Well! I had a busy day in DC. First, I went to the National Museum of Health and Medicine. Thank you reader SZ for suggesting it! Although, I wanted to vomit, literally, by the time I left. I used to be really into the, uh, "strange," and I guess in my own perverse way I still am, like once I bought a -- a -- shit, I can't remember what it was, but it was some creature pickled in a jar for a guy who used to be my boyfriend, but at this point in my life rows upon rows of what amount to dead babies in jars just sort of made me want to throw up the egg salad sandwich I had just eaten. There were three jars in particular -- not the one with the conjoined twins in it, but in the case right next to it -- that had the, like, "too freakish to live" babies in them. It was horrifying. One was a cyclops. One had some kind of dwarfism. And one -- the one that made my head want to explode in primordial sadness -- had the thing where your brain stops growing, and a tiny head, and these terrifically bulging eyes, and the "the horror, the horror" thing about it is that it was a girl. Remind me never to find myself in a deformed pickled in a jar freak baby again.
(And I'm not even going to get into my responses to the elephantiasis leg in a jar, or the human hairball from the little girl who couldn't stop eating her hair, or the floor from the Iraq war hospital, or that all these things were nothing, nothing, nothing at all compared to what was going on in the endless buildings of the surrounding Walter Reed Army Medical Center.)
After I stopped wanting to die, I didn't go to the mini bar of my dreams, but I did sit at the bar downstairs and ate the best grilled cheese sandwich of my life. I wanted to make love to it, but I ate it instead. It didn't have a leg or a fetus in it, but a lot of truffle oil instead, so I was happy.
Then I wandered around and stared at the J. Edgar Hoover Building, because it's in my novel. It's so sad. It's like someone at the DoJ was trying to punish someone by making that building. It's a true Brutalist horror. Although I guess that's sort of a redundant thing to say. I went to school at a place that was a Brutalist concrete nightmare, and I would not refer to my experiences there as exactly "fun." Except for when we used to have races in which people rode in large garbage bins. But that's another story.
Next, I went to the National Museum of Crime & Punishment, which is awesome. I highly recommend it. You have to, you know, though, have, like, an open mind. If you are serious about such matters, you will not like it. But if you are into finding out what you look like in infrared, think it is exciting to look into a gas chamber and discover there's a mirror in there like it's YOU IN THERE, and cannot get enough of John Dillingerabilia, you will have a good time. I enjoyed the part where I did a video simulation that enabled me to save a screaming woman from an attacker by shooting him. Sure, it took me two shots, but it took the woman in line ahead of me three shots, so I felt pretty pleased with my performance, poor as it was. My favorite thing, though, was the replica of the Dillinger death mask, and there was this card next to it that said something to the effect of: "LOOK IN THIS TINY MAGNIFYING BOX TO YOUR LEFT, AND YOU WILL SEE AN ACTUAL EYEBROW HAIR FROM THE REAL DILINGER [sic] DEATH MASK." And then you look, and there is Dillinger's one eyebrow hair, like: Here is what murderous DNA looks like, people. The museum has a lot of typos, but all the sirens and flashing lights and prerecorded gunshots make you not worry about the technicalities.
I skipped the spy museum. It was too Hollywood, and there were too many people around, and it was kind of off my research, and I think you had to buy tickets in advance, and, well, that was that.
After that, I went to the National Museum of Natural History. That was pretty great. I had a literary epiphany in the mammals section. And I checked out the Hope diamond. And I went through the live butterfly exhibit. Good times. I think I prefer my museums with fur over organs.
On my way back to where I'm staying, I lingered about the Department of Justice, by which I mean I sped by it and hoped no one would arrest me for casting sidelong glances at it. I like the figure of the woman over the entrance with her boobs hanging out, like, "This is what justice looks like: my tits." When I got home, I checked my blog stats and saw that someone at the DoJ had been visiting my blog when I was cruising around the periphery. Eric Holder, is that you?
