The Smell of Money

I promise, my last entry of any kind for the week.

One of the more interesting things about riding the Washington, D.C., metro train home is the adverts you see in the Pentagon and Crystal City stations. Adverts for products no one can or wants to buy — mobile phones made by General Dynamics, stealth fighter jets, helicopters designed to fly presidents around, ships that show the world “what littoral dominance looks like.” (Because you’ve always wanted to know.)

The most frightening and amusing I’ve seen in a long time is from CDW-G, which (near as I can tell), provides some kind of service(s) to government. I can’t tell what kind of service. I’m not sure it matters.

All I.T.
All government.
All the time.

So THAT’S the problem. And the cause of the smell. You know, that smell, the heavy odor of Federal Reserve notes heaped into a giant pile, doused in kerosene and set on fire…

Also seen from the Metro train: a sign advertising brand new town homes “from the low $700’s.” A year ago this same development, which had just started construction, was selling brand new town homes “from the low $500’s.” All of this for condos built porch-to-gable of ticky-tacky and shoved in between railroad tracks and a highway just three minutes walking from the always busy and very noisy National Airport.

The two-lawyer household is going to have to do a lot more billing these days to make the mortgage payment.

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8:18 pm on July 8, 2005