Vic Socotra

29 August 2008

Community

No playmates in the pool last night. The Dog couldn’t join me- there are strict Condo Association rules on that score at Big Pink. We have to keep a tight community, you know?

Why people were not more assertive about maintaining their cardiovascular activity was beyond me. When I signed in at the log, I was mildly surprised to note that I was the only one, besides Jakob, who had come down to the water. So what if it was raining?

Were they concerned that they would get wet?

As I stroked smoothly, I considered how best to pass the time. In normal dry conditions, I am out there long enough that my hair dries while I swim. In the gathering gloom I thought about what the Admiral said earlier in the men’s room on the eighth floor high above Fairfax Drive.

“You have so many characters I can’t keep them all straight,” he said. It being the men’s room, I nodded in agreement and kept moving. With more than two hundred units in Big Pink community, the cast of characters is constantly changing. In addition to the young folks just starting off, and shuffling in and out of the units that are being rented, the Reaper has visited to cull some of the old folks.

Sometimes I count strokes to pass the time. Tonight I decided to count characters. I can’t alphabetize on the fly, so the people came to me in the rain.

I got a pretty good list going, thinking about the people who have been so good, and some so crazy, and the ones who have moved on.

I thought Old Jack was the pivot point. He was very much the spirit of the place, a curmudgeon to the end, and the spitting image of the Millionaire from the Monopoly board game. Aside from watching baseball in his unit on the eighth floor, he did not have much to do except camp out on Tony’s patio, of Jigg’s over on the front of the building.

The Ornamental Concrete Workers International keep some nice patios, as you might imagine, and they have been here in strength for twenty years. That might be changing over the next year or so. I made a resolution to start the list of the players- the dramatus personae of this totally real and wholly imaginary place.

I hit forty minutes and decided the wet from above and=2 0below was as much as I could handle and toweled off. Jakob asked how long it took to drive across America, sea-to-shining sea, and I told him. “Four and a half days, starting before dawn and driving until after dusk,” I said. “It is pretty cool. It is a big country. It is a lot different than here.”

Jakob said he was surprised we were so European here in Arlington. He felt right at home. I wondered what Old Jack would have said about that. Something caustic, I suspected, and wondered briefly where he had been buried. I thought I ought to pay my respects.

Maybe that is the way the list ought to be organized, starting with the dead, and moving on through Mardy One, the dog-walker and professional mourner. She was the last of us to see Old Jack alive, and sat with his corpse until he had cooled and she was sure he was really gone.

That would lead naturally through Death Junior, and her wonderful tattoos, since she is the mortuary technician that makes us all look good for our last short journey to the fire.

Maybe that was the tack I should take, since the book about this20place will not be complete until the concrete crumbles and they take me out, feet first. I made a tall drink when I got back to the unit above the pool. The last of the ripples I had created with such energy were gone, and the water was glassy and pocked with the impact of the desultory rain.

I turned on the television and saw Bill Richardson railing about Senator McCain. I feel bad that the Governor is not on the ticket with Senator Obama, though I think he looks great, and on the whole, it is probably more fun to be the King of New Mexico than the second banana here in Washington. It is completely selfish on my part. His elevation would have been my last shot at being someone in public life, parlaying my connection with him from the 105th Congress into some self-important position in the Pentagon.

I sighed. If this was all about change, that might have been the dream ticket. Instead Senator Obama picked a white-bread senator from a postage-stamp state who has been in Washington since Watergate.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Slow Joe. He fills that hole in the Senator’s resume, which is mostly composed of making speeches about change, and I was interested to see the one he was going to make in the middle of Mile High Stadium before 75,000 screaming fans.

There was a parade of retired Generals and Admirals who came out on cue in a big cattle call. I knew several of them, and the one who got a speaking part was Scott Gratian, who I worked with during the Afghan invasion. He was a pompous wind-bag then, and I was not surprised to see that he still is. I bet he will have the chance to be someone in a suit at the Pentagon, if he has played his card well. Damn.

When the Senator’s speech came I was not disappointed. The Senator is undeniably charismatic, something we all noted in his breakthrough address four years ago at the last Democratic convention.

Perhaps it is a function of the Age, and the desire not to make him seem like a wonk on the podium that he never actually says what he was going to do to effect this change he is talking about. I have had to find bits and pieces of it in the interviews, or in the “how many angels can dance on the head of a national health-care program” that went on endlessly in the painful Primaries.

Much of what he says can't be taken seriously, though the words can provide a vague insight into what he wants to do. He must know that Presidents do not have the power to wave their hands and make the Congress pass laws. He can’t imagine that those of us who work for a living would imagine that he20could.

Still, Chief Executive does have enormous discretionary power to change rules and policies in his co-equal branch of the Government.

I hate to say it, but taxes are important. I give the Feds and local European-style Arlington government more than a third of my paycheck. Were it not for the mortgage loophole and the massive amount of money I transfer to the Ex, it would amount to nearly half.

I don’t think that is unreasonable, but the list of things to fix is daunting, and I have the feeling that the Senator is going to need me to cough up some more.

It will start with some minor adjustments. Eliminating the cap on Social Security contributions alone will cost me $385 bucks a month. The Senator has said he will eliminate the cap, and tax it all. That is going to amount to $5,000 a year more he will take from me, and that is the smallest of the things he can do.

So this is personally very important. I am willing to contribute to a bright future, but for whose?

I am not sure that his opponent is going to do anything much different. They are both going to need an awful lot of money to work down the laundry list of things that need to be fixed. It might be big enough that it will encourage me to retire and watch it from the sidelines.

I’m not sure that is what either of them wants, but as Senator Obama said so stirringly last night, “It is not about me. It is about you.”

I have to agree. But what the hell. Change is coming. Why not roll the dice, relax and enjoy it while we can? There is only one other thing that is sure, besides taxes.

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