and across the street from where I had lived until very recently, was trundling home from the grocery store around the corner, somewhat clueless. The block was dotted with large, strange men. And they weren't too polite to this liberal Yankee woman. Her husband was, at the time, one of the world experts in John Milton up at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and they were an erudite couple. So after getting a little rude treatment, she finally figured out what was happening -- maybe it was the smoke coming from 8th Street across from the Marine Barracks a block-and-a-half away.

"OH GOODIE," she said. "We're going to have a RIOT!"

Fear spread with the smoke. Up in Northeast near the Supreme Court, Thumper (that was his nickname then, but no longer) and his family were packing up to head to their boat, docked between Fort McNair and an electric power station. Good, safe place. Until some recent renovations, there still was a quarter-sized hole in the kitchen floor -- gotta watch where you put the chair leg -- that just happened to get there when Ol' Man Wallace was cleaning one if his .45 semiautomatics. BANG. Oops.

I watched the smoke pillars that afternoon as my home, my city, burned.

My grandparents got out of town and went to their place out in the country -- the home of the bell. LBJ called in the Army and airborne troops were posted at intersections and had sandbagged machine-gun emplacements around the Capitol and the White House. The National Guard -- including several members of the Washington Senators, think Eddie Brinkman for sure -- was patrolling the streets. There was a sniper reported atop the roof of Miller Furniture at 8th and Pennsylvania Avenue Southeast -- my old neighborhood. Suburban cops put up roadblocks on all the main drags leading out of the city. We'll have none of that nonsense out here. Gas stations and liquor stores shut down by order of the mayor.

Fourteenth Street and U Street in Northwest, H Street in Northeast, all were ablaze and looted. Lots of trouble about in the land. Fourteenth Street and U Street have more-than recovered nearly 40 years later and the area is a mecca for its nightclubs, playhouses and restaurants. H Street is still a flotsam and jetsam of retail, bad carry-out places, wig shops and pharmaceutical entrepreneurs just around the corner.

I don't remember how many people were killed in the melee, but I remember several years ago when a construction crew tearing down a building on H Street found the body of a soldier who had gone missing that weekend. What died almost instantly was the faux southern culture of the city. No longer would blacks step aside for whites on the sidewalk. Even the older men who had been held down their entire lives walked with their heads held high.

Maybe it was something that needed to happen.

And an 11-year-old innocent missed the Opening Day baseball game.

It's Sunday with not much sun. Oops, there's a brief glimpse. There it goes, so long. It's as if the weather was reacting to my mood: Do I rain or not? Overcast or not? Chilly or not? And the answer usually is the wrong one. Or not.

There's damned little in today's Washington Post want ads. There's repeats of jobs for which I've already applied. There's entry-level jobs where they want experience in just about every desktop publishing program known to modern man, and they probably wouldn't mind an intimate knowledge of chisel and stone. Gutenberg was the man. Actually, Herr Gutenberg was a goldsmith who adapted his skills to carving movable type. I guess there's a lesson in that for bad job markets; become an entrepreneur and create your own job. What that means is all you faithful readers must send me cash for the right to meander along with me.

I've been perusing the Internet for HUD-foreclosed houses, and it looks like there's one in Brentwood that could be a possibility. The irony! I'm selling to avoid HUD foreclosure and thinking of snapping up someone else's sorrows. There's some others, but they sound as if they are absolute wrecks ("no insurance due to roof, plumbing. wood rot, electrical, blah, blah, sis-boom-bah") Sounds like a convenient fire waiting to happen.

Prices are right in Baltimore, but that's a tad far away from all my pals and I need 'em badly. If I get a job up that way in the next several weeks, and I've applied for some (hahahaha), I would consider the move. Prices are right in the Deanwood section of DC, too, but I'm worn out with urban pioneering and it will be two generations -- if ever -- before things pick up in that section of across the river. It might be the only neighborhood in DC where you can actually bargain down the seller, aside from far Southeast.

The Big Guy is taking advantage of a brief spot of sunlight and he's working on his tan. A cat ought to be the picture in the dictionary next to "lounge." They do it so well, and effortlessly -- as it should be done.

Wolf Blitzer is talking to Howard Dean about the Bush administration. The multi-level irrelevance astounds me. CSPAN radio, the ultimate DC geek activity.

I'd be planting lettuce and spinach in the backyard around now, but why? I'm outa here before I'll get any. Well, not the spinach, maybe some lettuce. It's another thing added to my "Why Bother" list. What happened to all the crocus? Croci? The daffodils and the jonquils are doing their thing, and the lavender and ivy ought to revive fairly soon. Except... except... except it's supposed to be rainy, overcast and cool all this week. April Showers can bite my butt, the plants and I need some of that Vitamin D sunlight. Partly sunny just doesn't do the trick and if we're lucky we might get as high as 61 degrees on Thursday -- when it's supposed to rain all day. Chew it well, muses of meteorology.

I'm cringing in the rain.

wschelt@aol.com

So much of (white and from somewhere else) DC is all about what you do. Are you on The Hill? K Street? Tech stuff? Hello, the perfunctory fake pleasantries and the "So what do you DO?"

Not much, it seems.

I send out 10-12 cover letters/resumes/clips a week. I call around here and there trying to find work. I fret, worry, and fear myself. I drink cold coffee and rarely eat anything with more soul than a sandwich. So that's what I do with my time. Oh yeh, I take care of the Big Guy, sort of.

I thought money would talk, but maybe it doesn't yell loud enough; it's only 6 figures we're talking about here. I went to Greenbelt yesterday, sat down with a real estate agent. The type of Greenbelt house I can afford? It usually goes within 24 hours of hitting the market. You snooze, you lose. And there's the coop thing. I'm barely self-employed, so the coop people fear I might not be able to pay the monthly coop fees. Hell, I'll be able to pay two years in advance, I wonder if that will be good enough to cool their jets?

Maybe I'll just chuck everything and move into a rural Alabama single-wide and wait for the tornado. I've grown quite accustomed to eating dried beans, though Big Guy still has his doubts. But then he has his doubts about everything and glares moral inferiority into everything, including the plaster walls.

Maybe it's time to jump the White House fence. St Elizabeths (Don't get smart with me, it has NO apostrophe.) has some of the best views in town if you overlook the concrete plant and the tank farm. Just could be that I'm crazy, but if America re-elects George Bush this year I'll have plenty of company, but they'll be outside the walls.

I've never been cruel to pets and never burned anything down when I was a kid. Does that mean I'm sane? Even if I've done some "crazy" stuff back in the day? Or even if occasionally I have to scrub away at an anti-social streak? And see "anger management" as more effective, well-directed rage? Stare at blank walls and see all kinds of stuff? Are you sane if you win the argument with your inner voices? Take enough meds to choke a horse and flounder with the side effects, when the side effect of NOT taking them likely would be fatal -- and thinking that would be so much easier in the long run?

"Pets or Meat" the crazed rabbit-selling woman advertises in one of Michael Moore's earlier tomes. Naw, just something soft and furry and cute to stomp on. But that brings me back to "I've never been cruel to pets ..."

My fingers clog-dance across the keyboard with enough force to form lead type back in the day. Does that mean I'm angry? Probably so.

I'm mad as hell and I guess I'll just have to take it some more.