Freeway of Love

Salutations.

I write to you from the comfort of my dorm room. A room that’s bigger than my own room at home, but somehow manages to still feel like a jail cell with the terrible paint color chosen for the walls, carpet thinner than a deer’s blood, and furniture – and I use that term loosely – stolen from the Rooms To Go donation box. Although I will say the desk I have is fairly new. Of course it wasn’t purchased right off the showroom floor, but rather the “buy one get one” half off rack. But that’s neither here nor there.

Last time I was here was at the beginning of the summer, and it has been quite an eventful summer, for me at least. I flew home in the middle of May for my sister’s graduation from high school. My mom got a buddy pass, which forced me to dress in business casual attire for the flight (since when did airlines have a dress code?). So by the time I got home, I noticed that a lot had changed around the house. New doors were put in. New furniture. New appliances. New everything. My brother moved out, and somehow that justified my mom purchasing an oversized sectional and a 50” HD television for what was once his room. Now there are two dens at home. The other den has a 40” plasma screen TV, a coffee table, and a leather couch. I’m not sure why that room even exists anymore because nobody goes in there. Family from out of state came for the graduation. I won’t address how some of them snored to the point where I thought our home was being bulldozed in the middle of the night, but I love my family. The speaker at the graduation asked the audience to hold their applause until after all the names had been called. Obviously they didn’t see the barrage of Negroes in the audience. You know how colored people are when their children accomplishes something. We have to make our presence known in the audience. And for some reason, we feel like the child’s accomplishment is OUR accomplishment too. Whether if it means cheering excessively or acting like bats on acid, we will make sure we celebrate. But oddly enough, the Negroes weren’t as bad as some of the White folks. Some of those White people had party streamers, silly string, marching bands, and acrobats for their children. Okay, maybe not the last two, but you get what I mean. But overall, we enjoyed the benefits of a White organized event – coordination, organization, punctuality, refreshments, and ample parking.

The following month, June, I drove back up to DC to get the rest of my clothes I had left behind out of the house I was living in. The drive was normal, done it a few times. It only took me about 10 hours, although the GPS said it would take 11 or 12. Like usual, I made my first stop at Jack in the Box in South Carolina exit 48B. Come to find out that location had closed, so I went to the next one at exit 54. Got my 4 tacos, a Breakfast Jack, and a medium strawberry Fanta with light ice and two straws. The drive was fine. I sang my heart OUT to nearly every song on my iPod. Everything was dandy until I got to Richmond. [sigh] There was traffic. I assumed it was normal traffic because it was around 4 PM when I was passing through. That’s when I realized the IQ of the city. I’m not sure who told the highway commissioner that it would be a good idea to do roadwork on the main freeway at 4 PM on a Friday and close two left lanes. It took an hour just to get into downtown. Then it took another hour just to get through downtown and out the city. On the drive back home, I made sure I littered on the freeway for Friday’s inconvenience.

July was just a bunch of nothing. It was hot. That’s about it. August things were pretty much the same. It was almost time to take my sister to school. She got accepted to college in Michigan. So we decided to drive up there. The last weekend in August we packed our things and headed up north. I drove because I was NOT about to sit in the car for 12 hours and be bored out of my mind. So I drove the whole way. We left in the morning, around 6:30 AM. There wasn’t much traffic, but driving up I-75 was amazing because there wasn’t a cop in sight. Then we got to Tennessee. It was nice going through the mountains, although I couldn’t enjoy them because you had to speeding to not get ran off the road. Honestly, the speed limit signs might as well just have a picture beam of light on it because you have to be going at least 80 to be relevant on the freeway. Even the trucks were speeding. I had to speed up because I was not about to be punched out the game by a ’92 Mercury Sable or a Geo Prism. Once again, not a cop in sight from Chattanooga to Nashville. Then we got to Indiana. I thought my friend was joking when she said there isn’t much to the state. Little did I know she wasn’t exaggerating by much. Indiana is flat, and full of a bunch of nothing. Cornfield after cornfield, and factory after factory is all I saw. I couldn’t wait to get to Michigan. But once again I was traveling down a boulevard of broken dreams. My sister’s school, and the surround area, are…like……like…if the characters on Family Guy were a college campus, my sister’s campus would be Meg. The most upscale hotel I saw was a Howard Johnson. The most upscale store I saw was The Gap. The most upscale restaurant I saw was Red Lobster. It’s the definition of basic. The city was just deathly boring and the whole city collectively is unneeded. But I’m glad my sister is in college. The drive home was 12 hours, and again I drove the whole way for the aforementioned reason.

So I’m back at Howard, and not much has changed. People still don’t know how to walk in the right side of the sidewalk. People still don’t know how to push in their chairs after leaving the table. And people still have the audacity to show up late to class and leave early. Although I will say that Howard, and the surrounding area are on the come up. Gentrification FTW. There’s a Potbelly across from Starbucks now. They even decorated the store with Howard paraphernalia. Property taxes and rising cost of living are doing the dirty work of getting the underprivileged Negroes out of the area. And it’s unfortunate, but I’m all for it. There have been so many Howard students that have been robbed (some at gunpoint) by people in the area, and that’s something we shouldn’t have to put up with. I’ve lived in the suburbs all my life, and we like to do stuff like walk to the store at 3 AM for ginger snaps, or garden on Saturdays. And now that more non-coons are moving in, the police actual come and patrol the area [happy face]. The projects are being renovated. The sidewalks and streets are repaved. And there’s people outside jogging. All the signs of gentrification in progress. But I have things to do, so I’ll keep you updated on the foolery.

My life at Howard University.