1. For the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), the agency that runs the trains and buses in the DC area, 2015 is its annus horribilis.
One passenger was asphyxiated in January; an empty train derailed in August, seriously disrupting service on three lines for at least a day; the agency is behind in track repair; the agency is without a general manager; lousy service has resulted in diminished ridership and so WMATA is facing financial difficulties. The system's biggest challenge will come in less than two weeks when Pope Francis visits Washington D. C. His visit will bring countless visitors to DC -- and they will want to get from one part of this city to another efficiently. Can Metro deliver?
Metro's problems moved me to stay home today. I had planned to see a couple of movies in Silver Spring and go to the Silver Spring Jazz Festival, but as I planned my travels on the Metro system, I learned the Greenbelt Station was closed and I just didn't have the oomph today to take a bus to Greenbelt Station, board a shuttle to the College Park Metro, ride the Green Line to Fort Totten, transfer to the Red Line, where trains were running on a 24 minute schedule, and then ride to Silver Spring and do the whole thing again in reverse.
So I stayed home. I spent much of the morning working with the black and white pictures I took at Greenbelt Park on Friday, posting some to my tumblr blog, here, and others to kellogg bloggin and all of them to my flickr account.
I'm glad I stayed home, as it turns out. The Deke was exhausted from our travels and the emotional demands of Ted's funeral in New Jersey and Ben and Tana's wedding in Chicago and then returning to work on Tuesday and I think it was good I stuck around.
2. Early in the evening, the Deke went over the Diaz house and I continued my home stay and watched the last episode of the first season of Foyle's War. Foyle's son, Andrew, an R. A. F. pilot, gets entangled in the corruption of an R. A. F. base near Hastings, is imprisoned on false charges, and his bewildering situation connects with a curator's robbery of an art piece and with two recent front door stabbings and murders. Christopher Foyle eventually sees through it all and exposes terrible crime and cover up at the R. A. F. It is a complicated and deftly constructed story -- and, in the end, emotionally moving.
3. For the last several days, the Buggles' song "Video Killed the Radio Star" has been playing over and over in my head. I've enjoyed it. It's made me go back and remember times I enjoyed back in the 70s, times before, and during, the song's release. I went on You Tube tonight and and watched and listened to couple of versions of the song. Over and over two lines from the song have been spurring my thoughts about how much I was in love with falling in love and how I'd get scared and try to deny my experience and while I could deceive myself with my intellect, I could never fool my feelings. The Buggles put it this way: "In my mind and in my car/We can't rewind we've gone too far." Yeah. I got scared. Several times. I tried to rewind. Couldn't. We'd gone too far. Or, at least, I had. I spent the night with ghosts, both wrestling with and enjoying a past that always lives in my present.
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