{"id":6370,"date":"2013-10-16T15:36:38","date_gmt":"2013-10-16T15:36:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/?p=6370"},"modified":"2013-10-16T15:36:38","modified_gmt":"2013-10-16T15:36:38","slug":"opting-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/opting-out\/","title":{"rendered":"Opting Out"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"101613-1\"<\/p>\n

I saw Old Jim at Willow last night. In front of him at the apex of the Amen Corner was a brown Bud long-neck, a bucket with ice holding two more as reinforcement, and a triangle of a flat, foil-wrapped object.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs it that pizza you were talking about last night?\u201d<\/p>\n

He nodded. \u201cYep. It has the magic ingredient in the dough. The pinch of baking powder.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI would never have thought about it. Is that why Joe\u2019s Caf\u00e9 in Northampton, Mass, gets it right and I have gotten it wrong all these years?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"101613-2\"<\/p>\n

\u201cYou bet. They have been dishing out excellent pies on Market Street since 1938. This is my version with pepperoni and hamburger.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"101613-3\"<\/p>\n

\u201cI am looking forward to tasting it,\u201d I said. \u201cAnd I will stop at Joes the next time I am up there. I only get my tattoos at Lucky\u2019s on Main Street. The next one is going to be the letters D-N-R across my sternum. I don\u2019t want to wind up in the health care system.\u201d<\/p>\n

I picked up the wedge and slid it into my backpack next to the pistol and the iPad, hoping the toppings would not leak out and gum up either one. Then we made a point of not talking about what is, or is not, happening downtown.<\/p>\n

Jim\u2019s phone went off when we were dancing around one of the topics of the day- we had managed not to talk about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act right up until the moment that his dumb-phone went off on the bar. He nodded as he talked, and I heard him say \u201cFree, white and 21,\u201d and clicked off.<\/p>\n

\u201cWas that your lovely bride?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, her sister.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOMG,\u201d I said. \u201cDid she move into the place in your building?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cJust about. She has to learn to not call and ask about coming.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI am sure she just wanted to make sure that there was someone here, and that she wouldn\u2019t be sitting by herself getting hit on at the bar.\u201d I took a sip of Happy Hour White, a modest but satisfying Australian Sauvignon Blanc that Tex the bartender produced with a flourish. \u201cWonder why that never happens to us?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause the only place 60+ year old guys get hit on is in the fiction section of the Public Library,\u201d said Tex with a grin. Then he launched into a recitation of his weekend trip to New York, and the marvels of the Big City. He drove, of all things, and it worked out, though he left the car parked at the first place he could find. \u201cThe ticket was worth it,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd the women in that town are stunning.\u201d<\/p>\n

Co-owner and Executive Chef Tracy O\u2019Grady came in from the patio and worked the crowd for a while. Tracy is one of my heroes for what she does in managing the Willow\u2019s many affairs. She was in a pensive mood about the impact of the shut-down on business.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo one can plan anything, and the holiday season is already screwed. No one is going to make plans to go out and celebrate if they don\u2019t know if they are going to be working.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat applies to retail, too,\u201d said Jim.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Recession comes to Arlington,\u201d I said. \u201cSome would say it is about time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tracy looked at me askance. \u201cYou are not in the restaurant business. I always had impeccable credit before I opened this place. Never missed a bill of any kind. After we opened in 2006 I thought we were going to make it pretty well. Then the melt-down in 2008 and my credit was destroyed. I was behind on every bill, and I mortgaged the house to keep the place afloat and nearly lost that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHoly cow,\u201d I said, abashed. \u201cI had no idea. You represent everything these idiots are supposed to care about: small business, providing decent jobs for thirty or forty people, and they are crushing you. Maybe you could establish a special membership for the regulars and we could chip in?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou are out of work, too, Vic. How would that work?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know. Maybe they will start another war,\u201d I said hopefully.<\/p>\n

Smart Pat, Chanteuse Mary\u2019s sister, arrived in mid-anecdote and ordered a glass of the red. She does something exotic involved with legal interpretations of something complex.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t have too much,\u201d she said, \u201csince I have to drive back for Silver Spring for the last time tonight.\u201d Jim tried to get her to commit to staying with them for the night to avoid the late commute traffic, but she was adamant that she needed to get back to the Free State for the final preparations for the move the next day.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had to come down today to get my car re-registered in Virginia,\u201d she said. \u201cIt took four hours. I have no idea why the system works the way it does.\u201d Chanteuse Mary arrived, still in her work clothes and opted for a glass of red, like her sister. I marveled at the family resemblance in the two women.<\/p>\n

I ribbed Pat about Maryland, imaging a requirement to have a visa to travel between the states, and the antics of the legislature in Annapolis. \u201cAnd then it looks like we are going to elect that corrupt jerk Terry McAuliffe to start doing the same thing here.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"101613-4\"
\n(Mr. Terry McAuliffe.)<\/p>\n

\u201cYou are not going to vote for that troglodyte idiot Cuccinelli, are you? He wants to put women in burkhas.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"101613-5\"
\n(Mr. Ken Cuccinelli)<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know what the alternative might be. McAuliffe is a carpet-bagging DNC bag-man. Idiot or moron, I guess. I normally vote for the ones out of power on the theory that they can do less damage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jim and Pat both frowned. It all depends on what your definition of the least damage is, I guess. I determined that politics of any kind had gotten so toxic that it was smarter to just avoid the whole topic in polite society. \u201cI wonder why there is no real choice anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, there is choice, all right,\u201d growled Jim. \u201cIt is just so breathtakingly stark.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI have been thinking about starting my own party,\u201d I said. \u201cThe Opt Out Party. We would just not participate in stupid things. No health care exchanges, no carbon dioxide cap and trade, that sort of stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou may as well include elections in that,\u201d said Mary. \u201cAnd if you do that, you essentially opt out of society.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was thinking of a witty retort, like \u201cWho IS John Galt,\u201d or another glass of wine, when a lovely woman approached from the end of the bar and said, \u201cHi, Vic!\u201d<\/p>\n

I blinked in amazement. It was Kathleen, from the Phone Company. We worked in the same office down on New York Avenue in the District a few years ago. \u201cOMG, You look fantastic, Kathleen!\u201d and I made the introductions around the Amen Corner. Before I got to Jim, Kathleen stuck out her hand and said \u201cHi, Old Jim!\u201d<\/p>\n

Crap, I thought. This gets complex when we are living inside a story. It got more surreal as we caught up on the events of the last six years. Sure enough, our old office was in the process of melting down, again, and she had moved on.<\/p>\n

Kathleen explained to her associate Leslie the curious intersection of reality and fantasy that was contained atop these few stools at an un-imaginary bar. I gathered that she actually thought the Willow might be a literary device of some sort, intended to convey something subtler than simple companionship and the sale of alcohol, which it emphatically is not.<\/p>\n

It is actually a learning laboratory, since I learn something new every day. Today\u2019s lesson was: Don\u2019t talk about politics.<\/p>\n

Too freaking crazy these days.<\/p>\n

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
\nwww.vicsocotra.com
\nTwitter: @jayare303<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I saw Old Jim at Willow last night. In front of him at the apex of the Amen Corner was a brown Bud long-neck, a bucket with ice holding two more as reinforcement, and a triangle of a flat, foil-wrapped object. \u201cIs it that pizza you were talking about last night?\u201d He nodded. \u201cYep. It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-socotra"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6370"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6377,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6370\/revisions\/6377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}