06 January 2004

Sex in the City

It is smack on six o'clock. I am up early and bushy-tailed because I have to be at a stultifying monthly meeting at the Facility at nine and have a stop at the Company before that. There is nothing happening here except last night's dishes. There are bombs in Afghanistan and Robots on Mars. The radio says the Army is going to offer a $10,000 for troops to sign on for another tour in Iraq.

I did some quick calculations. It had better be a tax-free ten grand. In my tax bracket that would cut the bonus in half. My great-great grandfather was offered $650 to re-up for a second hitch in the Union Army in 1864. The Army threw in a thirty-day home leave as an added incentive. Young James Foley was a sensible Irish lad with bright blue eyes and a mop of golden hair. He had done three years, part of it in the lines below Vicksburg. He took a good-faith down-payment on the bonus and went home and stayed there.

I think if you did the math in constant dollars, allowing for a century-and-a-half of inflation, he got a better offer than what the Army is offering today.

I did come lingering dishes and made the coffee rich and strong. When I turned on the computer there was a long queue of e-mail from the usual suspects in the intelligence chat room. They have no interest in the alleged conspiracy to murder Princess Diana and her Muslim lover. That investigation starts in London this morning.

I had an interest in that, and went to the tunnel where the accident occurred when I was last in Paris in 1998. The scars were still fresh on the concrete then but the flowers had dried up and blown away.

My intel colleagues were more concerned with binary explosive devices that can be concealed in body cavities, the better to blow up airplanes. They posted helpful links to pictures of airliners blown up on the ground to test the level of explosives required to inflict catastrophic damage. There was another note from an associate in the health care profession, commenting on the resurgence of SARS. I answered that one after noting two disparate facts. I believe I can integrate them into my world view:

"Two things that may be of interest." the note began. "The World Health Organization apparently prefers that the Chinese not decimate the civet population. They feel that it is unnecessary and may destroy evidence that could be used to understand SARS. I tend to agree with them from the standpoint that many of the merchants and animals handlers have been seropositive for SARS for at least two years (I think the reference is from NEJM) and that destroying civets at this point may be too little and much too late."

That seemed reasonable.

There was something else, about a newly economically viable imaging technology. This one apparently uses terahertz radiation (somewhere between microwave and Infrared) to penetrate tissue and solid materials but is not ionizing. It therefore is less harmful to living systems, and may be good for penetrating wood and metals.

I thought about posting the note back to the intelligence guys who are obsessing about body cavities and didn't. But people do obsess.

I heard about another harmless one over the weekend. I saw the professional dog-walker who lives down the hall. She invited me to a Sex in the City party. It is a sometimes-regular occurrence, this one commemorating the fact that there are only seven more episodes remaining in the made-for-HBO series. Then it is over. No more Sarah Jessica Parker adventures in modern love and living in New York. Watching the show en masse is apparently a social vehicle favored by one of the major market demographics. The newspaper even prints lists of trivia questions to help frame the mood. Times being what they are, Sex on the TV is better than what is happening at Big Pink and at least everyone gets to talk about it.

Walking dogs is one of her lines of work, the other being a Mourning Consultant at the funeral home on Fairfax Drive. She walks the dogs for a living, having decided that being a Foreign Service Wife was not going to be her destiny. I told her to count on me coming, and I would bring something. I was carrying a load of stuff from the upstairs to the downstairs.

I am slowly moving the apartment and hoping to avoid the pandemonium that came when my first Big Pink landlord gave me the boot fourteen months ago. I had a one year lease, and the terms went to month-to-month after that. I was happy enough there on the second floor, easy walk up, but I got a call at the office that said my occupancy was terminated.

I had a month to scramble and miraculously a place came open on the fifth floor just when I needed safe haven.

The landlord showed up the day I was supposed to be out and I wasn't, for the excellent reason that the painters in the new apartment were not quite finished. Matter of hours, they assured me in Spanish.

Buffy- that was her name- wore a wig every time I saw her. Her skin was unlined but had an eerie translucent quality that enabled me to see veins below the surface.

She had entered into this change of life through the abrupt loss of her husband. He got an infection of some sort, strep, probably, and it erupted and killed him. She was nice enough in person but I could hear her screaming in the hall at her maid about my failure to vacate the premises. The painters were just pulling up the drop cloths, and I really needed to clear out. So it was not one of my best-organized decampments.

I'm slow on the uptake sometimes, but I figured out over a few weeks that she was the evil step-mother to two ungrateful daughters, since they promptly put the marital dwelling up for sale. I couldn't figure that one out, why he hadn't left it to her at least for the duration of her health, but all situations are different. Hearing her scream vituperation about me down the hall made me sympathetic to the evil step-daughters.

Anyhow, Buffy's closet guy and phone guy and some other assorted construction types were already measuring things as I was throwing the contents of my refrigerator into a shopping cart. The salad-dressing was going with the dress shirts, shoes matched and un-matched, and I was wheeling it down the hall from 202 to the elevator bank and taking the next available car to the fifth floor. I hurtled back and forth that morning, closet to shopping cart, cart to elevator, elevator to new place, closet again.

I did not see a lot of stuff in the new unit until I began to peel back the sedimentary layers in preparation for my third move in two years.

The second place in Big Pink was on the 5th Floor, directly across from the elevators. There was a definite cultural change associated with the move. I had no idea that my new floor was populated with some of the most noted of Big Pink's eccentrics. I did know that I was now an elevator person, dependent on getting up the ten half-flight stairs by the miracle of the Otis Corporation. I get people trying their keys in my door when they get off at the wrong floor.

I understand the problem and have done it myself. The muted light in the hallways can have a disorienting sameness. They walls are rich beige in color with crown molding that covers the cable TV runs, the carpet is suitably dark and the big botanical prints in their golden frames all look the same.

I was staring at the ceiling fan I had just installed in the unit I bought on the ground floor. This change is another mixed blessing. Any change is as good as a vacation, they say, and I am convinced that you can never lose money in Arlington real estate, even in the condo market. Big Pink is a grand building with nice people, plenty of free parking and a lovely park-like setting. The new places they are throwing up (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) are cheaply constructed and you have to park in a crowded basement garage or take your chances on the street.

Big Pink is built solid, to the custom standards of an exacting owner. Once you get inside, the units are almost soundproof. I just bought the closest unit to the pool, and can literally hop from my patio to the lifeguard's station. The patio nearly doubles the size of the space available to me. I can sit out there with a table and one of those big umbrellas and tiki-torches like the Ironworkers executives on either side of me have. I could put in a hot tub, or anything you can do with nearly a hundred square feet of concrete.

I'm not sure if the hot tub next door is in accordance with the Association rules, but no one seems to mess with the Ironworkers. And there is no lawn to cut, and no one can throw me based on the designs of evil step-daughters, or for smoking in the house, or for having a pet or anything else landlords stick in the lease.

But there is also a downside to living on the first floor. Jack lives down by the pool in the summer, and he considers it his right to smoke his big cigars on any of the patios down here. In exchange he waters the plants and sweeps up. At least he claims to.

It was seventy degrees that day, very odd for early January. I had put the finishing touches on the ceiling fan and was about to turn it on to see if I had all the wires correctly spooled together. I contemplated my handiwork. I probably should have used the close-to-the ceiling mode of installation, I thought. It seemed like 97" was plenty of head room. And the think was controlled by a remote. There were no pull chains like God had intended to have on lights and fans. I think it was in scripture, and probably in the New Testament. I could wind up not being able to turn on the light if the battery in the controller went dead.

"Can't have that!" I mumbled to myself. And what's more, the remote controller didn't seem to manage the fan-off, light-on thing at all well. When the fan was not moving the lights flickered in just the right frequency to bring on epilepsy. So there I was, thinking that just what I needed was another remote control to go with the one to the TV, the Cable box, the DVD and the TiVo.

I was filled with the elation of accomplishing something with the potential to burn down the building and the grim realization that I should get back up on the chair, disassemble the fan and put it back in the box to trundle back to the Home Depot and stand in line to return it. Shoot. I hate it when that happens.

I had the back door open just like I do up on the balcony on the 5th floor. Of course, since the hurricane last summer I can't do anything but leave the door open at least ajar. The claws of the wind had torn it open with such urgency that the hinges bent and it will no longer close on the frame. The best I can do is slam it real hard and hope it jams a little.

But since I am always coming and going to smoke and daydream and watch the traffic on Route 50 it is normally open. I went to the kitchen in the new unit to get something, and realized the door was wide open and anyone could just walk right in. I heard voices. I suddenly realized that I was accessible again. Up on my balcony I had an inviolate aerie. No one with the exception of the process server sent by my ex-wife and the pizza man had ever knocked at my door.

Now I could emerge from the kitchen or bathroom and discover Jack sitting in my armchair smoking a big cigar, or a homeless man pulling down the Murphy bed looking for a nice nap.

I made a mental note to get some liability coverage in case one of them bumps their head on the ceiling fan.

When I got back to the fifth floor I thought that I needed to figure out something to take to the party. I put some more stuff from the closet into a box.

Another banner day. I found a jar of last year's salad dressing in one of my hiking boots. It was still sealed. Maybe I could work it into a nice dip.