The government might have shut down but the politics definitely haven’t. I had to delete the NYTimes and Washington Post apps from my phone just to cut my habit of checking for breaking news every spare moment (of which I’ve had plenty lately). How did I get here? To the place where a forced mandate to stay off work means I obsessively keep tabs on when I’ll be able to return. Haven’t I been longing for a break? A moment to reset so that I can get to a pace of life that’s actually reasonable for a human being? It’s been two weeks, and I feel like I’m still shaking off the momentum I carried over through the holidays from 2018. Like I’m still in the middle of a rolling stop but I can’t get myself to fully step on the brakes. I blame D.C.
A lot of people who love this town say they do because it’s a “thinking city.” Whether they live here or are just visiting, people are here to share their expertise. It’s true that everyone here has an opinion on the state of the nation and the world, and you’d be hard-pressed to get through a day’s worth of conversations with people without someone giving you a piece of their mind about the president, or the mayor, or the way the mayor swears they’re the president of somewhere. The thinking city has been a vice for me, in the same way I was magnetized by New York as a city of the hustle. All these cities are driven by a pillar of Western civilization – D.C. for the politics, New York for the chase for a dollar, LA for the vanity. If you had asked me what the Bay was about when I was still living there, I would’ve said it was the activism. But that was ten years ago. Now, it’s about enterprise – scaling up – someone could argue that whether it’s the activism or the tech, it’s always been about the progress, but I just don’t apply those as the same thing. It’s a shame, how the birthplace of the Third World Liberation Front is now the landing page for America’s captivation of international attention. Maybe it’s still the same gate, just a different direction of traffic.
When I move to LA in the spring, I’m not sure that it’ll be the best move if I’m hoping to grow away from being self-centered and driven by the desire for recognition. Dahlak left town because he said he didn’t like how the city made him look at other people, as individuals to either measure up against or brush off as irrelevant.
But maybe I want to be irrelevant. Wouldn’t it be nice to live somewhere where everyone sees or hopes to see me as such? It sounds like a mutual relationship. Maybe moving to where everyone wants to be recognized is exactly the perfect setting for me to go anonymous. Because as long as I’m in D.C., I can’t not play the game. I can’t not be a thinking person, and thus I can’t not be a part of the herd, equally vulnerable to the trappings that cause us all to wander and react in unison. So yes, I moved to New York to hustle, and I moved to D.C. to politic, but how interesting it will be to move to LA now that I’ve (supposedly?) shed my desire for fame. I can finally exist somewhere not in center stage, but in the nosebleed seats. The view from there must be great.