Vic Socotra

21 November 2008

Rent

We were at the bar last night, and the Capital City Brewery was doing a roaring business. We normally have the far left corner of the big horseshoe under the towering vats of micro-brew to ourselves, but we wound up jammed against a party of women lawyers having a farewell party for one of their own.

Angel was apologetic- she is 5'11" in flats and a commanding presence from her command post near the door- but she moved my trenchcoat to accommodate them. She is a fox, young Angel is, and I could see some portents in all this. The old gray Spooks were far outnumbered by the practitioners of the legal trade. If I had to make my guess, I would have called them for a bunch of Republican, poor dears, although they were young and good-looking enough to be Obamites.

It could have been a farewell from private practice to return to government. Everyone is impressed with the speed and authority with which the Transition is occurring. The new Administration is bring some of the best of the Clintonistas back, mostly Ivy Leaguers, if the leak-a-day announcements are to be believed.

It does not appear that the No Drama administration is going to veer too far into the left-wing ditch, which has some folks howling in betrayal, but this is a centrist country, after all. Governing is a lot different than campaigning.

A stint of No Drama seems to be just what the Doctor ordered, despite that fact that people in my line of trenchcoat work are probably going to have to tighten the belts on our Burberrys significantly. We are likely to be outnumbered by the lawyers for the foreseeable future.

There were a couple revelations at the bar- I can’t go into them, for a variety of reasons. One was the role of the “8a” Alaskan Native contracting companies, now that Uncle Ted Stevens has conceded defeat and been run out of town on polite applause from his former colleagues in the Senate.

You would be surprised at the connection between the Inuits and the Intelligence Community, and how they made all out lives easier in meeting the Government’s minority hiring goals, but we will have to wait and see what happens. There were some other developments, life-changers that are breath-taking, that made me consider how rapidly the essence of our nature of our existence can change.

I got home sober enough to check the e-mail and close out the last of the office minutia by nine. I got one note from a pal who is a couple years further down the road than I am, and lost a spouse the hard way.

Not that divorce is easy, but death is very difficult indeed, and with the stock market now down 50% since last year, the fixed income and reserves as starting to look pretty thin for a lot of folks who thought they had it all figured out. Stupid Baby Boomers. We should have known that we would wind up broke and looking at social security without lunch money or rent.

We would have to go and save the worst for last, wouldn’t we?

We shot back a couple notes about money and the future. I won’t bore you with it, but my trenchcoat is already on the next-to-last notch, and I think I already published the Personal Identification Number to my ATM card already. Have at it.

Suffice it to say, renting out my living space for the inauguration week is starting to look like a pretty good option. I figure I can get three families into Tunnel Eight, two more into the Efficiency, and serve watered-down drinks with a festive air. I got out my copy of Les Miserables to listen to the Innkeeper’s aria for business tips.

It was a lot like a musical at the bar. You could feel the excitement in the mostly youthful crowd. With the swearing-in still two moths away, the chamber of commerce is already talking about the largest inaugural crowd in history. There could b e an additional four million people converging on the National Mall in our Fair City, and they are going to have to sleep someplace.

This is huge, and there must be a way to cash in on the commencement of the New New Deal. Many folks are going to camp out near the Lincoln Memorial to be near the JumoTrons, and the whole “New Birth of Freedom” theme and the opening of the new underground Capitol Visitor’s Center is going to make this a complete zoo. What with the Global Cooling going on, they might want a place that is a little warmer overnight, and I could be just the innkeeper to help them out.

There is a lot that can happen in the two months before Mr. Obama raises his right hand. I mean, just look back two months and see where we were then. The good news is that he will have a good chunk of his team on deck and ready to get working.

I think that is good news. It will certainly be an improvement on the Hoover-Roosevelt transition, but if we are reaching back that far for good news, that must mean we are in some pretty deep kim-chi. The car companies could be gone by then, and God knows what else.

It is good to have a ring-side seat, I suppose, and demand for floor-space. I mean, think about it; there are a lot of places where no one is eager to go at all. One thing about being over the hill. The speed really picks up.

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