two of them didn’t do much more than drink and play video games when they were in college so it was quite a shock for Broom to hear them talk about work. For his part, Eric was shocked Broom wasn’t a scholar on some aspect of history or at the very least teaching somewhere. And even though Broom shrugged it off as if he didn’t want those things I could tell it affected him. I could tell he was asking himself similar questions. The chasm between what we are and what think we’ll be always seems to be a pretty steep one. Broom mentioned his potential travel plans and both guys said they would back him if he decided to head out to DC. And after hearing that I told them they might need to clear a spot for me, just because I didn’t want to be left out. But DC had never been on the list of places that I thought about living, and I’m not sure why. It had people. It had energy. It was important. But it also had traffic, which seemed to be ubiquitous. It was odd though. People in LA drove around like they could have cared less if the got where they needed to be going and the people in Chicago were always in a hurry. But here I got the impression people were anxious to get where they were going but weren’t all that excited about it. Which I suppose isn’t all that surprising. DC is the political capitol of America and if I worked in politics, I wouldn’t be anxious to get to work either. Broom, however, was anxious to check out the city because of what those guys had said to him but also because he was interested in taking a mini-history tour. I’m pretty sure a bunch of the classes he used for his fake major were history classes, so it made sense. Although he wanted to get a bit more intimate with the place than I envisioned. I wanted to see everything too though because I hadn’t been here since I was in the 8th grade when our class came up for the day and spent the whole time at the Catholic shrine. A catholic education is very… focused. The city certainly wasn’t short
on sights but what really got me was the bigness and brashness of a lot of the places. The Washington Monument can be seen from almost anywhere in the city so it’s hard to ignore both its presence and its prominence. But it almost doesn’t even seem to fit with the rest of the city. If you didn’t know any better, you would almost think people were conducting sacrifices or rituals at the base of the thing. The Lincoln Monument presented similar issues in my mind. Here was a marble statue of Lincoln where if he had been standing would have been over thirty feet tall. He’s stoic, regal and powerful seated in that chair. Someone who is unaware of the history could see this place and think he was a king which would seem to go against everything the man was about. Broom went on and on about both of their accomplishments and how they influenced American history, which was of course completely accurate. But when we got to the Jefferson Memorial he brought it to a whole different level