The Rockville dump; Dad’s Mid-century modern desk; two reggae songs on an early hardcore album.

I’m All Lost in… 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#25

I didn’t feel like posting this week because, to be candid, I’m all lost in nothing at the moment.

I thought about doing an anti list instead: stalled in H.D.’s book-length 1961 poem Helen in Egypt; bumped from my American Airlines flight back home on Sunday after moving Mom into a smaller apartment; and lastly, disappointed in Jane Wong’s Seattle Arts & Lectures interview with one of my favorite poets, Victoria Chang. (I like Wong’s poetry a lot, but as an interviewer, she was unprepared and disrespectful of Gen X-genius Chang);

Local poet Jane Wong (r) interviews poetry star Victoria Chang (l) at Rainier Arts Center in Columbia City, 4/2/24

And an addendum to my complaint about American Airlines’ rude but evidently legal “involuntary bumping” policy: Airports are not the “Aerotropolis” bazaars they’re all-dreamed-up-to-be in urbanist white papers and science fiction novels, at least not National Airport in D.C., where I had to spend the night, and where the shops and bars close around 10pm.

Stuck at National Airport, 3/31/24.

But I do want to keep the momentum going on this chronicle of weekly-obsessions project, so here are three things that gave me a little buzz this week:

1) The satisfying Shady Grove Transfer Station, aka the Montgomery County Dump in north Rockville, MD.

This is a landfill, so not an environmentally friendly scene—as opposed, to say, taking Dad’s stuff (and much of Mom’s as well) to Goodwill, as we moved Mom into her assisted living apartment over the weekend.

(We actually did make some Goodwill runs. And we also hit Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore, plus a little bookstore called Wonder Books to get a price on Dad’s dad’s 1925 12-volume Funk and Wagnalls Jewish Encyclopedia set.)

But mostly, downsizing for Mom’s new apartment involved several energizing trips to the accessible and friendly dump. Hoisting and heaving old stuff over the ledge and listening to it slide away and fall and crash—similar, I imagine, to the cathartic sensation of dropping evidence down a dark well and hearing it splash—is kind of a kick.

2) Sad footnote from the weekend move: I wanted to keep Dad’s amazing Mid-century modern desk. Along with his packed and mesmerizing bookshelves, this desk defined Dad’s signature den throughout my childhood. But it cost $3,000 to ship cross country to my Seattle apartment. So, we’re selling it.

Dad’s cool, clean-lines desk accompanied the majority of his days: 12 years in Rockville, 21 years in Bethesda, 22 years in North Rockville, and finally, as seen here, in Mom & Dad’s most recent apartment in Gaithersburg during the last year and a half of his life.

While growing up in Rockville and Bethesda, I often camped out in Dad’s den perusing the Raymond Chandler novels on the book shelves as he sat at his desk drafting legal briefs by hand in black pen on yellow legal pad. But more often I spent time lying on the floor there, and mostly lying underneath the desk. Despite this cozy ritual, I didn’t remember the “1966” stamp on the underside. It leapt out at me this weekend. The spring of 1966 (when I was on the way), is when my parents and my older brother moved out of their Takoma Park apartment and into our family’s first house in Rockville. I had no idea Dad’s desk and I formed parallel lines in history.

Despite the frugal decision to sell the desk, I did pilfer the left top drawer (and smuggle it home in my carry on.) I’m now using it as an in-box on my own desk, a knock-off of Dad’s that my parents bought me as birthday present 25 years ago.

3) Last week’s list included a prized LP cover tee shirt find: Bad Brain’s first record. As I noted in that post, while I was a Bad Brain’s adjacent teen at the time (1982), this landmark D.C. hardcore record is not encoded in my DNA. So I’ve been listening to it all week.

In addition to the catchy opening banger, Sailin’ On (“woooh, oooh, oooh”), the album’s two dub-inflected reggae jams—the off-handed Jah Calling , which sounds like an over-inspired outtake, and the more composed (and nearly twice as long) Leaving Babylon, with its thoughtful drum attack, no-frills vocal, and the perfect bass line—are the story here, on this record of precursor speed metal.