Sic Semper

It's been a weird week, no? The odd, enantiomorphic death of the Pardoner and the Demon, the catafalqued Rotunda and the neck snap in Baghdad. Actinic Capitol and dank execution stairway. A dark ending to a dark, dark year, with another record-setting month of violence in Iraq.

We drove to visit in-laws in North Carolina for the holidays, and did stopovers in DC on the way down and Philadelphia on the way back to provide some teachable moments for our 7 year old.

Philadelphia is enough of a relic to be unproblematic, but how do you explain DC to an inquisitive child? An entire city, a bureaucratic layer, dedicated to the inertia of policy, a whole town of the middle management that consultants continually struggle against; "Veterans still in shell shock from ordnance twenty years obsolete," as Pynchon has it.

In DC, we saw the top hat Lincoln wore to Ford's Theater; in Philly, a chunk of John Wilkes Booth's trachea. When you're a kid, you can just enjoy the experiences. It's we adults who are sentenced to understanding.

Okay, I'm still tired from driving 1,500 miles. I'll be back to my cheery self shortly.