Meet Melpomene, the muse of tragedy

Hi there. You may remember me from my brilliant and incisive comments on this blog under the clever and obscure pseudonym “anonymous.” But you may not remember me, so I thought it would be proper to introduce myself and tell you why I hate D.C.

Unlike other metropoli in our fine country, many of which were highly populated by Native Americans before the white man arrived to seriously fuck their shit up, D.C. isn’t a natural city. It’s a contrivance -- a faux city built on a random swamp so the tenuous compromises between the northern and southern states could persist in the early days of our country’s infancy. So, D.C.’s main problem, the fact that it is fucking soulless, kind of makes sense. When our Founding Fathers decided to fix the seat of government up in here, it wasn’t exactly the best way to plant community roots. I think D.C. was probably the Columbia, Md., of the late 1700s, but with fewer crappily constructed townhouses. (I mean, let’s face it, a lot of the older townhouses we’ve got are at least pleasing to the eye.)

But obviously, the city happened, right? And here we are on the east coast in what’s supposedly a large cosmopolitan city, and shit is set up so you might reasonably expect it to be a cool town, like there’s museums and restaurants and universities and major media outlets and a subway and everything, but yet, something is missing. And I don’t think it’s just the lack of thousands of years of history that’s preventing me from enjoying this place. We all know what the main problem is, haters. Modern-day D.C.’s issues stem from one central and inescapable tragedy: the majority of people in or near the city limits at any given time are a bunch of self-important, self-entitled, douchetastic assholes.

We have stupid tourists who visit here, stupid tourists who live here, a bunch of fucking wonks who don’t live here but do work and get wasted here, and enough air-headed rich sorority girls that we’re getting our own terrible reality show about their ridiculous lives. Every time I leave my apartment (which, at this point, I do as little as possible), I have some bullshit encounter with an idiot and/or asshole. It’s usually small things, like passive-aggressive tourists harassing me because I politely ask them to stand to the right on the escalator when I’m running late, or some clipboard-laden teenager screaming “BUT WHY DON’T YOU CARE ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT?! DO YOU HATE TREES??” at me as I politely decline to chat with him on my goddamn precious free time, or some drunk asshole throwing the remains of his beverage at me from his car while I’m innocently walking home on a Saturday night (?!). But, you know, over time, repeated exposure to minor incidents of assholitry take a toll and turn a girl into a bitter, crochety, hostile old lady.

So, that’s me. And that’s my take on why D.C. is tragic. I’m on my seventh year of living in this crapfest of a city, so I do speak from experience (unlike my predecessor Liz, I suspect). Of course, the soullessness and the assholes aren’t the only problems we have around here -- you know, like, for example, pretty much everything from Metro to jury duty to taxis to social issues is dysfunctional in the extreme -- but the soullessness and the assholes are the ones that make me lose my will to live (or at least my will to live here). All the eye-pleasing architecture and quality building materials in the world can’t make up for the douchebaggery living in those Georgetown and Dupont Circle townhouses. My tragic encounters with those and other jackoffs are what I plan to describe to you in my contributions to this blog, although I hope I never have any material again, but alas, I doubt I’ll be that lucky.