We had arrived at a critical point, 13 days behind in the blog, 7 days until the looming specter called “home” was to become a reality, a rare sunny day in
Seattle beckoning to us through the windows of Alex’s apartment.
Does one pay their debt to past glories or suck the marrow from the now? Give in to the willfully imposed burden or throw it all to the wind? This is how it played out for us:
I got up a bit early to get my blog on and pose for this painting by 17th Century Dutch master, Johannes Vermeer:
The others began to stir. Actually, Gordon got up and jumped around a lot, Bryan got up and turned on his computer, and Brad kept sleeping. We made an agreement to get out of the house and hit the streets by 12:30. 12:30 rolled around, then 1:00, then 1:30…Brad, Bryan, and I kept typing, while Gordon sat in the kitchen stewing with anger, carving pieces out of the wooden table with a kitchen knife and making little stick dolls of the three of us, which he then burned in effigy with a lighter. Bryan was the first to smell the smoke, so he deftly disarmed Gordon and got him to calm down with no less than 4 karate chops, 2 spoons, a bottle of Jameson, and a shiny metal badge.
We ended up leaving Alex’s place around 2pm. The blog may have taken our morning, but the night belonged to Seattle, or so we thought. We walked from Alex’s house on Capitol Hill all the way into downtown Seattle. We went to Pike Place Market, home of the flying fish, Shoulder Cat, Remy & the Belting Hobos, and plenty of other weird shit.
We then headed to the Space Needle, a mecca for intravenous drug users since 1962. Just kidding, the Space Needle was built for the 1962 World’s Fair, and its top is an example of Googie Architecture. As if the name wasn’t enough to make you not take it seriously, Googie Architecture is a futuristic style from the 40s, 50s, and early-60s during which atoms, spaceships, and boomerangs comprised the creative muse. Not to be outdone by a bunch of sky-scraping futurists from the 60s, Frank Gehry designed his own metallic blob of insolence to complement the Seattle skyline. It takes a lot of chutzpah to poo out a baby blue, shiny purple, and gold train wreck onto Seattle’s most prime real estate, but Frankie G. ain’t afraid of nobody. Perhaps this quote from his wikipedia bio will provide a glimpse into the mind of this mad genius, “As a child, he would observe his grandmother every Thursday putting a live carp in a bathtub full of water to later make gefilte fish. Frank would observe the movement and form of these fish, which later would be an enormous influence and underlying theme in much of his work.” Other childhood events had equally large influences on Frank’s work, like when dad drank a bit too much Manischewitz that one Passover and decided to hide the afikomen in his ass. Oy vey!
This building houses a science fiction museum and a sort of interactive music museum called the Experience Music Project. Though we were warned about the hefty price of tickets from the locals, Let’s Go’s rave reviews spurred us on to this mysterious place. In an ongoing saga of lies and betrayal, Let’s Go told us that it would be open until six; it closed at five. Maybe they should call it Let’s Not Go or Let’s Come Back Tomorrow. The latter is what we decided to do.
We then parted ways. The guys headed back to Alex’s place to freshen up before going out while I staked out Antioch College, awaiting the emergence of my friend and former drum teacher, Justin Tomsovic. In the meantime, I headed to Starbucks and got a lesson in how to speak Starbuck from the girl behind the counter. Did you know that Starbucks is named for the pull-no-punches first mate of the Pequod? Did you know that Moby Dick was written down the road from my house in Pittsfield? and that the inspiration for the white whale was my high school Algebra teacher? Now that Interstate 90 connects Boston and Seattle, the circle is complete and Herman Melville will rise from the dead to terrorize the world with more 800-page books about whales. Sure, you laugh now, but when it happens and you don’t have a tattooed cannibalistic savage (or Maori warrior, as in the Patrick Stewart movie adaptation) to watch your back, you’re gonna bow down and call me Ishmael!
So Justin found me and we shared a bus ride to his home in northern Seattle. There we talked of music and life over a delicious meal prepared by his beautiful wife, Laila. Then I caught a bus back downtown to meet up with the rest of the crew. While waiting for a bus, I observed a street kid asking to bum a cigarette from an old black dude, who responded with a “Haaaaaeeeeellll no boy, you ain’t but nine years old…askin’ me for a cigarette, what I ought to give you is an ass-whoopin.” It was funny, in my head I pictured the man then pulling a 5-foot inflatable cigarette from his pocket and beating the kid over the head with it. (Disclaimer: despite the power of imagination, 9-year olds living on the street begging people for cigarettes is actually not funny at all).
We all met up at Smith’s Pub near Alex’s house for a few beers and some good laughs. Rachel Krefetz, another camp friend currently living in Seattle, was there to join us. We enjoyed the décor of light taxidermy and failed oil portraits, and it turns out that Alex Saunders is a master of African drum-making, who knew?
We then walked back to Alex’s place, on the way he told us about a local coffee shop where a man with a pierced, sweater-wearing iguana was one of the locals. Had I not just been introduced to Shoulder Cat, I would not have believed him. As it turns out, nothing is too weird for Seattle, because Seattle invented weird. As the rest of the guys went to bed and visions of sugar plums (wtf is a sugar plum anyhow?) danced in their heads, I stayed up until 4am writing a post for the blog, just like I’m doing right now. So which side won? Seattle is but a colorful, surreal memory; but the blog my friends, the blog remains…
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