| Page 2 of 5 < > |
A Homer's Odyssey
"He's the guy saying, 'No, man, this is Washington.' "
Sticking Close to Home
Some people live their lives a mile wide and an inch deep. Mark Opsasnick has done the opposite.
  Mark Opsasnick at Alexandria's George Washington Middle School, which was a high school when Jim Morrison attended there. (By Lucian Perkins -- The Washington Post) Save & Share |
Saving options
Born in 1962 -- the year after Morrison shook the conservative dust of Alexandria from his boots and lit out for college, California, stardom and finally death in Paris in 1971 at age 27 -- Opsasnick is the ultimate homer.
He lives with his parents in the Greenbelt house the family moved into in 1965. He types his longhand drafts into a computer in the front room that his father, a retired lawyer, once used as a home office. The only adornment on the walls is a picture of Opsasnick's 1980 graduating class from Eleanor Roosevelt High School, where he was a basketball star.
Part of the reason he stays close to home now is to take care of his aging parents. But even before, he says, nothing ever came along to draw him away -- not a woman, not a career. He graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in urban studies.
"It just never went in that direction for me," he says. "Most [friends] got married and moved away. I just stayed in one place while everything changed around me. I don't question the way things turned out. I just accept it as life's destiny."
He doesn't especially like his job, but he expects to be at it for a while. It will be more than a decade before he'll qualify for a pension. What he prizes are the regular hours, leaving him nights and weekends to pursue his journeys into the past.
His road wanderings are ritualized. A trip to the beach: First stop, eggs and pancakes for breakfast at the Harrington House Restaurant in Harrington, Del., then a prowl through the Rehoboth Kmart, "a magical place" where, he says, he buys most of his clothes -- the XXL blue plaid Basic Editions shirts, the baseball caps. He always stays at the Francis Scott Key Motel in Ocean City and hangs at the Purple Moose Saloon, where he is king of the saloon's afternoon rock trivia contest, and where he wrote part of the Morrison book (he tells readers all the local spots where he did his writing).
It is as if the prescribed geography of his existence, and the predictability of his routines, set him free. They allow him to plunge deeper into his subjects than anyone else. What he is after is the bedrock, the gritty essence that made a place different from any other place, before the great cultural sameness began settling over the land.
"He is just totally obsessed, as am I, with documenting the denizens, the vibe, the atmosphere," say filmmaker Jeff Krulik, a fellow Prince Georgian who made "Heavy Metal Parking Lot."
"When things get bulldozed, there's a facade job, all of a sudden when things are cleaned up and made to look nice and nobody has the appreciation . . . [he] verifies and validates that it existed."
Friends have watched Opsasnick's metamorphosis into a bard of the obscure with a that's-just-Mark acceptance.
