20 February 2008

Loading Dock


The back door to our new building looks out on the service drive between the Westin hotel, a fancy high-rise condo and the old office building the government used to rent for the Navy Spooks, and later the Customs and Immigration Service, before it was eaten by the Department of Homeland Security.

The boxy 1970s building is still well kept, though there is an air of the interim about it. The top of the façade is scarred where a corporate or government logo used to be. It is shorter than the newer structures around it by eight stories, and clearly is destined for the ash-heap of architectural history.

The bubble nipped the re-development for now, and the owners have apparently decided to ride this one out and take on short-term renters until the future is clearer.

You know the kind. There are some legal firms that operate on the margins of the main stream, immigration and tax specialists with a seasonal trade, a couple small concerns that specialize in following people around, both virtually and the old fashioned way, on shoe leather.

And the Clinton Campaign, of course. It is the National Headquarters for the enterprise, and accordingly a barometer of things happening far away. I was standing by the loading dock to our building, which presents an alcove where the smokers can huddle to stay out of the wind.

I marveled that it could have been seventy degrees on Monday morning, the smell of earth and Spring in the air, only to have the thermometer plunge forty degrees by the end of the day. The smokers at the Loading Dock were not attired for the change.

I did not have my coat, distracted as I was by the conversation with The Invisible Girlfriend that began on the way to my car. It continued across Pershing Drive and the big dig for the new apartment building and up George Mason to Henderson, where I cut over to the Glebe Road.

It is such a short commute to the new building that it is hard to get anything meaningful accomplished, and the signal on the call was lost as I turned into the underground garage and drove down the ramp to the only decent parking spaces I have been able to find. They are located deep under the hotel, since the whole block is now hollow, except for the part under the Clinton building, though driving around down in the underground maze, it seems the developers may have tunneled under it in preparation for what is to come.

I wonder sometimes if the whole thing could collapse into the pit.

I took the elevator up from the garage and exited into the spare elegant lobby of the hotel that has a vaguely oriental cast to it. Very minimalist, which is how I felt after I called back, talking where there was a good signal out of the wind under the entranceway to our new corporate digs. The conversation did not go well, which has been the case with most of them of late, and I finally could delay going up to the desk no longer.

I felt as un-tethered as a weather balloon on the ascent, and only the pace of the stupid electronic correspondence made the day pass quickly. If I stopped to think the walls began to close in. I visited the loading dock twice on break times, between urgent memorandums, and watched the satellite truck setting up on the corner.

I talked to one of the pariah smokers, a pert young lady who said she had actually seen the Senator arriving at the offices only last week. I asked if she had been scolded for abusing her health, and she said, no, the Candidate just swept out of her big car and into the building.

“She is a lot smaller than she seems on television,” she said, proud to have some insight not available to the larger viewing public.

I watched the workmen pulling cable out of the truck. Primary day in Wisconsin, Washington State and distant Hawaii, I realized; a big day for the Democrats and a lesser one for Senator McCain. There was enough activity around the truck that I wondered if the Candidate herself was going to make an appearance later.

That did not make much sense, based on how things were going, and she would be much better served spreading her warmth in a place like Youngstown, the depressed little Gateway to Eastern Ohio. It is just past Exit One on the Turnpike, and just about halfway to Michigan from the Capital. I always feel a little sad, passing he vast empty parking lots of the GM assembly plant at Lordstown.

It is just about the bottom of the drive, in more ways than one.

I realized the truck probably would be a set-up for some national correspondent who did not feel like hitting the campaign trail, and wanted a suitable backdrop for the story after the polls closed.

There was nothing happening when I drove out into the gloom in the evening, and there were early reports by the time I got home to indicate that Senator Obama ran the table in the Badger State, and was likely to sweep the caucuses in Aloha Land, too.

That would make ten in a row for the charismatic young man, and ten in a row in the loss column for Senator Clinton.

I could not stay awake long enough to see the coverage broadcast live from the sidewalk in front of the empty building, though the results were clear enough to start drawing some stark conclusions.

Senator Clinton is going to have to win big in Texas and Ohio to do anything at all to stop the Obama juggernaut, and it will take some chicanery with the party hacks to keep the so-called Super-delegates in the box.

Even if she can pull it off, it is going to leave a bad taste in the mouths of the people who want something to change, and are willing to gamble the future on it.

That is just the view from the Loading Dock, but I will keep you posted on activity as the smokers see it from there.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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