Official Retirement and New Blog

Hey all! My "Late Independence Day Announcement" has finally come to fruition. I have moved into a new blog, Two Cents Richer. As such, I have officially written my last d.c. diary. Thanks to all of you who have followed the d.c. diaries over the years, both in its e-mail and Blogspot forms. I encourage you to subscribe to my new blog, and stay classy, readers.

Annie and Troy's High School Reunion

"'Cause I'm a million different people from one day to the next..."
- Bittersweet Symphony, The Verve

As I ambled through the skywalk at John Ascuaga's Nugget in my hometown of Sparks, Nevada, my mind wandered to television. My brain does this frequently, considering how often I have turned to the boob tube for comfort in my recessed state. This time, I reflected on two of my closest fictional friends, Annie Edison and Troy Barnes.

Annie and Troy are students at Greendale Community College on my new favorite primetime sitcom, Community on NBC. Troy is, in his own words, "a quarterback and a prom king". Troy is dense. Troy is dumb. Troy is also intensely nostalgic. Troy has arrived on campus at Greendale banking on riding his past glories into the future. In the pilot episode, he takes a heap of abuse for wearing his Riverside High letterman jacket throughout the first week of his post-secondary life.

Annie is an unpopular obsessive-compulsive former honors student who dropped out of high school after a brief addiction to prescription stimulants, earning her the nickname "Little Annie Adderall". Annie is neurotic. Annie is insecure. Annie is also a classic late bloomer. When her hair is not pulled back "like a librarian", she is delectably attractive - but she doesn't know it. Annie has arrived on campus at Greendale hoping to outrun her dispiriting past, to leave her high school haunts behind her and establish a new identity for herself at the most ridiculous community college in America.

Walking through the doors at my ten-year high school reunion last month, locking eyes with people I literally haven't seen in a decade, it slowly dawned on me. We are all Annie. We are all Troy.

The high school reunion is a truly peculiar American experience; then again, high school is really a peculiarly American institution. We may be the only culture on Earth that so worships youth and vitality at the expense of age and wisdom that we harbor the dormant belief that the years between 14 and 18 represent the pinnacle. The apex. If you were Troy, you spend the rest of your life trying to relive it. If Annie, to reinvent it.

Like most people, I suspect, my high school experience fell somewhere in between. I have fond memories of my life between 1996 and 2000. I had plenty of friends, no real enemies, and while I was certainly no quarterback, I did stake a Glee-like presence under the proscenium arch of the Reed High Little Theater. And I was a junior prom king runner-up (my date and queen candidate still refers to us as the "Prom Losers"); likable enough to receive the Benevolent Geek Party nomination, but sans the widespread popular appeal necessary to win the general election.

Still, somewhere within an unconquered insecure zone in my brain, part of me had been preparing for my ten-year reunion since I walked across the stage at Lawlor Events Center in June 2000. Since the invention of the American general public high school in the early 20th century, there has arisen a bizarre social hierarchy in which the quarterbacks and prom kings are virtual royalty. Other shapes, sizes, and personality types need not apply. Though I've always been perfectly comfortable in my own skin as a geeky, slightly quirky intellectual with an outlandish sense of humor and personal appeal, the shadows of unspoken expectations still loomed. Regardless of what we accomplish in our lives, however many degrees we may obtain, trophy spouses we marry, Audis we drive or diseases we cure, we subconsciously bow down to the archetypal royalty permanently crowned by the 12th grade.

Jeff Winger, defrocked attorney and chief protagonist on Community, explained it best:

"You think astronauts go to the moon because they hate oxygen? No. They're trying to impress their high school's prom king."

Having crossed the reunion threshold, let me tell you something, Sandy Frink. Drop the baggage. Nobody cares.

Which was exactly the attitude I adopted as I mingled with people I literally hadn't seen since the poker table at Safe 'n Sober Grad Night. By Saturday, July 24, 2010, I had thankfully stopped concerning myself with how fit or wealthy or accomplished I would be when I followed John Mayer in busting down the double doors. I decided to let my inner Troy and Annie out of their cages, and just be Scott.

And I had a blast.

I had a blast because I finally realized that I had been subconsciously (and narcissistically) viewing my friends, themselves real people with real issues and real insecurities, as cosmic audience members in the Shakespearean theater of my life. We all have our own lives to attend to, and I discovered that some people remained the same, some people backslide, while the majority of my friends had made significant strides in the intervening decade between the diploma and the dance floor. And by turning my attention to who they were and what was going on in their lives, I feel that they paid more attention to what was going on in mine.

So we downed some overpriced Heineken, grazed the buffet for wings, baklava, and empanadas, reminisced about forgotten fun, introduced significant others, and opened our emotional yearbooks for one another to sign. And we took a sobering shot of Jack Daniel's for a fallen friend named Kenny, who was taken from us in 1998 before we ever closed our lockers in yellow hall for the last time.

By the time I finally crawled through the back door of my dad's house in the early morning hours, I realized something significant. I can't for the life of me remember who the prom king actually was.

Late Independence Day Announcement

Albeit four days late and 5.5 trillion Chinese yuan short, I'd like to take this opportunity to wish all 35 readers of the d.c. diaries an ironic Happy Independence Day. Our holiday here at the d.c. diaries was a smashing success...we didn't have any nervous breakdowns, no drunken arrests, and only a broken flip flop tubing in the Delaware River. When I say "we", of course, I mean the royal "we". I am the only staff member of this enterprise.

I'd also like to make an announcement...of sorts. Within the next few months, the d.c. diaries will give way to an as-of-yet-unnamed successor blog, and will be retired into the archives of the Internet. Sad as it may be to think of the d.c. diaries floating around an endless series of tubes with the rotting carcasses of the likes of the Go network and Prodigy, this is not so much the end as it is the beginning of something new. Something big. Something mega. Something copious, capacious, cajunga.

I am declaring my own independence. I am going viral. I will conquer the Internet.

I have many reasons for doing this. The first is that it doesn't make any sense for me to host a blog titled the d.c. diaries if I don't actually live in D.C. I'm not ruling out a move back to Washington in the near- or long-term, but why chain myself creatively to one city?

Which brings me to my next reason: as I have grown and broadened my horizons, my blog has also grown and broadened its horizons. the d.c. diaries began humbly five years ago as a mass e-mail to friends and family back home in Nevada as I spent my first summer as an obscure Washington intern. Back then, it was really about D.C. and my wide-eyed experiences in a new land filled with people who don't say "dude" nearly as much as I do, and tend to bristle when I do say it. Today, it's about more. It's about perspectives from one American life on the entirety of that thing we call "American life". It's part political, part social, part economic, part satire, and other parts I haven't discovered yet. And I believe that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

This new blog, this mythic beast that looms on the horizon of the Atlantic seaboard, will hopefully serve as a springboard to other opportunities to cultivate my other vocational passion - writing. They say that the law is a jealous mistress. Well, so is the pen. I have two hands. I can hold a gavel in one and a stylus in the other.

I will continue to post content to this blog in the interim until I have established my new master plan to mesmerize the planet. Who knows? Maybe this newer, bigger, badder, bolder venture will result in a sparsely-attended book signing at Politics & Prose or one of those small-town boutique bookshops owned by a deranged aging hippie (the ones that have more boxes of tarot cards than anything else). Until then, keep your eyes peeled, and, for the long-term readers of the d.c. diaries (Mom, Dad, my old slow-pitch softball team, and the random loons who found me through Google), thank you for your support.

- The Management

The Boycott Problem

The needle is angled a little too far to the left for my liking. On the spectrum between "E" and "F", I need a little more "F" and a lot less "E". I can feel the "E" in the accelerator, shifting my way out of the parking lot of the SEPTA station.

Ca-thunk-a-thunk! Ca-thunk-a-thunk! Ca-thunk-a-thunk!

I really should have filled up the tank before the Focus turned into a Flintstones car. That would require forethought, which I often lack. Instead, I swear to God my car is actually borrowing from the physical force I exert on the gas pedal to make it the last 50 yards down Bellevue Avenue to the nearest gas station, the only set of pumps within striking distance of my God-forsaken lemon.

The sign at the station promises sunlight and hope, an oasis of green and gold. BP. British Petroleum. My salvation, an ever-present help in my time of need.

Go ahead. Shoot me.

The nozzle spews 87 unleaded into the tank. Anxiety eases; my streak of twenty consecutive months without a special gas can delivery from roadside assistance continues unabated. But as my anxiety fades, my conscience emerges as a substitute mental bother. Id has given way to superego. Images of bubbling black crude overwhelming the Gulf of Mexico, taking lives and livelihoods, stream into my field of vision. I have cast my dollar vote in favor of the destruction of a small swath of the planet. A conscientious American would have coasted on fumes until the car literally had a cardiac arrest on the I-95 onramp...

...or would they?

In the immediate aftermath of the only oil spill in history to spawn its own academic subject, hesitance to pull into a BP station is understandable and, at least in the abstract, commendable. Who wouldn't want to stick it to Tony Hayward, that evil yachting captain of industry whose company's negligence may single-handedly devastate an ecosystem into perpetuity?

Well, you're not sticking it to Tony. You're sticking it to Ed.

Ed is a daytime cashier at the BP station on Lincoln Highway and Bellevue in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, one of over 13,000 independently-owned BP gas stations worldwide. Contrary to what you may have heard, BP doesn't actually own the vast majority of the establishments that bear its logo. Instead, like virtually every other major oil company, it enters into futures contracts with local franchises to deliver gasoline, contracts that are not exactly easy for the franchisees to get out of. So by the time you have opted to bypass BP in favor of more "righteous" companies like Shell or Citgo, Mr. Hayward and the the shareholders of BP have already lined the interiors of their wallets and the cabins of their flotillas.

When I pulled into Ed's station just after noon today, my car was one of four in the parking lot. The owners of a Chevy Tahoe, Infiniti G20, and Pontiac Grand Am were the only other patrons. I meandered into the store to grab a Gatorade to quench my perishing thirst. Ed, an Asian man in his 20s, didn't look too excited behind the double-plated glass that separated us as he rang up my purchase. After he dispensed my change, I decided to raise the issue.

"How's business been?"

Ed doesn't seem to understand my query. "Excuse me?"

I'm delicate, but direct. "Over the last two months, how has business been for you guys?"

Ed wavers. "Ehh...it's been....yeah, it's been fine...it's been alright."

The four cars in the lot during a non-peak hour indicate that he may be right, but I press anyway.

"The oil spill hasn't hurt you?"

In an instant, Ed's eyes indicated that he knew what I was getting at.

"Oh," he said. "Dude, it sucks. Totally sucks. I see way more cars drive by without pulling in."

I give him my sympathies, and inform him that I'm asking for the purposes of writing about the BP spill and the subsequent public backlash. He tells me "good luck", and I walk out the store and drive off. All the other cars have left, and none have taken their place.

But it bears repeating that BP isn't the one hurt by the burgeoning BP boycott. With a few notable exceptions, most modern boycotts generally don't work, primarily because they either target the wrong "evildoer" (i.e., Ed and the managers/employees of independent BP stations) or they aren't broad enough in scope to generate the economic leverage to get the bad guy to comply. Your individual boycott isn't going to amount to much if others are more than willing to suckle at the teet of your nemesis.

Example: as a senior in high school, I courageously participated in the 2000 American Gas Out in an effort to bring gas prices back down from the earth-shattering $1.50/gallon heights to which they climbed. From April 7th through 9th, I didn't buy gasoline. I sure felt proud of myself when I, like every other brave soldier who entered that conflict with me, celebrated my efforts by filling my near-empty tank to the brim on April 10th. We sure showed them!

As of this writing, the primary "Boycott BP" Facebook page has 704,930 fans and counting. If only those three-quarters of a million people had a chance to talk to Ed.

Plenty O' Fish in the City

A friend of mine from law school, now working as an attorney in Manhattan, has asked me to share her own blog about the trials and tribulations of dating in NYC. Think Sex and the City, minus the odious blonde.

the d.c. diaries heartily recommends Plenty O' Fish in the City.