The Salem Orientalist Society

As you may have heard, I am now living in Baltimore, which is a hundred times better than D.C. because people here are actual people instead of old rich guys in Polo shirts and twenty year old intern girls in skirts that they can't wait to tell you they bought in Paris. And, people that work here tend to actually live here, and not in the pretend way that everyone in N. VA and Silver Spring says they live in D.C. And this is especially good since I was living not in D.C. (and never claimed to, for the record) but in a sad suburb devoid of any kind of identity where there was nothing you couldn't find everywhere else. And where, if you were lucky, they would steal your license plates (like me), and if you were unlucky, they would shoot you dead through your window while you got ready for work (like they lady ten houses down).

I'm living in Roland Park, which is the part of town where rich people built really big houses about a hundred years ago, in a house that is both really big and a hundred years old, with the old guy who owns it, his son, and three other borders. The old guy loves to talk, likes to feed me, and is fortunately an interesting person and a pretty good cook. He owns perfume factories in Hawaii so sometimes he's out there, and sometimes he's at his other house in Provence somewhere. He has three Porches, two Alfa Romeos and a Jaguar XJS, and he told me I could drive any of them any time I wanted, but I was too embarrassed to admit that I can't drive a stick. Normally, he speaks very carefully and tries hard to sound erudite, but when he's been drinking he sounds like the Bronx that he grew up in. He used to have a ton of money at some point, apparently, but it's not mostly there any more, from what I can tell. It's kind of funny and makes me feel all the more like I never really want any money at all.

But as nice as Baltimore is, I'm defending my dissertation proposal a week from today, and if all goes well, I'll be free for the next year to do whatever I want wherever I want with no obligation to be at Maryland. So I'm moving to Knoxville in January and I wish I were moving there today. I'm actually in Knoxville right now, looking out a window at a Norway maple, thinking about what Summer was like in 1987, wondering about what it will be like in 2037, and realizing just how little time there is in between. Yesterday a 93 year old man who has a highway named after him (GA 100 in Heard county) told me that if I ever find myself talking with anyone stupid, I make sure everyone who's watching can tell the difference.

Here's some pictures of Baltimore, a cat in a windowsill, and a unit of toxic Easter eggs that I took in 2000: