| | I felt the anger burbling inside me as I waited for my food to arrive at the take-out counter of P.F. Chang's China Bistro in White Flint Mall, which is in a town called Kensington, but prefers to say it is in North Bethesda, because the white women will not bring their BMWs to a mall in Kensington to nearly mow me down with, as they did today. Like the ambiguity of its postal location, the place where I stood was similarly awkward; not quite the dining room, where people dressed in their best T-shirts and sneakers chowed on Chinese fusion cooking, and not quite the bar, where young men with winning smiles attempted to pitch jokes at their female counterparts, who solidly rejected their advances. I grew quite frustrated by this arrangement, and by the entire concept of White Flint Mall, or Kensington/North Bethesda, or driving to and from such a place to feed my mother and brother all the way back home.
Yes, it is good to be back on livejournal. I am scrubbing the place (and its sister place) of its adolescent dirt and grime, preparing it for a lovely future as a home for my considerably more mature thoughts, be they about Chinese food or white women, or poops, but I refuse to elaborate on that as it is inappropriate too.
The summer is long and friendly, and I await its end patiently but reluctantly. I realize I am alone quite a lot, and a day will go by that I speak to but a few people, and not until late, late, late in the day. I have had a few exciting days this summer - driving up to Baltimore to visit friends from college who live in places flung far across this state and nation; or taking the Metro down to U Street with good friends from high school (Gili and Adrienne among them, or solely them) to see an indie band called Tilly and the Wall.
It was unclear to me whom among the seven performers on stage were Tilly, or the Wall, and I found this fact quite confounding. There was a young woman who tap-danced upon a platform with great exuberance, like Sarah Silverman - exactly like Sarah Silverman, in my mind, and nothing else - but it was unclear if she was the Tilly of the band's moniker. I soon discovered that the Wall was right in front of my nose; a large gentleman, drunk and excited to see his favorite band, he eventually explained, had elbowed his way in front of me, blocking my view. And that is a difficult thing to do, as I am tall like the willows, and my eyes are like a panopticon that can see in many of the directions at once, if not all of them.
But this gentleman was indeed the Wall, and he danced like the Wall, arms akimbo, head strutting in and out like that of a peacock, or an owl with a neck. In time, it became more of a show to watch him profess his love for Tilly through the dance than to watch the tap-dancer herself.
Oh, yes. An indie band is one that I would seldom watch, preferring instead my traditional emo bacchanals at the 9:30 Club or the Recher in Towson, with its many youthful emo children. But like all things, I must grow older and increasingly elitist about my tastes, all part of the great separation of one with the mainstream that America is built upon. In this act of seeing Tilly and the Wall, I become a part of something more than dinners at P.F. Chang's China Bistro and quabbles over where Kensington begins and North Bethesda ends. Lo, from the power I have gained from saying I went to this show alone I could smite both locations into oblivion, and the BMWs that would hit me would instead sink into an abyss not unlike that of a reservoir's outlet into a dam.
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| | Posted 7/27/2008 10:42 PM - 38 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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