taking notes
In the span of just two weeks I've managed to prolong an old woman’s extreme suffering, hurt someone I care about, and come down with Covid. Quite the trifecta. Welcome to my TED Talk on how not to do Hot Girl Summer.
I'm on the mend, I think. And realize talking about Covid at this stage of the pandemic, when almost everyone else has had it, is a bit like being an adult whose parents are getting divorced. All your peers went through that shit years ago and got over it; they aren't interested in hearing your delayed-onset version of the same story.
So here's something small I can barf out before slamming the next round of these horrid Paxlovid pills and going back to sleep.
Early last week, I found myself in DC's Capitol Hill neighborhood, in the middle of the afternoon, with an hour to kill before an appointment. Across the street was a dive bar that I haven't been inside since maybe 1992. I figured what the hell, it probably has air conditioning, and went in. I took the only available seat at the bar, and within ten minutes was deep into conversation with the guy sitting next to me.
Tony (not his real name) is a 30-year-old, third-generation Black Washingtonian and musician who loves Dave Grohl almost as much as he loves go-go music. He was pumping me for stories about "back in the day," so I told him about the time Rare Essence played my high school, and how I listened to "Live at Breeze's Metro Club" (on cassette) nonstop for months afterwards. By this point we both had our phones out and were taking notes about bands and artists we were recommending to each other. He wrote down the Rare Essence thing and said, "I bet my mom knows that record."
We learned we both want to go to the new replica of the old 9:30 club, but for different reasons. I just want to go inside and see what memories it evokes. For him, it's all about Dave Grohl's commitment to the DC music scene. He told me sometimes he is shunned for liking "white music," and when I made a reference to W. Kamau Bell talking about "blerds," he was like, "who?" so I made him write that down too, and promise me he'd watch Dave Grohl's SXSW keynote speech (YouTube) when he got home.
And we bonded, strangely, over having very different experiences of growing up in DC, because of race and segregation. Instead of explicitly saying "white" or "Black," we'd say, "because, you know" as we displayed our forearms to each other and nodded. It was one of the most enjoyable conversations I'd had in weeks, and when it was time for me to leave, he insisted on hugging me goodbye. (I am 99% sure he is not the source of my Covid.)
I guess if there is a lesson here, it's sit at the bar and put your phone away, but keep it handy because you might need to take notes.
Links
I bookmarked almost nothing this week worth sharing. (I think I was too sucked into deleting 80% of everything I'd ever posted on social media, a strangely satisfying project I'm not done with yet.) But I did enjoy the comments on this post asking where the single men in DC hang out. (Instagram)