Our American Neighborhood

Rain is pouring down outside the window right now and I find it more annoying than soothing. It sounds more like God or Mother Nature or whatever is taking a piss on the world. That's what winter is like.

There's a narrow alleyway between this house and the next with about a nine foot drop from the window. In the summer time it seems like people are constantly walking through there and it feels like they're just cutting through the yard. Indeed, kids who didn't live here were using the backyard to smoke pot, as I found out once the warm weather arrived, and one time I went to grill some hamburgers on the back porch and some cops had kids in handcuffs. One of the cops came inside the house and told me that the next time I saw someone who was unauthorized to sit there acting like it was their home, I should call 911. Turns out there were some issues with drug dealers using the alleyways to deal their wares and things were getting a little bit closer to bad. But the cops were monitoring the area and it seemed to clear up after that. Damn socialist cops, using our tax dollars to clean up crime!

I was kind of in a rush when I began living in this place. I moved back to DC two autumns ago after a summer in Ohio and a winter and spring in Lebanon and I didn't have much money to start. That September I took a temporary place in a group house in Columbia Heights, a neighborhood you wouldn't dare walk in at night ten years ago. It's now fully developed with a Target and Best Buy and box stores like that. You can't even find a little market for several blocks because they were all wiped out by what we call "development." I suppose in this case "development" really was development because it also wiped out most of the human trash that had made this place uninhabitable for good souls. Despite all the chains, it still has character to it. And characters, too.

I thought I'd be traveling a lot on my own when I took this place a month later and the price was a steal for the area. I had to share a bathroom and kitchen with others, but I didn't mind that. There's no other common area so it feels like my space is my space. Then last summer Chris moved in and now there's no space. It's a good tradeoff, though. :)

In the summer you have to walk pretty far to get to real green space, which usually I don't mind, but if I'm not in the mood to go to far I'll walk the half block from the house to the neighborhood square - I guess it's called Kenyon Square - and sit there with a book and watch the people. This is the square where the farmers market sits in the warm months and the Christmas tree in December, though this past December some asshole knocked the tree over before Christmas and they didn't bother putting it back up. Anyway, one time during the summer I was sitting there texting someone when I overheard this fifty year old black guy chatting up this teenage Asian girl. I say the races because it was not a pairing you'd normally think of; there was something off about it. I began to eavesdrop on the conversation - the guy thought she was "pretty" and he wanted to help her out with a job. He was in the "modeling" business and thought she could be a model. The disturbing conversation went on for a bit and he handed her a business card. It didn't occur to me at the time to warn the girl not to contact him because I thought he was just a disgusting old man. Turns out he was the most disgusting, despicable type of human being scumbag on the planet. After the girl left, he strutted (more like limped) over to a guy whom he called his business partner and they started up a conversation in lowered voices. I got bits of it. That was enough.

He realized I was typing on my phone and he said, "She's reporting us, that bitch reporting us." They hurried out of there. I had only been texting a friend but I immediately looked for a sex trafficker site so I COULD report him. I gave a description of the scum and what I had overheard. Later I learned that the area was once a hotbed for human trafficking.

That's slavery, for those who don't know.

I never saw that guy again. He probably moved on to another part of the city, but I hope something awful happened to him. Human trafficking - largely in the form of sex slavery - is a global industry that generates billions of dollars for scumbags of all races and nationalities. It's allowed to exist because there is great demand by men with no respect for women.

Unfortunately, Bad exists in this world. You're never going to get rid of it all, and you can't hide from it, because it will find you. Once you accept this, you can live a much fuller life. Fear destroys people; it's destroying our country's social cohesion. More and more Americans think it's perfectly acceptable to kill another human being for trying to take their shit. More and more would rather arm teachers than spend tax dollars to get at-risk kids an equal education that would keep them out of jail.

The cops - funded by taxpayer dollars - cleared out the drug dealers. I reported the slave trader. It takes all of us, folks, to nurture America. If you don't get that, you've been living in a bubble. Come on up to Columbia Heights - I'll show you around.

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, but I prefer mine dried or fresh

Yesterday Chris and I did not leave our room. He wasn't feeling well and I for whatever reason felt like working, which meant lying in bed with a laptop. The work was not anything mentally engaging - mostly I sought to gain more Twitter followers for our firm. It's @GQRResearch; please follow!

The powers that be seem to think we're not growing quickly enough despite the fact that we are gaining 100 new followers a month, which is great growth for a small firm. When I started we had 1035 followers. A lot of those were spammers or inactive accounts which I blocked. Six months later we're at 1650, but 40 of those came yesterday. I spent the whole day following and unfollowing people, retweeting, and researching who would be quality followers to have who might retweet our stuff once in awhile. The trick is to find people who like your stuff enough to share it, which raises awareness about your organization and gains new followers, with the ultimate aim of gaining new clients.

This is the extent of what I did yesterday: cooked eggs and made the smoke alarm go off with bacon, made and drank lots of coffee, listened to the Italian bistro channel (881 on DirecTV - it has become a Saturday routine), watched the Nationals spring training game, listened to the Reds game, read the news, read and worked on Facebook and Twitter, ran around the corner for some wine, drank the wine, cooked homemade chicken noodle soup that made Chris feel better.

I think it's the magic of pepper. The last soup I made - a veggie soup - cured me of an awful headache. Both were heavily-laden with peppers of many varieties - lots and lots of black pepper, dried hot peppers, red pepper flakes, Aleppo pepper, a yellow Peruvian pepper that I forget the name of, a certain type of black peppercorn, chili powder, Frank's cayenne pepper sauce, and fresh green peppers and jalepenos. Yes, that's a lot of pepper, but no, it's not overwhelmingly hot. Yes, it has a kick, but it's a tasty kick, a healthy kick, a natural kick, a sinus-clearing kick.

So that was my yesterday, my Saturday, a less than kinetic day but quite wonderful. Every now and then you need a day to do nothing. The grind of monotonous routine is getting to me. I once had an office with a view of the Mediterranean; now I have a cubicle in the middle of a building. I feel caged.

I never had more freedom than during my second long stint in Beirut. My schedule was whatever I wanted it to be; my office was the balcony of my apartment. From there I basked in the radiance of the Mediterranean sun and watched people go about their daily lives with all the curiosity that true freedom can bring. The hum of scooters still rings loudly in my memory, a sound I frequently heard as they zipped in and out of traffic, over sidewalks, even. I don't miss the whirring generators or the choking smell of diesel that poured from them during the mandatory three hour power outages with which quotidian Beirut is plagued, but I'd suffer the suffocation in a heartbeat if I could be back on that balcony.

I can't wait to take Chris on a walk through Beirut, to see the amalgamation of eras and cultures, to show him the juxtaposition of shiny buildings next to bullet-riddled relics, and to drink and play darts in Amigo's bar. I'm not a planner when I travel, but we'll have only three days this time around and I need to make sure he's hooked by the time we get on a plane for Italy. I already have the touring routes mapped out, the two-block walk from the hotel to the steps next to American University of Beirut, past the bombed out building with the bright blue shutters and the "Seaside" sign on the telephone pole, around the curve to the corniche, where he'll be subjected to the physical proof that time does not exist, the old men and their clacking prayer beads and the women in abayas or niqabs walking next to women in tight, modern clothing, past the Starbucks and the Hard Rock Cafe and the shawarma stands and the overpriced Lebanese restaurants along the sea, around the bend to the ruins of the St. Georges Hotel and the statue of Prime Minister Hariri where he was killed by a car bomb, past the glistening five star Phoenician hotel that is dwarfed by the bombed out ruins of the Holiday Inn, through the streets of the Solidaire district and to the rebuilt downtown, across the road to Damascus, a road that eventually leads straight to a war zone, into Gemmayze where we'll stop for Almaza in Spoon, which has a great window table where you can watch all of what's going on, then back to Hamra where we'll cover the table of a restaurant with plates of hummus and tabouleh and all the pleasures of a Lebanese mezza, then onto darts and beer. I promised him the crusader castle in Byblos and a seafood lunch at Pepe's Fishing Club, so I guess that will be Day 2.

He's genuinely excited about going to the Middle East for the first time, though he's nervous. I used to be amused when Americans looked at me like I was crazy for loving Beirut. Now I find it annoying because of the ignorance. The worst is when they act like they know more about the place than I do, despite having lived and worked there for what amounts to a year. I'll never understand that mentality. But back to us going to Beirut. I hope it happens. We already have our plane tickets to Italy but the jaunt to Beirut is turning out to be more costly than expected, so we don't have those tickets yet. Chris is working his way back to singing for more than just weddings and funerals. But it's February, not wedding season, and people don't seem to be dying, so he isn't getting calls for funerals. One of us could go on a murderous rampage of Catholics to increase the number of funerals, I suppose, but then we might not get to go to Italy, either. Haha? (That's a joke, people.) He recently got all of his music out of storage - boxes and boxes of books of it have taken up what little floor space we have and he digs out the scores to every opera that comes on, it seems. He's also working with his former instructor so he can get back into gig shape. (If you want to help, you can do it here. Alternatively, contact me to hire Chris for your wedding, funeral, birthday party, anniversary, etc.)

I can't stop thinking about our trip. I can't believe I haven't left the country in...nearly a year and four months?!? Not since I went on vacation to Beirut over Thanksgiving in 2011. Of course, there are life reasons why. I quit the job with the psycho boss and got a new one, which meant I had to build up my vacation days. Oh, and there's the whole meeting Chris thing...February 26, 2012, as we discovered. Of course, that doesn't count the six weeks of knowing him and thinking he was obnoxious. :)

I haven't been to Italy since 1997. I made two ventures down there while studying in Luxembourg - one was to Cinque Terre and the other was a whirlwind week-long trip to Rome, Florence, and Venice. This time we're going south - to the Amalfi Coast, just across the Mediterranean from Beirut. I'm really looking forward to visiting the ruins at Pompei - I've always always always wanted to go there! That was my only requirement - Chris can pick where we go during the rest of our five+ days there. I can't wait to roam the streets of small town Italy and take in views of the Med.

I just hope his passport arrives soon...

Politics is a pain in the ass

Last night I woke up in excruciating pain. Must have been a pinched nerve in my neck. Fortunately, I fell back asleep and woke up without that pain. But a different pain, one that came to me last night as I was sitting on the bed playing a mindless game on the laptop, still plagues me in my lower back. It seems to be worse now that I’ve been sitting at a desk for an hour and a half. Again, offices are unnatural. This is becoming a theme, I think.

I’m staring at a wall full of global celebrities, autographed photos of such dignitaries as Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela, and Tony Blair. Senators and representatives each express their version of a smile. It’s not a normal office. This isn’t a normal industry to most people. It doesn’t feel normal to me, either.

The thing is, the politicos in Washington ARE kind of out of touch with the average American. It has more to do with the education levels of people here, I think, than any disdain for the common folk, as seems to be the view of said common folk. Washington is the most highly educated city in the country (and by educated I mean people who graduated from college, which is not the same thing as knowledgeable.) It’s just that the politicos in Washington read a lot and see it as a sort of duty to read a lot and know what’s going on in the world outside their living rooms. Maybe duty isn’t the right word. Maybe it’s routine. Yes, it’s routine. Something you don’t really think about, you just do. I don’t know if we take for granted the knowledge that everything people do affects everything about the rest of the world of if we have no comprehension of a lifestyle that doesn’t including reading newspapers and books and interacting with people who are different than we are. So we look at people who are ill-informed with bewilderment.

There’s really no excuse for being ill-informed, though. What we have in this country is willful ignorance. I would say that’s everywhere in the world except Americans have access to information that is nearly free from authoritarian control. Information is free. Education is free. We’re gradually losing that but it still holds true. Yet it feels like we produce imbecility at a rate that mimics the speed of light.

Consider this:

17% of registered voters believe the President of the United States is a Muslim.

40% of Americans reject evolution

What’s worse is they have no concept that the President being a Christian and evolution are not things you believe in. They are reality. This is not politics. This is reality. The sky is blue on a sunny day. This is reality. This is reality. This is reality.

America built itself up as a superpower because its citizens embraced science and knowledge. That’s crumbling now because we’ve rejected those things. I don’t know why that is. I suppose historians will one day discover that television had a lot to do with it. We’re starting to see the effects of television on the human brain after studying it for generations. SPOILER ALERT: The results are not positive for television.

But I stare at those photos and I wonder if a lot of the reason the average Joe has become so ill-informed has to do with those of us whose brains are wired for the pursuit of knowledge have left the areas where we grew up. I think the Walmart culture has done much more damage to our country than we realize. Walmart and those other big box stores came in and took over entire local economies, killing small business and offering nothing more than mediocre jobs to the citizens of those towns. We had to look elsewhere. So now we spout off numbers from offices in Washington DC or New York or San Francisco that mean nothing to the person in Springfield, Ohio, and because there are fewer knowledgeable people around to discuss it with them, they turn to Fox News or nothing at all, then they blame the politicians because the politicians weren’t around to discuss it with them, either, so they didn’t learn from that person in Springfield. 

The truth is, I'm sick of politics. Yes, I know I work for a political firm.Yes, I know I have a degree in political science. Yes, I spend my days reading about the president and Congress and the moronic GOP. But I'm sick of it. If we could just value knowledge again, if we could just discard the religious nonsense that pervades our legislative process, if we could just see reality for reality...

I don’t know what to think any more. I sometimes question the wisdom of democracy. It used to be that people with mental illnesses were on the fringe, but being crazy and stupid has become mainstream. If we don’t change our attitude towards education, if we don’t get rid of standardized tests and start teaching analytical thinking again, if we don’t start paying teachers what they deserve and stop demonizing them, we’re screwed.

The sky is blue, people. The sky is blue.

Going home

And now for that part of the day I’ve grown to cherish…the leaving of the office. Today it was special. Today, there was still light in the sky and colors on the horizon. The world is about to be reborn and though it is freezing outside the light is an indication that warmth is not far away.

Now I am typing this on the train on my way home. I’m staring at the colors in the sky, the vestiges of another day I feel I’ve wasted, not because I’ve actually wasted it, but because it didn’t fulfill me. My office is located half a block from Union Station, which is the same number of stops to Columbia Heights no matter what side of the tracks I get on. I usually choose the outside route, the one that makes me feel I am still part of the world after spending an entire day cooped up in an office.  It’s always interesting, no matter how many times I travel it or the time of day or the passengers with me. Sometimes I pretend I’m in Europe, where train travel is normal and graffiti filled walls are a social expression instead of a crime. The train yards near Union Station can feel like we’re pulling into some small town in Anywhere, Europe. But then the crowding and pushing and peddling and begging come into play and I realize I am in a far less desirable place.

Trains are wonderful. There’s a certain practical romance to riding the rails, a testament to man’s creativity in finding solutions to make our lives easier. I laugh at all those commuters riddled with the pangs of traffic, for they’ve made a poor choice. As the internet meme says, they aren’t stuck in traffic – they ARE the traffic.

It’s half price night at the local watering hole. The crowds are bigger these days, bigger and louder and less interesting than they had been before word got out that all drafts are half price. I'll be there soon.

Soup's on!

I ought to make a habit of writing on this blog every day, even if I have nothing to say. At least the times I do have something to say, I'll get it down instead of keeping it swirling inside my head.

Today was a bad day, not for any reason in particular. I just wasn't with it. I woke up with a desperate desire to stay in bed, not for any sleep reasons but because I dreaded going to the office. Six months in - that's not good. The three day weekend was not even a memory; it happened far too quickly for it to have really occurred. Chris and I did absolutely nothing yesterday and it was wonderful.

I've hit one of my spells of boredom in which nothing seems to interest me. Our trip to Italy commences in three weeks and three days; if only I could sleep through the monotony of that time and wake up eating pasta on the Amalfi Coast. Alas, there are eighteen work days between then and now, eighteen days of routine and schedules and meetings and sitting in the same place and staring at the same screen and wearing the same sweaters because winter refuses to yield to spring...

That's the real problem. This time of year is maddening. You've had several months of cool then cold weather and you're ready to tear your hair out staring at the same walls. That's me, at least. It's generally too cold to go outside and even when you have the time at the end of the day, there's no sunlight to enjoy. Human beings weren't meant to be trapped in offices. We are animals. We thrive when our relationship with nature can be experienced to the fullest.

About the only thing I enjoy about winter is making soups. I've gotten pretty good at it. My mother gave me a giant soup pot for Christmas that has seen many types of soup, each with its own flavor. I also received spices for Christmas, which have gone into the pot. The soup was so healthy that a headache from which I had suffered all day today instantly disappeared when I ate it in the late afternoon. Here is what went into it:

8 or 9 red potatoes
one small onion
5 or 6 large carrots
one head of broccoli
5 or 6 mushrooms
half a bag of frozen peas
half a green bell pepper
4 dried hot red peppers
6 or 7 black peppercorns of a variety whose name I can't remember - I got them at the spice stall in Union Street Market
French thyme (given to me by my sister for Christmas)
Lots of garlic salt
Worcester sauce - this is awesome in veggie soups; I encourage you to try it.
Chili powder
Some root that looks like ginger but is not - can't remember the name of it but I think it has "sun" in it.
Ground ginger
Corriander
Salt
Olive oil
Fresh basil

I think that was it. I started by filling the pot half full of water, adding the dried peppers, peppercorns, fresh basil, and olive oil, then adding the potatoes and carrots. The rest was just dump and taste, dump and taste until it was awesome. I could probably sell these soups at the farmers market if there were a farmers market at this time of year. I still need to work on some things, though. Like getting all the veggies the same shape.

I haven't written much on this blog but when I have, it's mostly been about food. That's because food sustains us and I'd love to see us get back to a more natural way of living. I think we have to. We've product'd ourselves into all kinds of trouble, gave away our country to corporations who don't care what they do to us as long as they're selling us stuff. We lost our sense of community, of society, because we were too busy pursuing material things, what we thought was happiness. As it turns out, a lot of us are unhappy as a result.

I've learned some things in my 36 years. I've lived in four countries outside the US, I've had a few experiences that opened my eyes.  In the spirit of community, of the communion of souls, I'd like to share these experiences in the hope that others can learn from them. That's basically why I'd like to start writing here on a daily basis. So if that means sharing nothing more than a recipe for something I've created, so be it.

By the way, the title of this post is "soup's on," which is a play on the French word soupçon, meaning suspicion. Because I suspect I will have a difficult time finding the discipline to keep up with this and my baseball blog Church of Baseball despite wanting to do so.

Spice is the Spice of Life

The best strawberry I ever ate was the one I grew. Yes, the one. I never could keep the rabbits away; they'd always be one step ahead of me in harvesting the fruit, leaving emptiness of plant and heart every time a berry bloomed. Except that once.

Yesterday I bought some strawberries from the Giant, the one in Columbia Heights that lurks a block from where I live. I bought them because they reminded me of summer, knowing full well they could not be as tasty as a local strawberry. Prettier, yes, but pretty is supposed to be secondary to taste in matters of food. Pretty is for folks who have already mastered the art of taste, the culinarians whose knowledge of the palette gives them license to turn a plate into a work of ingenuity. For the rest of us, food is what we do to keep our hearts beating, our lungs breathing, and our brains pumping those chemicals we call emotions.

Well, in most countries.

For whatever reason, our country discarded food for food products. We discarded local markets where the shopkeeper knew your name for massive, soulless grocery stores like Giant. We discarded vitamins and minerals for high fructose corn syrup and preservatives whose names we can't even pronounce. Now we find ourselves faced with epidemic levels of diabetes, high cancer rates, and unprecedented allergies to components of basic foods. Last night I couldn't find an essential ingredient for my planned dinner - tahini paste - but Giant had a whole aisle dedicated to gluten-free food products.

The thing is, we don't even know that's not normal. How many generations have grown up knowing nothing other than Giant, Kroger, and Harris Teeter? How many don't think twice about frozen boxed meals or cereal in the shapes of cartoon characters or cheese products with some of the same ingredients as plastics? I certainly knew nothing else. But the course of my life has taken me to places that have shown me what food really is, that it's not just something to stop the rumbling in the abdomen. Food truly is life. No simpler way of putting it exists.

I don't just mean that it sustains us and keeps us alive. Of course it does. But think about it. When we get together for social gatherings, food is the biggest part of the party. Why is that? Is it that we have so little to say to each other that we feel the need to stuff our mouths as an excuse to be silent? While that may be true for some people, for most of us, it's not. Food is not merely fuel, it's spiritual. In ancient Egypt, ka was a spiritual lifeforce that needed to be fed even after death. Throughout history, humans have sacrificed food to various deities. Even today Jews and Muslims have rules for the way to slaughter animals and grow crops for food. But the spirituality of food isn't found in religion alone. Go to one of the "food countries" and see for yourself how food is the soul of a culture, that fresh foods are deities in their own right. Italy is one example. In fact, the Mediterranean peoples from Spain to Italy to Greece to Lebanon and around, have made food the spice of life.

I first learned that food was more than a solution to hunger when I lived in Europe in college. By the time I went to Lebanon more than a decade later, I had already developed an appreciation for nourishment of the soul, but eating in that country, eating the fresh, locally grown produce, going to the small market everyday, sitting at long tables covered with plates of mezze dishes, conversing over a lengthy meal, not merely eating but living...I'll never return to the American way of consumption. The chain restaurants where they microwave frozen foods and turn over tables in less than an hour. The corn-syrupy convenience of pre-packaged meals. The unhealthy addiction to fat, the fried foods, the bacon worship, the obesity, the chips and cookie culture. It goes against nature. It goes against the laws of the universe.

Food connects us in a cosmic way; it transforms something that was once living into energy so we can keep on living - you know, energy is neither created nor destroyed. The science of the universe, the laws of existence, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, we are all made of stars...no, there is no denying that everything in the vast expanse of the universe is interconnected in a way most dare not contemplate. Human beings have used various terms to describe our cosmic connection: the ancient Egyptians called it Ma'at, Carl Jung called it the collective unconscious, the Catholic Church calls it the "communion of souls." The works of philosophers, theologians, astrophysicists, writers, and countless other disciplines on matters of a metaphysical nature could have their own library and no one could get through it all in a lifetime.

So how does this have anything to do with food? Think about it. Every bite you consume affects the rest of the world forever. That strawberry I ate, the single red berry that survived the bunny thieves, contributed to fueling me...every action I have taken since then has in some way been affected by the fact that I ate that one berry, that the chemical reaction that occurred as that berry was transformed into fuel for a human body helped in a tiny way to not only affect my actions, but events in the entirety of the cosmos. Whatever I did that day, no matter how small it seems to us, made the world different than it would have been had I not eaten that piece of fruit.  Now think about that in terms of the food you consume in a lifetime. Energy is the essence of being, and we are all part of one big collection of energy.

So how did we lose the natural, the spiritual, in our food? Why do we buy flavorless strawberries and green bananas and meat pumped so full of chemicals that we have to wonder if we can still call it meat? Why is the slogan for Welch's Fruit Snacks "We Put the Fruit in Fruit Snacks?" I know some of the answers to these questions. The real quandary, though, is how we continue on this path to nothingness. For every new farmers market on the corner, for every new quinoa trend, something like fried Oreos is put on a menu and someone is dropping dead of a heart attack or being tortured by chemo or checking their insulin level. But worst of all, worse than physical illness or even death, is the spiritual emptiness in our consumption habits, the cultural refusal to understand that what we put into our bodies affects the entire world.

The last strawberry sits in the container, a big one, red, beautiful, reminding me of summer. I found out that the berries weren't that bad, and a hint of the season I love so dearly came to my tongue. Another six weeks until the farmers market starts up around the corner and I can perform the weekly ritual of buying local. Another four until I get to sit down to meals in Lebanon and Italy. Until then, I'll suffer the Giant and its Florida-grown produce. At least I have that luxury.