Tales from the Steppes

2004-09-22

3:45 p.m.
I wanna free fall out into nothin', Gonna leave this world for awhile

Last night was the County Council public hearing for the master plan I have been working on for a couple of years. Hours and hours of testimony from citizens and developer. Sounds totally boring but it actually got kind of exciting. Strangely enough, the president of the County Council decided to call people on their affordable housing bullshit.

We hear a lot of people that say something along the lines of "I'm all for affordable housing, just not here. We already have too much and we aren't on a transit line. Those people need to be near public transportation, jobs, and shopping." It sounds plausible at first pass, but when you've heard it over and over again all over the county, you begin to get suspicious. I won't go into the gory details but let us just say it got a little animated last night. And we were given a lot more work.

I didn't make it home until after 11pm and wasn't ready for bed, so I sat around and watched "Angels in America" until I couldn't stand it anymore and went for a walk. "Angels in America" is about the early days of the AIDS epidemic and I found it to be extremely painful to watch, though important to see. Knocked me right out of my perky mood.

So I went for a walk.

And got horribly lost.

I had some thinking to do and do my best thinking while I am walking. Unfortunately, I was not paying that close attention to where my feet were going and then had to try and divine where I was. I thought I knew and proceeded accordingly. When I finally came out onto a main road, I was miles from where I thought I was, in a totally different direction.

So I found myself on a road with no sidewalks or shoulders, at 1am, wearing my silk jammy pants, a tank top and a pair of sneakers. Not a smart thing. I thought about trying to retrace my steps through the neighborhoods but hadn't left a trail of breadcrumbs and thought my track record wasn't so good. The main road had hills, fast traffic, and "limited sight distance", as we in the biz like to say. Definitely one of those "What an idiot" moments. How would I explain any injury from jumping off an embankment?

I finally got home, after several dodges and a visual strangeness involving a train. The walk seems to have been a good thing afterall - a case of the journey being more important than the destination.