Last week I avoided the crowds and toured the tidal basin just before sunrise and took some good photos of the cherry blossoms. It’s too late now, but next year I highly recommend that you push yourself out of bed, fix a thermos of coffee, bundle up, and haul someone you like to the Jefferson Memorial. No one is out there except photographers and the odd couple snuggled on park benches, and it’s a great way to spend the morning. It was hard to get out of bed at 5:30, but walking the perimeter of the basin in the crisp dawn air before the world is awake energizes you for the rest of the day. I felt like I took a mini-vacation in my own backyard.

Last week was a big deal for gay equality. Iowa and Vermont made gay marriage legal and DC decided to honor gay marriages from the states where they are currently legal. I’m pleased about this, but reaction did elude me for a couple of days until I heard young Evan Jeter testify before the Vermont legislature on behalf of his two moms. I was in my kitchen preparing food for my boyfriend when I heard him speak passionately in front of a room full of adults, many of which disagreed with him:

Evan Jeter Speaks the the Vermont Legislature(Click to Listen)

I’ve marched in protests for gay marriage, engaged the opposition in debate, and even helped start a failed non-profit focused on achieving marriage equality. I did all these things because of civic duty, but in my heart I didn’t give a shit. Marriage has always seemed like a gift meant for someone else, a party I would rather not attend. It’s a feeling I can’t quit. Yet, when I heard Evan Jeter speak, I was moved. Since then I’ve thought about the future arc of my life, the sacrifices and pleasures of commitment, a boyfriend that sticks around, and a perfect little boy who held the hands of his two dads while walking through Thomas Circle on my way home from work. These thoughts fill me with questions I can’t answer.

Maybe you see him standing on the platform and decide to stand next to him, even though it made more sense for you to board the train on the opposite end of the walkway. You’ve recognized each other on many mornings and you feel close because of this, and you wonder if he feels it too.

You don’t want to speak to him, but you think about where he might be from, where he goes when he ascends the escalator, and what his bedroom looks like when he leaves it in the morning. Maybe you crowd in to a rail car, and as your bag gets caught in a closing door a cute brunette with perpetual five o’clock shadow reaches out and pulls it free. He makes a joke or engages in small talk that hangs in the air with no place to go, so you both just smile and enjoy your manufactured innocence. Maybe as you squeeze through the semi-permeable membrane of stoic commuters you find yourself standing next to a preppy young man holding a coffee cup. You catch him staring at you and he looks away. As the crowd shifts between stops you are squeezed together, and you both reach for an empty spot on the overhead handrail. Out of necessity you face each other, a foot apart, each of you with an arm raised in leverage. He looks away but you examine the details of his face, the knot of the tie he wears behind his v-neck sweater, the way he likes his barber to trim the hairline at the base of his neck, and the erection that seems to be forming behind his trousers. Each of these experiences ends the same way. One or both of you walk through metro’s open doors, and you leave each other with something gained, shared, and undefined.

I was at an event last month with a large group of professionals who had flown into town to lobby their Congressional representatives. I was listening in to a nearby conversation regarding Bernard Madoff, arguably the most hated man in America, when one person brought up the possibility of execution. Nobody flinched.

As you know, Madoff was convicted in a 50 Billion dollar financial scheme, leaving thousands of investors with an empty portfolio. One Connecticut town alone lost $42 million in pension money, and famed holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Eli Weisel’s “lost everything.” Wiesel, when interviewed, said that Madoff should be “in a solitary cell with a screen, and on that screen…every day and every night there should be pictures of his victims, one after the other after the other, always saying ‘look what you have done’…he should not be able to avoid those faces for years to come.” I think I can do Eli one better.

Lately i’ve attended a number of social engagements that resemble live theatre. I’m amazed by how easy it is to vanish in them—even in small group settings—without the cast of actors noticing. They perform with little need of reaction from me, the audience. Monologues replace interaction and listening becomes less an art than something endured. Usually that endurance is limited,their voices leaping over each other in a chorus of competing self-importance. I can sit in the darkness of the audience and watch for hours. From the cheap seats these social invitations are revealed as bribes of food and/or wine paid in exchange for sitting through a performance.

The lights of the theatre may not be dimmed, but the conversations are. I recently gathered around a table and sat with five people for a nearly four hour experience involving dinner and drinks. Only three direct questions were asked of me all night. I usually prefer to investigate others, so it suits me when people fail to show an interest in what I do or think. However, on this night the chorus was so intense that even my questions were lost to the crowd as so much ambient noise. A couple of times I tried to cast a line of interrogative discourse through the declarative fog, but both attempts were blocked by a competing actor’s need for center stage.

“Notebook” is published every Tuesday. It is the weekly column by TNG Co-Founder Ben.
I read recently that it’s the anniversary of Kurt Cobain‘s death. I’m sure there will be the …