Do the Pogo motherfucker, do the Pogo: 48 Hours in the Nation's Capital (Part 1)

Guess who's back, back again. So I took off work Friday and went down to the City Formerly Known As the Nation's Murder Capital.

Friday
12:20 pm

I get to 88 East Broadway to board one of the famed Chinatown buses. I'm greeted by a small Chinese lady who starts yelling to me, so I show her my email receipt and she tells me to stand in line. Hmmm.

Soon enough, a bus arrives. This seems to be the one. As we board, the dude behind me remarks "Smells like fish in here." We should be so lucky. It's not fish.

Fortunately, I get used to the smell after a while. Or not. The restroom smell comes and goes. But it's kinda funny how the front half of the bus is packed and the back is less than half full.

After about a half hour of complaining about the smell and the woman continuing to yell something about "DC" and "bus", our bus sloooowly pulls out, inches out of Chinatown and into the depth of Holland Tunnel.

3:30 pm

"10 minutes", the bus driver yells. I wake up and we're at a rest stop - still on the NJ Turnpike, it seems. Yeah, I've been asleep for maybe an hour? Thanks to my current relationship, I am no longer as dismissive of New Jersey as I used to be, but my opinion of its scenery is unchanged - North Jersey isn't much to look at, and South Jersey doesn't have anything to look at.

Nature calls, I answer. I stretch and get back on the bus. Without warning, the bus starts to move. I notice that half the passengers aren't back yet, and I see the girl who was sitting next to me running frantically. Turns out, the driver was just pulling up to make space for other vehicles. But here's the thing with Chinatown buses - you never know. It just might leave half the bus in some rest stop in the middle of New Jersey.

I stay awake for the rest of the trip, more or less. I've done the I-95 South trip a few times to go back to Chapel Hill and it's about the most dreadfully boring road trip, like, ever. At least I don't have to go through Virginia this time, and it only gets worse from Fayetteville, NC until the road hits its absolute nadir in Jacksonville.

So it's a good thing I infused my iPod with a few new tracks. I bought Guero from iTunes and downloaded a few fresh Common tracks. His new album's going to be excellent, I can tell. Out of the five tracks, four are either solid or excellent (the other one features John Mayer).

I wasn't a big fan of his last output, Electric Circus. I love ?uestlove but his production just didn't work for me, and the two Neptunes-produced tracks were simply mismatched. This time around, he has Kanye West producing the the whole album and it seems to be a working combination. Kanye's old time R&B sensibilities are perfect for Common and brings the best out of him. Common kills couplets like $500 sublets. He hasn't rhymed like that since 1994's Resurrection

Of course, Kanye does spot rapping duties but his drawly, half rhymes are a nice complement to Common's crisper, precise rhymes. I hope they end up working together more - they could be like Timbaland and Missy, each artist bringing the A-game for each other.

A lot of Jennifer Lewis/Rilo Kiley tracks as well - I should be tired of "Portions for Foxes" but it gets me every time. I'm not yet sold on The Go! Team, but the track on the Tsunami relief CD is excellent. I also transferred the White Stripes' White Blood Cells - I hadn't listened to the CD since late 2002 and forgotten how much I liked the album.

5:30 pm

More or less on time, the bus rolls into Chocolate City. The area near DC Chinatown isn't the friendliest of neighborhoods, as far as I can see from my seat. Though It is safer and more whiteyfied than it used to be, or so I hear. I can see the Capitol building - motherfucker's huge.

The subway is a short walk from the Today's Bus pick up/drop off point on I Street. The fare thing took me a couple of seconds to figure out - your fare varies by the distance you travel. But turns out, most short trips are $1.35, including mine to Columbia Heights.

The next thing I notice is that, unlike the NYC subway, the DC Metro totally has that 20th Century feel. It's clean, things seem to work, aren't designed ass backwards and shit's labeled properly. The train's fast and, again, clean. Oh shit, that board tells you when the next train is coming!

Where is the littering? The rats? The smelly F-train guy?

10:00 pm

Meeting up with Maureen's friend and kinda-bar hopping on 16th St, apparently the hopping street in Adams Morgan. This ain't Clinton St or Meatpacking District. This has more of a college town feel, albeit with older people and without all the VD in the air.

I also notice that it's legal to smoke in bars here. No, I realize it's illegal to smoke in bars in NYC. Personally, I think it's great that I can come home from drinking and not have all my shit smell like stale tobacco. I don't have a problem being around smokers (though I used to get nauseous at smaller spaces like Down the Hatch) but I hated that I would have to air out my sweater after a night out. I totally take the smokeless bar thing for granted now.

To be honest, I don't remember too much. Hard liquor has never agreed with me, except when I've wanted to get super shitty drunk. I'm tired as fuck and we make our exit from the bar, like, midnight? 1 am? Who knows. Back to the apartment for some ZZZ.

Continue to Part 2