… the story of UD‘s college drug use.

Everyone’s talking about college drug use, onaccounta the Georgetown University drug lab guys, and a lot of people around UD‘s age are reminiscing about the drugs they did in the dear dead dorm days beyond recall…

When I search my mind for images of UD high, at Northwestern University, I discover one measly memory-trace. (Alcohol-wise, the results are no better. I remember vomiting spaghetti into a toilet after drinking hard liquor. End of alcohol story.)

It was Christmas, and my roommates had all gone home. I was still in Chicago because, being a fuck-off, I’d postponed taking a take-home final until the very, very last minute. I remember the test was about Walt Whitman in particular, and Romanticism in general…

I sat at a desk that wasn’t mine – don’t remember which of my roomies used it – and I played vaguely with stuff in the top drawer while pulling myself together…

Right away I saw a very fat marijuana cigarette. I took the joint out and lit it, figuring being high while writing about Romanticism made plentiful, plentiful sense. I also turned the radio on, figuring listening to loud music while writing about Romanticism…

Because I was a weed virgin, I got astoundingly high almost immediately.

The radio was tuned to an insane born-again preacher berating listeners about their sickening materialism, most starkly on view during the holidays. He shrieked of UD’s evil ways, her selfish ways, her godless ways, and threatened her with damnation.

UD listened, enrapt. She leaned close to the radio and took in every word, weighing it carefully. She forgot about her exam. She took a few more drags. Not many. She was high as a kite and the owner of the joint would never know anyone had touched it. She listened to the man as if he were Kant on the categorical imperative. She marshalled her intellectual resources to follow his argument…

But she had no resources, and after about fifteen minutes she gave up trying to follow his logic and turned instead to her Whitman essay.

She got an A.

Why do you think she went on to become an English professor? UD can do this stuff in her sleep. Or blotto.

12:01

Toward the White House end of the street, someone sings Hey Jude.

Wings flutter: The President’s helicopter flies over Washington Circle.

A car alarm.

White clouds float over a blue sky.

Wheels jangle at the university loading platform.

A FedEx truck in front of Rice Hall idles.

Flocks of swallows look black against the blue sky.

An ambulance wails.

A truck door rattles.

More music, from a car radio: You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman.

High piping as a delivery vehicle goes into reverse.

Hammering at the construction site.

A cawing bird.

Police siren.

The clouds darken and move more swiftly.

A heavy jet engine roars.

The Hey Jude singer starts up again.

12:55

UD likes GW. A lot. She likes the student culture of the place.

I mean, she likes the culture she, in her innocent, ignorant world, gets to see. UD doesn’t go clubbing with them, after all…

But what she sees, she likes. Take this woman, Ms I’m A Dumbass. UD just now passed her on UD‘s way to the Foggy Bottom metro. They were rushing in opposite directions, UD contemplating existence, the woman yelling into her cell phone.

It was clear from her condescending, exasperated tone that the woman was talking to someone – a boyfriend? – who’d been offering excuses for her failure. Maybe illness, a bad professor?

NO!

She failed the course because she’s a dumbass, damn it…

**********************************

She was absolutely beautifully dressed. This is another thing disheveled UD loves about GW, especially this time of year, with the air getting chilly. All the women are wearing the following:

High burnished riding boots, spanking new, with a hint of sadism.

Black leggings.

Tightly tailored long black jackets.

The classiest scarves imaginable, worn with insolence.

Add to all this a generous helping of Incredibly Young, and you get the picture. They stamp their high hooves up and down Pennsylvania Avenue, cursing at their phones, adjusting their black shoulder bags, tossing their lustrous manes.

Some of them are Mean Girls.

UD expects great things of them.

1.) I threw some plant and branch material from the back woods into the fireplace just now, and instantly the house smelled of marijuana.

“It smells like marijuana,” said Mr UD, coming in from reading on the deck.

“Totally,” said UD. “Could the author of Ferdinand the Bull…. ? No…” (Munro Leaf was the last owner of our house. We bought it from his sons.)

2.) Either Tabasco Sauce is losing its oomph, or I’m developing an immunity. The heat is gone!

… looking six floors down at all the police cars, and listening to endless sirens… I sit back down and read the Washington Post:

The evening commute in the West End will get tricky as President Obama heads to George Washington University to host a “Moving America Forward” town hall meeting for the Democratic National Committee. The event is scheduled to start at 7 p.m., but that means authorities will be clearing streets before then. The distance isn’t far, and authorities don’t discuss the routes the president takes. However, the street closures should roll through the area fairly quickly. The best advice we can offer is to avoid the area around the campus during this time period if you don’t have to be there. If you’re headed to points west, try Constitution Avenue and M Street to steer clear of the delays.

So why am I still here? Time to go — before they close the street.

… a large typical owl, hoots its eight hoots late at night from the back of our woods. Over and over, the barred bard makes its haunted sounds.

When I think of the way it looks, this invisible owl, things feel more haunted still. Its flat black predator eyes set in a medieval cowl. Cold and watchful in the dark, my barred owl, with a gray wintry coat and carved talons.

When the owl is silent… That’s when it whirls down from the black oak and picks a rabbit off the ground. Sometimes I hear animals shrieking as they’re taken.

***************************

I spent hours yesterday afternoon lopping and hatcheting out a small secret garden halfway up our hill. I raked grape vines and honeysuckle branches and then carried thick garlands of them into the woods. Who placed these stones just this way? I never saw them before, not under the ivies and ferns. Was it Munro Leaf? Did he write in this garden I’ve let get so overgrown?

As I knelt to pull a few last bits of ivy, an enormous buck appeared a few feet away, wondering what the fuck someone was doing in his woods.

****************************

Early autumn, when the days are mild, Garrett Parkers come out of their houses and clear their gardens of summer growth. The clarity of the air makes us want to clarify what’s going on in our muddled forests.

But mainly we just want to be outside, because this is earthly perfection: Cool sunlight over bronzing dogwood leaves.

Before I started on my garden, I joined my neighbor, Dick Pratt, as he cleared what he called the king’s highway part of his woods, which lie adjacent to ours. He mentioned that the town’s tree expert told him to take down his Norway maples, and I said I’d been told the same thing, and had already begun girdling some of them.

“We girdled a tree a few years ago,” said Dick. “It didn’t care! It grew a new bark.”

************************

I left a canopy of honeysuckle over the hollow. My garret, furnished with a black wrought iron table and chair, can’t be seen from the house or street. Who knows if I’ll actually write here, hidden from the world, hearing the Brunswick train hoot, and indignant deer stamp their hooves?

I suppose it’s a garden blind too, a place unseen from which to watch unwary hawks and foxes … A blind? A baffle? I’ve looked and I can’t find the name for this. What’s it called? What have I built?

And if, with a little lantern on the table and plenty of repellent on my face, I sit here at night?

It’s too late in the year for fireflies. But the owls are out.

… the oft-unheard of Garrett Park.

The restaurant, as veteran readers know, is a half-block from UD‘s house.

… beat Bethesda Chevy Chase High in football 42-28 yesterday. In dramatic style.

[A]t this time in 2008, the Wildcats had not won a game in four years.

… UD‘s friend (she met him through her sister, the Morrissey fanatic) Pete Dilima, with the Westboro Baptist Church people behind him.

The Supreme Court is dealing with a case against the church even as we speak.

****************************

A scene from protests and counter-protests in front of the Supreme Court building.

… Just after 8 a.m., Jacob Phelps, 27, held up a sign that read “Thank God for Dead Soldiers.” He was surrounded by local college students such as Alex Yudelson, 18, a George Washington freshman.

“This nation will be no more once we’re gone!” said Phelps, a Target warehouse worker and grandson of the Rev. Fred W. Phelps, who founded Westboro Baptist Church.

“Where did you go to college?” Yudelson asked, as he and other students laughed.

“Washburn University,” Phelps said earnestly. “I actually graduated.”

Moments later, Sam Garrett, 18, another GWU freshman, clad in only sneakers, tight boxer briefs and flashy white Diesel sunglasses, approached Phelps. He was carrying a sign that read, “Fred Phelps wishes he were hot like me!”…

That’s my GW.

David, the soil specialist from the University of Maryland, called this out to UD as she stood some distance from him in her back forest this afternoon, chopping down a tree.

David was in one of the many deer-ridden thickets in her half acre, planting a black oak between two immense tulip poplars. “The tulips will probably die in not too many years. You’ve got a Dutch Elm, too. The disease will catch up with it …”

As for all the Norwegian Somethings, get rid of them! Foreign interlopers, and we’re reestablishing the native canopy. Did UD have an axe?

She did, she did. It was one of many fine garden implements UD inherited from her mother…

She’d never used it; hadn’t seen it in years. It lay at the bottom of her little storage shed, its silver dirty and gray.

“Try girdling this Norwegian. Chop it all around the bottom, about an inch in. Only the bark is alive. The leaves will start to go… You should be able to push it over… ”

The axe’s blade was very, very sharp. UD girdled Norwegians here, here, here, and there. “And what,” she asked David, “about these excess honeysuckles? Could I take the axe to them?”

“Sure,” he said; and it was when he heard UD‘s cry of triumph at felling a honeysuckle – wood chips flew in her face as she slashed – that he said the thing about empowerment.

*******************************

Later, when Les UDs took a walk along Lake Needwood, UD explained to Mr UD that she was now a woodsman, that she enjoyed axing, and that he should expect her to axe many things.

“Along those lines,” he said, humming the famous song, “What’s a lumberjack, exactly? What does a lumberjack do?” He asked in that special I’m-Polish-and-you’re-American-plus-an-English-professor way.

“Er, much more than chop down trees,” said UD, trying to sound authoritative. “They chop them down, of course; but then they chop them into logs, and then they send the logs, uh, down the river, which is called log-rolling… Or they just, you know, transport them in whatever way they need to be transported, and, uh…”

“You don’t really know, do you?”

Then they drove to Johnson’s in Kensington and bought many packs of moss for their topiary bulls. Also they bought pumpkins.

Mr UD knows nothing about pumpkin placement, but as soon as he parked the car he raced to the trunk, took out all the pumpkins, and placed them here and there around the front of the house. He didn’t even understand that pumpkins need to be massed.

… are about to drive to Baltimore to see:

1. the Frank Zappa statue; and

2. the Katyn Memorial.

I’ll blog about it, of course.

… to want to read Margaret Soltan’s monthly articles in the Garrett Park Maryland Bugle. She covers the Town Council meetings.

—————

Link doesn’t seem to be working at the moment. I’ll try to fix it.

Not long ago, UD almost witnessed a Being Dead incident. She was in her office, typing away at the blog, when a massive something struck the glass doors leading to her deck.

Of course she knew what it was, and she approached the deck grimly. A bird. A bird had flown into her windows.

But this was two birds, two red bellied woodpeckers, and together they’d slammed into the glass and fallen, inches away from one another, under the deck table. (Here’s the table a couple of weeks ago, with my woods’ enormous mushrooms on it.)

So now UD had the questionable privilege of examining beautiful woodpeckers very close up.

They weren’t dead. They lay still, eyes wide, chests aflutter, heads occasionally turning.

In shock. Dying, or trying to recover? They seemed to look right at me, and I thought: “Ugh. Bad enough to be traumatized as you’ve been; now you get to witness inches away the monster whose slightest shadow you fly from.”

I stood there for awhile, staying inside my house, staring at the paralyzed birds, and I thought more thoughts.

If they die, Mr UD will have to dispose of them. I won’t do it.

If they die, I should get the really flashy one stuffed. How difficult is it to get someone to stuff a bird for you? And then… what? You put it on the wall?

I left them there and went back to work. I checked on them every few minutes. Quiet, panting, waiting together for death or recovery.

And then, minutes ago, I wandered over to the windows and they were gone. They’d made it. Flown off.

… the latest Presidential psychoanalysis, UD reminds you that her own George Washington University houses one of the form’s pioneers. Here’s a LaRouche interview with him.

UD just whispered these words to Mr UD as he fell asleep.

Mr UD insists that UD vote, even in the primaries, so after she taught her classes he picked her up at Grosvenor Metro and they drove to Holy Cross Elementary School (they usually vote at UD‘s elementary school, Garrett Park, but the main building’s being demolished and a new building’s going up).

As they walked from the car to the polling place, UD read, loudly, in the voice of Major “King” Kong, instructions on how to vote.

The instructions were in the booklet Mr UD had just handed her. He’d written UD‘s Polish name –Madzia – on the top of the first page of the booklet.

Inside the booklet were mock ballots on which he’d carefully marked every person UD was to vote for. Aside from Barbara Mikulski and Chris Van Hollen, UD recognized no name in the booklet. (Check out picture # 5 on Van Hollen’s website. That’s my neighbor, John Wilpers; his daughter Terry is just about my oldest friend. I wrote about John here.) As is always the case when Mr UD forces her to vote in primaries, she simply does what she is told.

There were very few people in the polling place, most of them fellow Garrett Parkers. UD was handed a computer card and escorted to a little booth, where she quickly touch-screened all the names Mr UD told her to enter. The whole thing took twenty seconds.

Mr UD took forever. “I was rereading my ballot,” he said, “to make sure everything was right.”

On the way back to the car, UD railed – again loudly – about the travesty of making Americans vote at a religious school.

LAST TIME I LOOKED THIS WAS A DEMOCRACY. ANYBODY HERE HEARD OF SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE? ANYBODY? ON OUR WAY INTO THE BUILDING WE WALKED DIRECTLY UNDER AN ENORMOUS CROSS. YOU MEAN TO TELL ME THAT HAS NO EFFECT ON PEOPLE? LAST TIME I LOOKED…

The Major Kong thing, the loud railing church and state thing — These are the ways UD makes unpalatable events palatable.

***************************************

Update:

LOOOOOK!!!!!!!!!

Thanks, Phil.