Sitting in a hotel room in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC. The hotel, a well-known brand-name, is attached to a mall where every store is a well-known brand-name, and you can’t walk anywhere, and the carpet of green trees stretches to the horizon broken only by the white geometries of modern business architecture. I’m a long way from home.
Maybe I’m just baffed out. Transcontinental travel yesterday, so nasty these days, plus the W3C TAG did a four-hour telecon walkthrough of the (very early) draft Web Architecture doc, plus I’m helping set up for presentations of Visual Net to twelve (12!) different Federal Government agencies over the next few days, plus I'm getting swamped in echospam; someone has forged my email address on a massive spam so I“m getting virus-dected and no-such-person junk, a lot of which makes it through the filter, plus the privacy-at-all-costs crowd is giving me pretty sustained grief over wanting to count subscribers. Actually, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like most of this. But there is a certain fatigue-haze.
And through that haze, suburban Virginia feels like the other end of the universe from the middle-city walk-to-shops bike-to-work planet where I live. I read no essays in the glossy mags talking about the urban-suburban gap, but it feels huge to me, and growing wider all the time. No, I don’t know what this means.
