I Heard it Downtown

I feel like I’ve been beating a dead horse a little bit here. Over the last few days, I think I’ve written 4 articles, and close to 3,000 words on my brief trip back to DC for the Obama inauguration. I’ve been looking through my notesbooks that I kept on the trip though, and I think there are still a few things I would like to flesh out, now that the pressures of deadlines and stylistic rules have passed.

Or at least I think so, because my notebooks are nearly incomprehensible, even to me. When I’m writing on deadline, my I frantically take notes, with little regard to things like “finishing thoughts”. I kind of take the “House” approach, where I frantically throw sentence fragments up on the whiteboard, bounce them around people around me, and see what sticks. Sometimes this works out pretty well…other times, like when I’m covering sports stories, I sit down at the computer, frantically turn through 11 pages of notes, and go “What the hell does G 42—+8 3-11 HIT mean? Was I taking notes of a Battleship game??”

A few of them still make sense. The words “Just for the feeling of being here” are circled and underlined, which kinda became the thesis of my first piece. Other fragments never really made it into the articles.

One was a circle that said Greyhound: Pass The Baby. I’ve done a fair amount of traveling these past few years, and since I don’t often have the money (or the foresight) to fly, I end up taking a lot of Greyhound buses. I don’t know how many of you have experience on those wonderful buses, but those of you who have know what I mean when I say you always meet characters. I’ve had folks try to sell me drugs in Milwaukee, heard prophesies on the end of the world in Pittsburgh, and sat next to many an Amish guy on the route from Columbus to Cleveland

(funny aside. last time I road with Amish guys, I caught them playing the Deer Hunter video game at the Columbus bus station. They were really getting into it too…high fiving each other and yelling. It was the funniest thing I ever saw, since these same guys had been glaring at me something fierce when I had the audacity to send text messages in front of them on the way back.)

Anyways, this trip to DC was no different. We had a woman sitting in front of us who had the most adorable little baby boy. He was quite the ham, and was entertaining everybody sitting around him (I tried to teach him how to drum on the seat). Sometime after we passed Pittsburgh, the woman fell asleep, and passed her baby around to other passengers on the bus to hold. Total strangers! Random Greyhound people were bouncing him around, trying to feed him cheezy poofs, etc, while I just sat there, horrified.

The other note that I didn’t really get a chance to write more about just said “Homecoming?” Washington DC will always be a special place to me. Its where I first became independent, first became intellectually aware, and on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, last March, where I wrote my first facebook note, and had the audacity to think that *maybe* I could be a writer.

The first time I was in DC, I joked that I thought the Potomac was full of Root Beer. Now, sitting on those steps, I could see it was filled with ice. My transfer from American to OSU was ugly and hard, and I used to tell everybody that I still considered myself a DC guy. But every time I go back, despite always loving it, my over-romanticism becomes more apparent. Its taken me a few years, but now I finally feel that Columbus is my home. DC is a place that I visit (with a grin plastered to my face the whole time), and I’m okay with that. The homecoming wasn’t so much when I stepped out at Union Station…it was when I went back to High St.

So, another 1,000 words later, I think I’m ready to finally put this story too bed. There will be new adventures, new political beats to break, and its time for me to move on to them. My only regret is that I still can’t spell inauguration right on the first try.