UPDATED 9/16/2009: Includes video from weekend protests referenced below. Regardless of where you stand on national healthcare, it’s a bit troubling. Especially when you live here.
I remember when I moved into my first apartment in Colorado. It was a spacious two bedroom, two bathroom apartment, that I moved into alone and with no furniture outside of a televison, DVD player and a stool I saved from garbage truck peril.
As an already hyper-paranoid person, sleeping alone in a new apartment, in a city where I knew no one put me on edge. I remember crawling into a makeshift bed in the living room right in front of the TV to distract me from completely morose questions concerning who would find my decomposing body five days after some lunatic had followed me home from Blockbuster, waited until dark and shimmied up the tree outside my living room, climbed onto my balcony and broke in through the sliding glass door to attack me.
Xanax, much?
All together, I’ve lived three other places alone since then and have always gone through an initial period of anxiety where I assume falling asleep will be the death of me, and thus I lie…awake.
Combine this paranoia with some of the awful stuff in the news lately, D’s robbery and his departure to Minnesota for a fishing trip and you have a situation with meltdown written all over it.
I mentioned this stress today when somecolleagues noted anxiety over the increasingly hateful behavior going on in the city. For example, some two million tea baggers gathered here over the weekend where they lined the streets and told participants running a 5k for the National Press Club to “go kill themselves” and that “Obamacare should be “buried with [Ted] Kennedy” (in regard to national healthcare).
Another colleague has been a target of road rage while walking to work—twice in one week, drivers have told him to go f*ck himself while walking legally through a crosswalk.
The director of operations for my shop, who lives eight blocks away from me (and says he calls 911 once a week to report drug activity near his house), said that they invited two city police officers to last night’s neighborhood community meeting and when two young women asked for tips on staying safe on the street, they responded: “Get a dog. No one with a dog seems to get mugged.”
Get a dog? Is this what we’ve all been missing? And moreover, are these the people who are supposed to be keeping us safe?
I know crazy things happen everywhere, but somehow the angry, negative crap seems to have landed here. Think about how the pink slime in Ghostbusters II turns everyone in New York City into disgusting, violent assholes, and you’ve pretty much got the picture. Unfortunately, I am unaware of any positively-charged slime with the capability to rig the Statue of Liberty to a joystick and walk it through the city blaring Jackie Wilson* to shake people from the funk.
Bottom line is it’s two hours past my bedtime and I’ll be awake playing a word scramble game on my iPhone until sleep becomes involuntary. Bottom line is the rose-colored glasses are still off. The DC honeymoon seems over. I am so excited to be leaving tomorrow for a few days in sweet, sweet Iowa.
*This song does put one in a fantastic mood. Maybe we should get it on some loudspeakers.
