Navigation.

Yesterday I drove all over Annapolis, which was the USA's first capital city, and even though that posterity would be nice I'm glad they moved it to that half-breed swamp DC. Annapolis could not handle the nation's traffic and would sink into the Chesapeake. Although the old bars in downtown would probably still be open to service all the congressmen and senators who would stumble in after a particularly rigorous filibuster to drown their sorrows in liquor and complain about how hard their lives are to the less-than-minimum-wage beer wench as she refilled the pretzel bowl.

As I'm reading over that statement, I realize a particular descriptive phrase could be seen as bigoted because of the current demographic spread of DC. Allow me to remind my gentle readers that DC was created by pulling land from Virginia and Maryland, so it is a half-breed. Which is great, because if it mated with another city it would make a baby city with a more robust genetic code, and we need that kind of thing nowadays. Our cities are far too sickly, with their busted up roads and condemned buildings and lack of proper circulation. Lookin' at you, Baltimore.

DC It was also built over a swamp. These are facts. Ruminate upon their factness with a fine cabernet.

So I was driving around Annapolis after about 6 years of living away. I guess I've only been away for about 2, but 4 years of college can atrophy your geographic memory better than most hallucinogens. It's like you dump the old stuff to make room for the new. "So that's what stellar parallax is! Aaaaaand I have no idea where I live now." It really doesn't help that Annapolis is constantly under construction, and unlike other cities (ahem) it gets that shit taken care of. Every semester when I'd go back home I'd be confronted with some new traffic pattern that made no sense to me and screwed up my entire map of the city. And it's also constantly building new and taller buildings with new convoluted shopping centers. I think there used to be a law in Annapolis that you couldn't build over a certain height, and when you would drive there from Route 2 you could always see the white peaks of Suntrust Bank, which were designed to look like sails.

Now you see a huge apartment building that is only probably 1/10th sold because of the recession and were converted to rental apartments to avoid bankruptcy. Poor condo owners, who now find themselves surrounded by snotty 20somethings who only moved there to be within walking distance to all the bars in the shopping center below. I weep for the ladies who work in that office. They probably get 50 bitchy phone calls a day. There is nothing nastier than a bunch of half-rich people who are pissed about being upside-down in a condo surrounded by people who play Call of Duty on max volume and bring the party back to their place when Cadillac Ranch closes at 2.

So Annapolis' construction projects can eff off. I don't want to say I'm a bad driver because I think I'm pretty good, but I am a terrible navigator. I'm like an ant who gets the leaf dropped in its path. If you change how I'm supposed to get there, the entire map in my head erases and becomes an empty abyss of nothingness. I think it might be because I have such an awful time telling left and right. I can do it, but it takes me about 5 seconds longer than other people. It's the one thing that never clicked for me as a kid, so when I have no home base of reference and you change the flight plan it becomes empty infinity in all directions. Here is something that will help me out: If you are navigating for me, don't wait til we're right up on the turn and tell me to go right because I am going to either miss it or go left. You need to tell me on the street before so my brain has time to confer with itself and figure out what you're trying to tell me. It seems like for everyone else it's instant, just like thought or speaking. You say "go right," and all the little office workers in my brain throw their papers in the air and start rushing into other people's cubicles and punching them in the face and throwing rolling chairs out the windows. It's chaos.

In college when I was learning how to drive in Baltimore I had my friends tell me "this way" for turning right and "that way" for turning left. It worked much better. But driving in Baltimore is a whole other blog.

And telling me, "just go North" means NOTHING to me. When I go up a hill, feels like north. When I go down, feels like south. When I turn left it feels like West and when I go right it feels like East, so screw the compass.

I wish I was better at navigation. It's possible I'll be living in new places next year and would really prefer not to take four years to acclimate myself to the area. I don't want a GPS for a place I'm supposed to call home. Dad has a GPS that's supposed to be voice activated so you can do the hands-free driving thing while you're GPS'ing, which is a miserable failure whenever he tries to use it. He tries to tell it to find Annapolis and it sends him to Indianapolis. He wants to go home and instead goes to Rome, Texas. I want to be able to say oh, yeah, we're here and we need to go here, so we'll go this way. Like they did in the old days. Technology is becoming a handicap, kids! Hope you didn't toss your atlases, because when the End Times are here you're going to need them, and even then they might not be much help because of the disastrous state of the highways. All I can say is I hope it happens quick like that Nicholas Cage movie where the sun explodes and the aliens drop the kids off on the new planet. Although I bet they'd plan their cities poorly, too. So I'm pretty much stuck being a terrible driver no matter what planet I'm on. Stupid aliens. Take a few college grads and Ph.ds next time, you know, people who can repopulate the planet and rebuild it at the same time and don't have all that time-wasting puberty to go through. I volunteer - I'll be the griot. As long as I can bring a kindle with me I'll be able to bring at least 3,500 books. Sorry, guys, the holies ain't making the cut. Our new religion is Star Wars.