Ch-Ch-Changes

Change is hard. It’s not our fault; the human brain is hard-wired to favor consistency and reject the unfamiliar. In fact, fear of change is such a universal emotion that literature and film are replete with characters whose stories revolve around it. If you’ve ever sobbed your way through watched a Pixar movie, you know what we’re talking about. Woody doesn’t want Buzz Lightyear to replace him as Andy’s favorite toy. Carl doesn’t want to leave a home that connects him to the life he lived with Ellie. Joy can’t accept that Riley’s emotional landscape has shifted after moving to San Francisco. Letting the animators deal with their unresolved childhood trauma and fear of change by inflicting it on the viewing public is basically the studio’s entire business model!

But it’s not just emotionally stunted children’s movie protagonists who resist change–all kinds of people do it for all kinds of reasons. No one reading this needs us to explain that throughout history, those with wealth and power have fought tooth, nail, and anonymous super PAC donation to protect their vested interest in the status quo. There’s certainly more than a little bit of that dynamic motivating the current opposition to local zoning reform efforts (with slightly less dark money and significantly more misleading Powerpoint slides). Yet the opposition goes beyond economic self-interest; for a lot of people, it’s psychological. Change can feel scary because it requires openness to new experiences, which in turn requires imagination. Specifically, the positive kind of imagination that’s rooted in optimism and faith, not the bad kind of imagination that runs away with us until we’re convinced that the future brings nothing but a parade of horribles leading ultimately to Alexandria’s conversion into Dante’s ninth circle of hell (Crystal City).

This kind of doomsaying is all too common, and it’s nothing new. Opposition to change has been a consistent theme throughout Alexandria’s history. Over the last century, residents have pushed back against things that at the time they couldn’t imagine, but that now in retrospect it would be impossible to imagine our city without. 

For example, in the early twentieth century, people who lived in the town of Potomac—now Del Ray—didn’t want to be annexed into Alexandria. Or how about—after World War II, the local chamber of commerce fought the idea of creating an Old Town historic district. This is a good one—in the 1970s the Old Town Civic Association opposed proposals to turn the Torpedo Factory into an arts center, which is now our single most important tourist attraction. And more recently, people lost their goddamn minds over the waterfront redevelopment plans that have completely revitalized our stretch of Potomac shoreline. The pattern is clear: Alexandrians have gotten into the habit of seeing anything new or different as a threat to all that is good in the world and reacting in the most dramatic way possible.

The fact that the pessimists have historically batted close to zero has not, alas, stopped people from freaking the fuck out once again about the Zoning for Housing proposals. These aren’t even huge changes! They’re incremental (yet still critically important)! You’d think it might occur to even one member of the Coalition for a Livable* Alexandria (*offer not valid for pedestrians) that maybe, just maybe, this initiative might turn out okay like all the other changes we recounted in the previous paragraph.

Here’s the thing, what we actually wish people would remember as they work themselves into a lather Mavis Beacon-ing their fever dreams onto their neighborhood listservs: there’s no such thing as preventing change. Change is always happening. Buildings are demolished and rebuilt. Homes are replaced with new ones (preferably if they’re 70% shiplap), people come and go, trees grow and—OH GOD NO—get cut down. We can’t stop it; we can only try to influence what comes next. The status quo that some people want to preserve? It disappeared as you were reading this. We have a new status quo now. Whoop, there it goes again! That status quo sure is a slippery little fucker.

So just… let it go (shit, that’s a different sort of Disney reference). Move forward. Imagine the future we actively want. Live, laugh, love (ok now we’re really mixing the film metaphors beyond repair). All those characters in movies and books who resist change? They always come around in the end, because change is growth and stasis is boring as hell. Together, all of us are the protagonists of Alexandria’s story—and not just because we have a deplorable excess of main character energy. It’s about time we grow up and start acting like it.

Things You May Have Missed Because You Have a Life 

• Del Ray’s Halloween parade was recognized as one of the 10 best in the nation, alongside notable metropolises like New York City, New Orleans, Chicago and [clears throat] Rehoboth Beach Delaware.
• ALXnow ran a very cool profile of long-time King Street business owner and champion of the popular holiday lights, David Martin. And sure, he’s an older gent with white hair, and a white beard, and a twinkle in his eye who loves Christmas lights, but that doesn’t mean you should start jumping to any concl- OHMYGOD DOES SANTA CLAUS LIVE IN ALEXANDRIA???
• Craft beer, local pizza, and sustainable energy? Surprisingly, not the Hinge profile for most of the 25-30 year old guys around here but rather a new location of Atlas Brew Works, opening in Carlyle.
• The city was honored with a national award that identifies technology used to make government more responsive, for our equity index maps. Listen, we’re not saying that technology + good government + maps is the specific kink of any particular local elected official but like, has anyone actually seen Mayor Wilson and this so-called “Center for Digital Government” in the same room at the same time?

Local Discourse Power Rankings

1. Causes, Lost or Otherwise Misplaced (Last week: 1). Much to our eternal chagrin (Eternal Chagrin also being the name of Robert E. Lee’s second favorite horse), the dialogue about renaming streets honoring Original Recipe January 6th-ers has dragged into a second week. Not content to merely let their heroes settle for the superlative Most Likely to Be Set On Fire by General William Tecumseh Sherman, latter-day defenders of these dopes are clinging to the preservation of their names on small green rectangles of metal like they’re the hug they never got from their dads. Listen, adult man pretending to be Confederate President Jefferson Davis on the website formerly known as Twitter: we get it. You are clearly a serious person of substance deserving of our deference and respect. And yes, it’s frustrating that your mom isn’t bringing the Totino’s to the basement fast enough. But that’s not reason enough to yell at the rest of us. Try that mantra your therapist has you working on, the one about it not being your fault Stonewall Jackson got shot by his own men. Yeah, there we go. Say it a couple more times. Doesn’t that feel better already? 
2. Zoning (Last week: 5). Big week for the rolling musical revue that’s become our citywide debate about whether we should keep doing Hunger Games for Houses or nah, as everyone’s favorite public access channel programming entered the fray. At its absolute best, Agenda Alexandria is like a shut-in’s idea of a hot date night. Sort of a Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me for people that think spicing up their life is ordering the coleslaw side instead of the fruit cup with their regular club sandwich order at Table Talk. At its worst (and this week was, to be clear [Jean Ralphio voice] the wooooooooorst) it’s little more than reactionary propaganda dressed in the drag of high school debate club. What was pitched as a “balanced” conversation about housing with two opposing sets of “advocates” instead featured the founder and primary spokesperson of Coalition for a Livable* Alexandria (*offer not redeemable by teachers, cops, or firefighters) alongside a political candidate from Arlington(??) and moderated by a man who has an anti-housing sign (more on this below) in front of HIS OWN HOUSE and famously offered on Facebook to fist-fight the mayor for not being at a location where he imagined the mayor was. These hilariously biased nitwits were paired up with… a city staffer and a city planning commissioner? Who despite not actually being advocates for the other “side” still somehow absolutely waxed the floor with those three NIMBY doorposts? We really really need a new season of Virgin River or something, our evening entertainment options right now absolutely suck.
3. Yard Signs (Last week: NR). Ours is a city of proud symbols and traditions. We love our bricks, we love our ships, we love our dog parks. What we most especially love, though, is our yard signs. How else will your friends and neighbors know what you’re passionate about if it’s not printed on 3 square feet of cardboard and planted in your front yard? As we move through our community we must be able to look around and be comforted by the hate left homeless, the science believed in, and the kindness spread. But this powerful tool for social change is not always wielded responsibly. Of late, a new sign has started sprouting on local lawns. One that proclaims NO ZONING CHANGES in a feckless five-color palette, with a tagline appended in six-point font that says “Keel Alexander’s Loverboys” [squints] sorry, that’s “Keep Alexandria Livable.” The overall effect is “graphic design is my passion” with overtones of “landed gentry.” It remains to be seen if this masterclass in visual messaging will attain the level of success reached by its spiritual forebear regarding the bulldozed-ness of Chinquapin, or if they will merely appear and quickly disappear in the Brigadoon-like fashion of seasonal favorite PUMPKINS QUAKER AND SEMINARY.
4. You Idiots Are Doing This Road Wrong (Last week: 2). City Council had a long discussion at their meeting Tuesday night about how to stop people from cosplaying Fast and Furious on Seminary Road every weekend. That’s Fast and Furious the movie franchise, not to be confused with the new anti-housing group (This Is All Happening Too) Fast and (I Am) Furious (About It). During the discussion, the mayor remarked that the city can take some steps to dissuade motorists from holding demolition derbies in Ron McNeely’s front yard, but “they will involve trade-offs. There will be trade-offs with lane capacity. Trade-offs with potential congestion.” At this point everyone in attendance lowered their #JusticeForRon signs. Road safety? Haha, what? No no, it’s totally fine. You don’t need to take away any lanes. Forget we said anything.
5. Is Our Children Learning (Last week: NR). When we last checked in on the goings-on at ACPS, they’d held a lengthy meeting about significantly overhauling the board structure, a meeting that reached a crescendo when a member of said board pulled the old fake-phone-call-to-get-out-of-a-bad-date trick and walked out mid-proceedings. It seems that he wasn’t the only one guilty of ghosting in this process, as ALXnow reports that city council feels similarly stood-up, and as a result the ultimate outcome of the exercise is in jeopardy. Guys, we don’t think avoiding communication is what Dr. Drew would want you to do in these situations, just send a text message saying “I have to go accept my award for inventing Post-It Notes” like an adult and move on with your life.

Alexandria’s Hottest Club Is… Graveyards

We’re deep into Spooky Szn, that special part of the year when we learn which of our neighbors have a lot of time on their hands and know their way around a hot glue gun. Homes and businesses throughout Alexandria have fully gone all out with boo-tiful decor meant to startle and delight, to send a shiver down your spine or a tickle up your funny bone [Editor’s note: [sound of Becky hitting Jesse in the head with a shovel and dragging him away from the keyboard]]. Hang onto your butts, it’s time for the first annual ALXtra Haunted Hayride Halloween Hoedown (it’s just a picture round-up, work with us here) as we take a tour through some of the most excellent graveyards—real or otherwise—around town.

Graveyards are a classic of the form to be sure. They offer a great DIY opportunity and a fun arts-and-crafts project for kids. Or you can just buy the Styrofoam ones from Target and watch them blow away down the street the first time there’s a light breeze. But graveyards aren’t the only path to a great Halloween display—the real key is to just have a clear theme and stick to it. Take this yard for example, where the theme is clearly Victorian-era farmer’s market.

Or this display from a local business built around the very spooky theme “you’re paying $19 for a 10 inch pizza so we can afford two of those 15-foot Home Depot skeletons everyone on TikTok is obsessed with.”

Pop culture also makes for a great thematic anchor for any Halloween display, as evidenced by this excellent tableau titled (we assume) “Barbenheimer but for real.”

More pop culture! See, it works! You just take a recent current event—like the passing of beloved musician Jimmy Buffett in a tragic blender accident—and add skeletons! You wind up with a display that’s spooky, and funny, and gets people tal- hang on sorry, we’re super distracted… is the incredibly creepy baby on the horse part of this? Did that baby kill Jimmy Buffett??? 

And if pop culture isn’t your thing, you can always go with a reflection on current local events, like this trenchant commentary about the deleterious effect of gas-powered leaf blowers on our environment.

You can get pretty good mileage out of the socially conscious mindset, like this wry examination of the consequences of underage drinking. Take it from us, if you ever find yourself puking spiderwebs into a radioactive oil drum, you need to leave the party and get yourself to student health services.

And even as you tour and take in all these wonderful fake graveyards and spooktacular [Editor’s note: [Becky reaches menacingly for the shovel again]] scenes don’t forget to pass through some of our real cemeteries and final places of rest—most especially that of local legend the Female Stranger, our city’s coolest unsolved mystery slash awesome beer name.

Happy Halloween everyone!

The Alexandria Times Quote of the Week

“At the end of the day, if this is rushed through and passes in November, then what we’re going to see is life’s going to get a lot harder here.” - Roy Byrd

Yeah for sure man, build a few dozen townhomes and it’s off to the salt mines for all of us.

One Awesome Thing in ALX

Earlier this month, the city awarded its annual Ben Brenman Award for Archaeology (a word that is impossible to type correctly on the first try). This award can go to any person, business, or organization who supports archaeology (seriously though, why does it have so many vowels and why are they in that order?) in Alexandria. The honors this year went to a group of summer camp counselors who’ve been teaching local kids about the region’s history and the science behind archaeological methods—topics we definitely don’t remember our own summer camp counselors having any particular interest in. Back in the 80s and 90s, counselors were more into hooking up with each other, forgetting to put drops in our ears after we went swimming in the lake, and giving us nicknames that today would get them immediately fired.

But we digress! Past Ben Brenman Awards have gone to recipients like the creators of the Alexandria African American Heritage Trail, and the researchers and preservationists who have led the excavation of various waterfront sites. One winner was recognized for finding the oldest object ever recovered in Alexandria, a 13,000 year-old spear point found at Freedmen’s Cemetery (the folks at Visit Alexandria are still trying to find a way to connect that one to George Washington somehow, but don’t worry, they will).

What we’re trying to emphasize here, is that it’s pretty cool that the city has gone to such lengths to support these efforts. We have our own archaeology museum and even a city archaeologist (boy are we regretting the choice to write about a topic that requires us to spell this word so many times). Did you know that Alexandria adopted the first comprehensive citywide archaeological code in the entire country? Of course we fucking did. As we previously established, this city really leans into the whole historic aspect of our image, for better and for worse. But in this specific context, the way that we’ve integrated archaeological (surely one of those vowels isn’t necessary!!) study and preservation into new development projects and changing neighborhoods strikes a decent balance between looking forward and learning from the past. 

You can follow Becky @beckyhammer.bsky.social and Jesse @oconnell.bsky.social on Bluesky, or you can e-mail us anytime at alxtranewsletter@gmail.com.