Eastern Philosophy

     Reaching the East Coast has a feeling of completion. It feels similar to home except caressing a different ocean. This is our half way point. A symbol of ongoing progress.
     Washington, DC is one of the dirtier places I've slept and I've spent nights lying on dirt. City sanitation isn't in shambles. My opinion grew in the house of Dave's friend Tony like a bacteria in the mire of the place. Being in his home was akin to watching Animal House on repeat. Or if a heavy MDMA user developed Alzheimer's-like symptoms immediately after his golden fraternity years. Given that I did my best to avoid this type of environment in my college years, I didn't feel at peace in this den of partying.
     I could breathe easily when outside. My much needed aerial respite was silently snatched away, however, by the monumental sights my eyes drank up in the heavy-with-humidity air. The Washington phallus thrusts towards the willing solar ovum, visible throughout the Capitol as an everlasting marker of patriarchal exuberance. The White House and Capitol building tug back at an age when gaudy structures, white hot via monetary and social monopoly, headed vast fields of cash crops that were maintained by black slaves. The stark white of the monuments seems as out of place as most of the rules and laws in the Bible in current time. This nearly stultifying chagrin is due to the African American population being DC's majority. What a significant shadow president Obama can cast upon the interior walls of the Oval Office.
     The most placid of the monuments was Abraham Lincoln's. Even though its size is overwrought, the sense of awe cascades from the cool marble over everyone present who cares about anything (maybe there are fewer of these individuals than I believe). Inscribed on the two adjacent walls are the famous words from the famously bearded hawk of a man. Like a demure fawn in a sun nestled patch of meadow, a Japanese girl of indeterminable age throws up two V's and shows a slightly crooked but not at all unattractive smile. Abraham would have probably shared the almost overly cute grin in the presence of such signed victory no matter the superficiality of its intent or how long he's been dead.
     At the bottom of the marble steps a sweating park ranger stands next to a ghetto blaster that shouts the words of Martin Luther King Jr. When King closes, the ranger begins a proclamation of his own. With dignified sprezzatura the moist man lifts our spirits and encourages literacy so that we too can be less bearded Abraham Lincolns. This speech is one of the more inspiring things I've heard from a man's mouth.