Penoptic

Monday morning I made the drive from Silver Spring, Md. to Arlington, Va. to stay with my brother and sister for a few days. GPS and natives' advice recommended staying away from the city of Washington, DC, but that seemed rather annoying. After all, anybody who's ever been on the Beltway knows that it just ... absolutely stinks. And the district is just so pretty in the rain. I lived in two places when I lived in the district. The first was a townhouse in Capitol Hill that I shared with about nine other people, and the second was a studio apartment on 16th Street near Howard University and Malcolm X Park. At the time it was right on the edge of a seedy part of town, but gentrification has made it a lot, well, brighter if not safer, and that apartment building happens to be a straight shot from Silver Spring. So I took the scenic route to Virginia. And while I was driving, I meandered even more. I drove on Constitution Avenue past the Smithsonian and the Washington Monument...

Me: God, I hate D.C. sometimes. Mom: Why's that? Me: Too small. And apparently there's something about me that attracts homeless and drunken men. Mom: What?! Me: Homeless men keep hitting on me on the subway! Today this guy came up to me and said, 'Hi, I was just wondering, would you like to have dinner with me sometime? About me: My name is Dan, I'm 43, and I've been clean for three months and thirteen days.' Mom: Well, Laura, everybody has needs.

Summer is, was and will always be my favorite time of year. Something about the feel of the sun warming my hair just reaches down into my soul and makes me smile. Yes. I have a smiling soul. In California, summer can be measured in two ways - hot and hotter. There's 85 degrees hot, there's 95 degrees hot, and there's 105 degrees hot. Head out to Palm Springs or Lake Havasu, AZ, and you get 115 degrees hot. Sunscreen is a necessity, but there's nothing like it. For me, it's almost like the feeling I get when I'm sitting with a cup of my mom's fresh hot chocolate in front of the fireplace, watching the orange and red flames in their glowing dance. But there's one big difference between the two. Feeling the fire warming my skin and hair makes me feel like an old soul; even when I was seven or eight years old, I felt as if I'd been sitting watching fires for a thousand years (in the most non-pyro way possible). Getting that same feeling from the sun, tho...