im confused in the street, driving around in a borrowed car, cocking my eyebrow at things in a desperate effort to make them more interesting, trying to find something new about the place where i grew up, the suburban vacuum just outside of washington.

the new american architecture, the one they will dig up, is brittle plastic, its the signs and the siding, and its breaking apart as quickly as the spanish speakers put it up. theres an outback steakhouse, heres a starbucks, and i stop for a tea. its a dollar twenty, named after an emotional state. i sip the bliss flavored tea and watch the girl with very bad dolphin and bird tattoos on her forearms with the large ass simper. her attentions direct at the guy with the laptop, hes wearing a georgetown shirt.

"ORDERING:"

he was just talking about the elevated terror alert, about a mountain biker in california who was attacked by a mountain lion yesterday. i saw the same clip on the news. why does this kind of news get transmitted so far - why do people love to be afraid here?

back straight, i blink 3 times slowly, sitting by the window. my arabic cards are in front of me, not cards but scraps of paper really, kept in a ziploc bag. laptop guy looks at me funny, apparently unhappy with the unsophisticated approach i am taking to learning the language. obviously i need more product to be doing anything serious. like a laptop.

"sorry to bother you but - what are you studying"
"arabic"
"oh really? arabic? what for, if you dont mind me-?"
"its the language of god as revealed to Mohammed by the angel Gabriel."
"oh."

he looks at me and my ziploc bag.
ziplocs are for potato chips, he must be thinking.
he gets back to typing
i smiled.

i recall an accident i saw on the way to the spot we were sitting in. it looked lethal, engine blocks tucked unnaturally in passenger areas, exposed internals. 3 autos, brand new, 2 toyota trucks and a dodge car. the dodge lost. brittle blue shards plastic dotted the intersection.

im still confused.
where the fuck am i again?