I Have Found My Nemesis

The one guilty pleasure just about everyone shares is the Missed Connection page on Craig's List. Reading them can be the height of hilarity. Receiving one can be the highlight of one's week. It's a scientific fact: everyone loves Missed Connections.

My love affair with Missed Connections ended on October 10th at 1:01am EDT. I didn't know it at the time, but someone posted the worst Missed Connection in the history of lame Missed Connections. It wasn't brought to my attention until yesterday when a friend of mine from college (who was lucky enough to retreat back to the shores of Miami), sent me this link. That's right. Someone wrote a Missed Connection to the city of Washington, DC.

Attacking the text of the "MC" is easy enough. I'd like to first point out that writing an MC to a city is a vapid exercise. A total waste of time. Who are you trying to impress by writing this? Why did you spend that Monday night in October writing this piece of crap? What the Hell were you thinking?

I miss you already, you wonderful, self-important, walkable, sporty, humid, pretentious, kinetic, dazzling, overpriced, overcaffeinated, cobblestoned, self-conscious, self-unaware, popped-collar-sporting, popped-collar-mocking, preppy hipster college town masquerading as the political capital of the world.

How many of these adjectives are totally negative? Humid? Sign me up! The author also damns Washington with some incredibly faint praise. Washington is walkable? What city is not walkable? Cobblestoned? Like, parts of Georgetown are, but, again, that doesn't seem like anything to be especially proud of. If someone sent me this paragraph and I didn't know what city it was referring to (so, eliminate the political capital of the world reference), I would think this was the worst city ever devised by man. What a terrible opening paragraph. This douche has convinced me to hate Washington even more. Bad thesis statement!

I was just 17 when we met. You were my first love, and you stuck with me through thick and then - the years rat-racing through college, that weird time after college when I worked in a restaurant, the overpaid paralegal job, the misguided semester of law school, and then even when I moved down to Virginia I still visited you every single weekend.

If your first love is Washington, you don't deserve any love you ever feel for another human being to be requited. I hope you enjoyed Virginia though.

When the plane hit the Pentagon, I watched the smoke from across the river and cried.

Fair enough.

I thought the scaffolding around the Washington Monument was beautiful.

I dunno. Maybe?

I sat in Einstein's lap.

I don't know what this is referring to. It seems tremendously unimportant.

When I was flush I drank at the 18th street lounge...

Oh, fuck you.

...and when I was broke I went across the street to Lucky Bar.

FUCK YOU! Lucky Bar is neither cheap nor fun.

I could lie in my bed at night and listen to the monkeys making a racket across the street at the zoo, and wake up on a Saturday and sit in my front yard and smoke a cigar with my best friends and watch your young families and your gorgeous, gorgeous young women strolling by.

Cigars? You pompous asshole. As for Washington's "gorgeous, gorgeous young women," what the fuck are you talking about? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. I am from Massachusetts. It's the capital of ugly women. I know ugly when I see it. Washington is an ugly, ugly town.

Georgetown was the neighborhood I loved to hate, and seedy Adams Morgan at 3 AM on a Saturday was the neighborhood I hated to admit I loved. Afternoons laughing out loud at the human circus in Dupont Circle, then getting my butt kicked at chess by some homeless guy. All those weekends we spent Running Against Bush. Man, that seems like such a long time ago. Hitting up Mount Pleasant for real, authentic Mexican food, or crashing with my Hill friends and waking up early to get breakfast at Eastern Market.

I hope people now understand why this blog exists. How can one enjoy a city with these people inhabiting it? What does "human circus" even mean and how does it apply to Dupont Circle? "Running Against Bush"? So confusing.

Running on the Mall. Playing Ultimate or soccer or rugby on the Mall. Flying kites on the Mall. Building a snow sculpture of the Capitol, on the Mall. Worshipping in the temples of Lincoln and Roosevelt and most of all, Jefferson. Taking pretty girls for walks on the Mall and ending up on the top deck of the Kennedy Center, looking out at your beautiful lights and wanting it all so badly.

Ultimate frisbee!? Of fucking course. By the way, I've lived in Washington since 2001 and have spent a grand total of 40 minutes at the Mall. This guy has spent an awful lot of time in tourist traps for someone who claims to love everything this shithole has to offer.

I love the "wanting it all so badly" line at the end. I suppose I should mention that the prose on this Missed Connection is laughably bad. I know that the low quality level of writing should be self-evident, but, just in case, it still deserves a mention. I can picture this guy at his computer writing this abortion of an MC and thinking to himself, "I am so fucking clever." The reality, pal, is that you're about five levels below Carrie Bradshaw in terms of suckage. This overdramatic prose doesn't fit the medium which is FUCKING CRAIG'S LIST, YOU MORON!

All those mornings for all those years, waking up before daylight to row up and down and up and down and up and down the Potomac. Running from the cops under Key Bridge. Drag racing up Rock Creek Park in the middle of the night, and a thousand other crazy stupid things we did together that in retrospect were idiotic but at the time, just meant being young and being broke and alive and full of ideals and most of all, happy.

Crew and ultimate frisbee? Holy shit. I am speechless!

Also, drag racing up Rock Creek Park? As someone who has taken the E bus line two or three times, I'd like to thank you for putting my life in danger. It goes without saying that the author has, at some point, said this to one of his buddies: "Yeah, dude. 'Tokyo Drift' was the shit, man. Next time we watch it we should totally get shwillied in the parking lot so the chicks can check out my Honda, guy."

And now they've finally taken me away from you, and made me come live in this desolate little town in the middle of nowhere where the highest form of culture is the Barber shop/Tattoo parlor combo, and the nearest movie theater is 40 miles away, and the people weigh too much and talk too slowly and I can't complain any more about strangers in bars always wanting to ask what's your job and what's your politics, 'cause around here, everyone's job is the same and people don't understand why a polite person would want to bring up politics in the first place.

This paragraph made me joyful. Total, unadulterated, pure joy. I am so glad this story has a happy ending.

I guess I never really told you how I felt, DC. They say that you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone... only, I guess in our case, you're still there, and I'm the one who's gone, but anyway it works out the same way in the end. But now that I'm gone, I just wanted to tell you hey, thanks for all the memories, all the good times, all the things you taught me about myself and my country and the world.

I'll never forget you, the city of my youth. You're beautiful to me. You'll always be my first love.

LOL!