Greetings from Washington D.C. (one of the most expensive cities on Earth I think)

I had the trip from hell getting here.

I got to the Austin Airport around 5 AM Thursday because I had a 6:30 flight...or so I thought. walked up to the Northwest counter only to discover that there was no ticket. There never was a ticket. The school failed to pay for the ticket on time so he reservation got canceled. So here I am, with my companion that's going to D.C. with me, and neither of us have any way to get there. After an early morning detour to Kerby Lane for a serious WTF session with the powers that be we got booked on a 4:30 flight. We head back to the airport and wait there from 10 AM til 4 PM when we can board.

But wait...there's more.

Not only did we have no flight, we had no hotel either. We got a call at the airport telling us that we would instead be bunking with some people from Texas Christian University, even though I had called the hotel the night before. Turns out the school, once again, made the reservation without paying for it. They had actually booked two rooms for me, a single and a double, and then tried to tell me that I was going to sleep on the floor of someone else's room

Yo, fuck that. That's where I just snapped and started screaming at people on the phone. I had been at the airport for roughly 8 hours at that point. Eventually the head of the Texas State School of Journalism calls me, who is just as pissed as I am, and told me that she not only secured our room on her personal credit card but was taking us out to dinner the next night. Plus she got us an extra day in DC because we were supposed to fly out Saturday at noon.

Is that cool? Yes. Does it make this whole fucked up travel experience better? No, not really. I started the paperwork for this trip in July. It's not like there wasn't sufficient time to work this out. I still got a (nearly) all expense paid trip to D.C. but damn is the stress factor didn't blow straight through the roof, and it's not like don't have enough stress in my life right now.

However, tonight I walked to the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and the World War 2 memorial. I went to the Air and Space Museum during the day (the happiest place on Earth as far as I'm concerned) and overall felt like I took a powerful hallucinogen that was designed by Frank Capra. It's impossible to stand where Martin Luther King stood and gave his "I have a Dream" speech and not be moved. Likewise it's impossible to stand in the Lincoln Memorial and get a little choked up looking up at that huge statue or read his 2nd inaugural speech which is inscribed on one of the walls. You can't stand in the WWII memorial and not be moved. You would have to lack a soul to not be moved.

Somehow, despite being at a journalism convention, among some of the most cynical motherfuckers on the planet, I refreshed my "America batteries". Perhaps these are merely symbols but they mean something to me. The magnitude of history this place offers is simply unreal.

Tomorrow, along with the other things I mentioned, I plan on visiting the National Archives and seeing the Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, and The Bill of Rights. I have seen them before when I was 13 and couldn't really appreciate them. Now I can and it's probably going to be the closest I've come to a spiritual experience in a while.

We live in pretty fucked up times, and we have a pretty fucked up government, but I think we still get it right more often than we get it wrong on many levels. When I can see a kid's eyes light up looking up at Mr. Lincoln (like I did tonight) maybe there's some hope for the future. Maybe that kid will actually take their civics lessons to heart and actually believe, and try to make us live up to the promise held in those documents I'll visit tomorrow. Maybe, just maybe, Frank Capra had it right all along and Mr. Smith might just show up in this town one day. All I know is that while reading Lincoln's 2nd Inaugural Address, aloud to myself, I remembered that we have had extraordinary leaders and this too shall pass. That the powerful play goes on, the the words of Walt Whitman, and we can force the season of spring with our government when we need to.

Despite my own cynicism, and against all convention and logic, I still believe.

And I got an award...check it out.



Night all.