The evening meeting was in a cramped old house-turned-office in one of the blandly genteel neighborhoods of NoVa. I walked through a door that didn't latch and down a grubby hallway to a set of narrow steps. There, incongruously, I passed a woman dressed in Washington's typical young female up-and-comer's garb of short skirt, shimmery blouse and modifying conservative suit jacket. We both flattened ourselves against the sides of the stairway to scoot by each other, exchanging that common sort of apologetic half-smile that might pass for flirtation in a desperate man's universe. I was twenty minutes late, having blundered the directions, and everyone was finishing up sandwiches and getting down to business as I arrived. They had saved me a slice of pizza, which I at first declined. I hate eating in meetings with people I don't know. I won't eat with my enemies, and you never know which way a new person is going to go. Also, there is a social import to maintaining eye contact in a meeting, which I find to be at odds with the messiness of consuming food. Someone inevitably dribbles or sports a tooth-hugger as you talk to them. Someday I'm going to hold a meeting in which I serve the most logistically difficult-to-eat food I can find, and secretly film it as a performance art piece.

I sat across from the windows and watched the sky bruise blue and go out. The panes became mirrors. One person in the meeting was on speakerphone from Atlanta, because you can't have a meeting in the vicinity of DC without having one person patched in on speakerphone. My contribution was minimal. The two non-profits present are planning a large fund-raiser in December, and I'll be helping them create a website to promote it. Mercenary that I am, I was hoping to get a little money out of the prospect, but the meeting tended to confirm that no one there had enough to pay me for my services. This one will come from the goodness at the bottom of my heart. I foresee a site that will be beautiful, but small.

It was nearly 10 PM when the meeting broke up and we all went single file down the narrow steps. I stood outside for a few minutes talking to the graphic artist, who I thought looked like Beck. He had earned my admiration during the meeting when he told everyone that he thought their idea of using children's drawings as a motif was "weak." The swirl of mist thickened into something akin to rain, and I headed for the car. I was eager to get back to the District and home, but for a moment I just sat there listening to the faint skitter of light rain on the roof. It seemed a tremendous luxury to pause for something so common.

The ambient level of ions in the air changes dramatically before and after a thunderstorm, which may explain the intense feeling of anticipation and release some people experience in connection with rain. Washington drivers manifest this by driving like emotionally disturbed 12-year-olds as soon as the first drop hits the pavement. They are not the most conscientious and careful drivers to begin with, but when it rains, your most ridiculous paranoid fantasies come to life. Those few drivers who don't seem to be actively trying to kill you are helping the assassins by floundering into your way like cows terrified at lightening. It would be sheer misery, but the task of remaining alive consumes the energy of any spare neurons you would otherwise devote to feeling miserable.

Driving down the GW Parkway in the steady rain felt a little like being in a fight: alternate shades of anger, fear, and excitement. Concepts like lanes disintegrated in the rain-maddened minds of drivers. Down the road ahead I watched the bright hulk of a plane descending into National Airport. Spotlights fired off its belly as it came down, impossibly slowly, as if on a hidden string. Another came screaming over the trees as I drew closer to the airport. I could see the shine of its underside, like the belly of a whale wheezing its way through an ocean over my head. The scene around me was momentarily lit by its passage, then the scream dopplered down to thunder and the plane was gone. Somehow, this small event nearly made up for losing a few hours to this trip. Curving away from the airport, I could see the lights of the next plane in line winging its way in descent over the Potomac River. Seen head-on, it seemed to just hang there in the smeared sky. We drove right towards each other in the featureless dark, then out trajectories diverged and we continued on our own paths.