Didgeridoos are very large. The bro I saw yesterday wearing a green "Mushroom Life" t-shirt was holding one only ten feet from my face and it looked bigger than him. We were both standing in front of the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse, where, according to Reuters Daybook, my old Iowa sweetheart Susan Sarandon was supposed to be speaking at 1:00 p.m. on behalf of a Native American tribe opposed to a pipeline in North Dakota.
I can’t say I know anything about the issue—I was there to ask Sarandon a question about the Clinton Foundation—but a lot of what I heard did not pass the smell test. From the open mic I heard it alleged that a decade from now "two thirds of the world will be without drinking water." Someone else said that there will be "no water" at all by 2050, which is almost surely nonsense, right? For all I know the woman who kept referring to the proposed pipleline as "the black snake that’s being buried in the earth" is right when she says that the plan is dangerous. But I am not a scientist. How would I evaluate her claim? The editorial board of the Washington Post, the living and breathing embodiment of the center-right consensus in this country—to which Hillary Clinton subscribes—says that fracking is A-okay and that this is simply "science." The same people also insist that ripping babies out of their mothers’ wombs and chopping them up into little pieces is not murder and this is also "science." Do people who lie about babies also lie about rivers? I have no idea. This general epistemological crisis is a huge problem.
Anyway, I never did see Sarandon. After waiting for nearly two hours in the heat I needed to charge my phone and use a bathroom, so I decamped to Armand’s on Massachusetts Avenue for lunch and a few beers. When I returned, she still wasn’t there. Later in the day I was supposed to see another female icon, Ann Coulter. I meant to go to a book party for her latest title, In Trump We Trust. Many people have pointed out how amusing it is that her pro-Trump salvo is being launched only a few days after it was reported that he has changed his mind about immigration, which Coulter considers the most important issue of the election. It would have been nice to have written about the mood at the party, which I suspect was desperately gloomy. Unfortunately, the invitation made it clear that the event was off the record. Is it silly of me to respect these old-fashioned journalistic conventions?
The best thing about being a journalist is traveling for work. The pleasure I have derived from drinking gin and inspecting church architecture in cities as farflung as Las Vegas and Bow, New Hampshire, over the last year or so is diminished to some extent by the fact that I have a wife and a one-year-old daughter with whom I like to spend as much time as possible. It is always nice when I am able to wrangle an assignment that allows them to tag along. Last weekend I was able to take them to a lovely bed and breakfast in Fredericksburg.
The only bad thing about the weekend—other than Trump’s boring speech—was driving down I-95. Traffic was a nightmare. At one point it took us half an hour to go two miles. I think I probably could have walked to Fredericksburg faster, and it was a very good thing that we went back on the Jefferson Davis Highway instead. According to my wife, most of the people southbound on Saturday were going to the beach, an activity that I have never understood per se. Swimming is delightful, and so is the ocean, but most of the people you see at these places never go in the water and don’t care at all about scenery. It’s probably just another silly thing that people do because it is done, like keeping up with Beyoncé. Ugh, sheeple!
I should take this opportunity to announce that our editor-in-chief recently named me the Washington Free Beacon’s TV critic, even though I don’t own a television set. I will be using the internet and one of the office TVs to watch an hour of the boob tube every week from now on. Expect heavy coverage of those programs where people go fishing and talk about the best gear and so on. They are vey relaxing, don’t you think? Also on my radar is a new show about Henry Winkler and William Shatner eating sushi, which NBC expects to be a big hit on Tuesday nights. I missed the first episode because I don’t understand how to use their website. Stayed tuned for more!