If you would like to know how it feels to have your brain lining peeled like a grape, spend a few days in our nation's capital. Washington, DC is a beautiful city, a place of blindingly white historic monuments and precisely run all-ages spaces and very good Ethiopian restaurants. It is also a demented Kafka nightmare-scape. To attempt to go anywhere by car, during daylight hours, is to go willingly into insanity's hot, clammy, chattering embrace. Traffic circles abound, and sometimes they seem to be looped into each other, like Audi emblems. There is a grid to the streets, but it's a baffling, nonlinear grid, a grid designed by alien mathematicians. Gentrification proceeds at an alarming rate; don't turn around, lest you find out that the homey dive bar that you walked out of, minutes ago, has been magically transformed into condos. All the buildings are short. Nobody can afford an apartment, even in the closest Virginia suburbs. And thanks to recent events, you can be reasonably certain that many of the cars currently clogging up 495 -- more than before, even -- are occupied by people who make a great deal of money by actively working to make the country a shittier place.