Confirmation Hearing

I was standing in the basement of the Senate Russell building with fellow communications advocates yesterday, waiting for the Commerce Committee to bring the pain to Julius Genachowski (of which they brought very little), and my friends were complaining about how everything in our whole field is plugged up and not happening since the administration is dragging its feet about the nomination process.

And I pointed up the marble spiral staircase with a three-story queue of line-sitters paid by lobbyists to hold their spot extending to Room 253 and I said, “Well, this is it, you know. This is like pushing a stalled car and getting it going.” And thought but didn’t say, that I think a lot of really extraordinary things are going to happen soon in very rapid succession. Like a dam breaking.

Intuition is a bizarre thing, it’s so vague that I don’t even know if it’s about work, or my actual life. But I want to write it down so I can go back so I can see if I’m right. Even intuition needs verification sometimes.

I think I’m going to actually like it here. DC is just a bunch of silly rituals and everyone looks so comical and kind of touching going through them, even though they often aren’t aware of it, their little bellies hanging out over their belts, the young women in the flip flops with the many-times-reused crumply Ann Taylor bag containing their heels, the Red Line in the morning full of cut-rate Masters-of-the-Universe-in-training. All there, all waiting for one future or another to start. In just two years, you could be just as lame as Timothy Geithner is today!

I think I was wrong. We are not really running the planet – we are simply showing up for work in the most elaborately over-constructed edifice of language and money that has ever existed on Earth, and it actually prevents us from hearing the saxophonists and keyboardists and mandolin players who stand outside the Farragut North exit and play beautiful rush-hour morning music for the thousands of commuters who flow out silently to their jobs, their eyes averted, pretending to not hear so there will be no obligation to tip - a sea of cheap handbags, idealism, credit card debt, professional jealousy, anti-depressants, sunglasses, diet tips, Netflix to return, thoughts of home, and whatever solitary music they prefer to listen to on their IPods. Usually not involving saxophones.

They say, those ships, they sail into the Golden Triangle and just … vanish. They’re never heard from again. They lose all radio contact with shore.

I guess its time to reestablish.