Editor’s Note: Marlow lays it out, and it is still morning. The little pocket of writers in our backwaters, far from the tumult that made us and connects us forward and backward in swirling time. DeMille wanted to hold this for the big run-out of the story of all of us. Amanda the Attorney wanted to have a final review to ensure compliance, a matter that still rubs those who finally felt free of final review. But Marlow does what we always did: When it seems right, put it out.

– Vic

Coastal Empire, Piedmont and Tidewater

End of the Line

What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.

Good night to these princes and princesses of the Piedmont, these dukes and duchesses of the District.

As the bunkroom is silhouetted in the sky’s growing dusky reds and oranges, may your continuing bits in the Chairman’s Swiftian accounts of our times free you from your parenthetical bindings to roam unfettered among us through infinity.

Sob no more over distant foolishnesses, head the Chairman’s bourbon delivery van down the hill alone, don’t look back but ahead towards the distillery. Return with replenishments, We’ll keep the fire roaring well past the times when the shadows lengthen and evening comes, and the “busy” DC world is hushed, and the daily fever of its media’s life quiets with their work seemingly done, but ours remains unfinished with sneaky smiles over snarky things to be written and done while brown liquid glass clinks abound long into the night as we howl like dogs, running backwards and forwards as we collect ourselves for a new spring, while jumping on each other’s shoulders to encourage each other while DC endlessly misses its aims, falling daily into roadside ditches and gutters, turning and tumbling completely over as they go, striking their heads against the district’s marker and curb stones, dashing their brains out, only to be reborn the next morning to start all over again in their same oldiegarchy manner.

Saints preserve and protect us, as they have in the past, now and forever and ever.

Amen.

Why do we do this?

Because we like it, one another, and the world we helped create and maintain. Our work is like an unending snowball fight with snowy projectile targeting success rate of 100% as we overwhelm our beltway quarry, repeatedly sticking their grey balding heads into the snow as they aimlessly run in circles, coughing and mumbling incoherently.

No one emerges from the main house to yell over the darkness to our firepit, “Stop.” Even if they did, their tone would say they didn’t really mean it, anyways.

We stop, only when we run out of snowballs, whisky, breath, or consciousness.

​Piedmont bunkhouse

In the end, what should we call ourselves? You know — a group name. Certainly, no series of last names as in some incorporated gaggle of lawyers. Barf. The Travellers, perhaps. It’d match up well with some of the spookier things we saw and did way back when as well as those we see and hear nowadays around the ring. We could create an obfuscating legend claiming we are the only known surviving members of a tribe of wandering warriors, with an ancestry going back so far that our exact origins have become extremely difficult to separate from the Chairman’s well spun legends and myths that have grown around us.

Well it’s all right, sitting around in the breeze
Well it’s all right, as we live the life as we please
Well it’s all right, doing the best we can
Well it’s all right, as we lend each other a hand

Don’t sit around, waiting for the phone to ring
Waiting for someone to tell us everything
Sitting around wondering what tomorrow will bring
Certainly not some diamond ring

Maybe somewhere down the road aways
They’ll think of us, wondering where we were back in those days
Maybe somewhere down the road when somebody plays
Jimi’s Purple Haze

Don’t have to be ashamed of the cars we no longer drive
We’re just glad to be here, happy the Chairman’s keeping us alive
It don’t matter if we’re by his side
We’re satisfied

Well it’s all right, even though we’re old and gray
Well it’s all right, we still got something to say
Well it’s all right, remember to live and let live
Well it’s all right, the best we can do is forgive

Tip of the hat to the Traveling Wilburys.

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