the commute

I catch the bus every morning at the bottom of the hill, at Queen Anne Avenue and Mercer Street, which is the center of Lower Queen Anne and is a major transfer point for the area. I tend to sleep until the last minute possible, and hit the street during the last-minute commuter rush.

And I really like the experience associated with doing so; it feels like being a part of something great, a mass pilgrimage. I like the communal gravitation toward the node, a small swarm of us pouring down the hill like groggy robots and quietly converging on the bus stop in a line (also like robots) along the building facade.

And I also secretly like it when the bus arrives, and it's crowded enough to make the dozen people getting on at Mercer turn it into standing-room only, with people packed all the way up to the driver. It doesn't matter if it's a long, accordion bus or a shorter one. The 18 and 15, coming from Ballard, are popular enough to be packed regularly.

I like being crammed between a bunch of people while in my own world, plugged into headphones; it's like being on the metro, but with a better view. The route goes along First avenue, and I love riding through Belltown, looking out the west-facing windows to the Sound as the views between the buildings open up and give way to water and distant landscape as the grade falls away. As the bus approaches Broad, I always get to see Calder's red Eagle, framed between buildings, and I love the filmstrip of an experience it's a part of as each view corridor reveals a slightly different glimpse... water, railroad, Calder, cruise ship terminal, freighter, ferry, water, water and Alki, Pike Place Market, Market sign... then it gives way to viaduct and then shortly my bus stop at work, and that sixteen minute ride is just right to put me in the right place to start the day.

Unless, of course, I know the day's gonna suck. (Then I just enjoy my non-work moments while I've got 'em.)

Aside: There is a short, two-block-long street just before Broad that gives the view of Calder's Eagle sculpture at the year-old Olympic Sculpture Park. Its name- Eagle Street. Odd... the street name came before the sculpture was placed there. Serendipitous?

Ladro

I've become a bit of a regular at Cafe Ladro on lower Queen Anne (got my own mug, as well), and have taken to the baristas, most of whom I know now.

I have a couple favorites, and the one working the bar right now is the most endearing one; smart and eccentric and little, looking kind of like an early-seventies hippie playing music and eating shrooms in the woods, or actually a lot like one of the Band of Horses guys. Attractive in an eccentric way- fine, pretty underneath his beard I think. Soulful eyes that he might be playing up for me, because he's a secret, quiet flirt. He was just telling me to check out some photographer, and a musician, who are totally obscure, but worked together on some music, a french name, and I pretty much had no idea what he was talking about, but had to feign vague recognition to not feel like a complete moron while paying for my coffee. I told him I'd look them up, I thought that worked out okay. But now I've totally forgotten the name, I think it was Jean-Michel something. Drat.

Has excellent taste in music as well- Beatles, Miles Davis, Tom Petty, The Cure all tonight.

"You don't have to live like a refugee..." Which is true, so I'm heading home, since it's getting late.

ha

Ever seen "The Falconer" sketch on Saturday Night Live (two SNL references in a row on my blog, I really am a nerd)? This makes me think of it, but even if you haven't, this is hilarious:

http://eroticfalconry.com/Site/Home.html

Thanks, Kevin.

My favorite part is the personals:

Name: Jojo

Lovestyle: Dainty

Likes: Bits of hamburger, screeching

Dislikes: Rain, conversations about sports

Looking for: A not-so-hung glover, possibly of Arab descent

Name: Stickly Lovejoy

Lovestyle: Scratchy

Likes: Rats

Dislikes: Dave Matthews, Alka-Seltzer

Looking for: A Gemini with normal hygiene

summer's debut

or, Hike off a Hangover

The perennial drizzle that is associated with three of our four seasons here makes it so very sweet when summer finally arrives in all its warm and dry glory. May and June are never reliable in Seattle, and can be tempermental, but we're having a bit of a heat streak right now (it broke records at ninety yesterday). I'm not sure if people get so excited or involved with the weather in more predictable or even-keeled climes, but it's always amusing to me how people get so riled up over swings in the weather here.

I was feeling crummy yesterday after way too many mojitos the night before (not sure how it got that extreme, it takes a lot for me to get hungover, and I remember walking home late that night). I ended up spending my (glorious) Saturday afternoon hiking every possible trail at Discovery Park (in a feeble effort to keep training for the big climb), and may have gotten a little sun-shocked in the process- between the exposure on the bluff, and the reflection off the beach below, I was drained to the point of comatose by the time I got home from some errands and then was supposed to go out and let loose on Capitol Hill later that night. Sadly, the night ended with the decision being made for me that I needed to be taken home to watch Saturday Night Live instead of remaining at Linda's to be an uninspiring drinking companion. I had been planning on going out and having fun for a while, and I had gone and blown it. Ephin' A. It was for the best, I fell asleep 1.5 sketches into SNL and was lucky enough to be kindly tucked in in my delirium.

But now I feel like a big doofus, since hiking Discovery Park isn't very strenuous, it's not like I was at all tired, or got sore... just one of those enthusiastic Seattlites, like my boss, who got an unusually ugly sunburn on her neck this weekend, beading jewelry on her patio, or the hundreds of NW buffoons who try to drive in the quarter-inch of intermittant snow because they have the SUV-owner mentality and then roll into ditches and telephone poles because they live in Seattle where we get 1.35 inches of snow annually on average, in two bouts that last approximately twenty-one hours total. Raft down the Snoqualmie during record snowmelt? Sure! I, a generally dehydrated individual, chose to ramp up my mountaineering training on a recordbreakingly hot day after drinking myself silly the night before. Yes! Needless to say, I sucked down two bottles full of water and didn't pee once all day.

Above, a photo taken the night before, titled "Mojitos Mo Problems" by the other celebratory individual in the photo. Indicator of what was to come: my classy pantleg.

Playing in the cafe: Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Awesome.

Onward and upward!

A Kiss is Not a Contract

I don't want to discriminate between FOTC songs, they are all very very funny, but this one is amusing me right now, so I thought I'd record it. A couple of the lines make me stop what I'm doing and laugh every time I play the song.



A kiss is not a contract
...but it's very nice
Mmmmm, very nice

...just because you've been exploring my mouth
doesn't mean you get to take an expedition further south...
-No-
a kiss is not a contract,
but it's very nice,
-it's very, very nice.

Just because we've been playing tonsil hockey
doesn't mean you get to score the goal that's in my jockeys

Just because I'm in a two-man novelty band
doesn't mean it's all about poontang.
I can't go around loving everyone;
I just wouldn't get anything done.

You can take me out to dinner that might be quite nice;
you could buy me a burrito and some beans and rice
but that won't get you into pants paradise-
-They call it a fly because it takes you up to heaven-
-oh oh-

A kiss is not a contract
...but it's very nice-
it’s very very nice.

I'm only one man, baby, pretty baby...
-we're only two men, ladies-
babies...
pretty babies.

...I love the "They call it a fly..." quote, it never gets old. I did, however, originally think that they were saying "Just because I'm in a German novelty band doesn't mean it's all about the poontang" ...which, clearly, they're not actually in a German novelty band, but the thought of German novelty bands creating a poontang craze is quite amusing to me. You know, lederhosen, polka, tubas, suspenders... so hot.

The Talk II

The most painful hour in a cafe ever... and I wasn't one of the people breaking up. It seemed like they'd pull through right after I first posted, and I regret not listening harder (but it was so uncomfortable!) since it got dramatic and there was crying, and he raised his voice even louder and practically yelled "-fucking..." No one else in here was talking any more. She was pleading, he was unresponsive... it was classic and awful, and a half hour later he got up and left and she followed, walking the opposite direction, pissed off and crying.

Then the entire cafe-full of remaining patrons, mostly regulars, all looked up, made eye contact, breathed deeply, and started recapping. It was hilarious, but we all actually needed therapy ourselves after that session. It was amazing, we all concluded, what a jerk this guy seemed like, pansying around and saying things to make himself feel better, while this girl who was "way cuter than him," the barista noted, freaked out and got desperate. One older guy had had to leave and go outside and have a cigarette, and said he'd contemplated telling the girl to go home and find herself someone better on his way out, he reported. The barista said she'd contemplated walking over to open the window to gesture at the poor girl to save herself... the incident had been scarring and embarrassing for us all. Ah, to bond with strangers over shared catastrophe.

God help me, I hope to never have to go through something that painful in public like that. If I ever do, I don't think I'd be such a loud talker, at least.

The Talk

I'm at Cafe Ladro right now, and there is this couple having a plenty-loud version of The Talk a couple tables away. Where things are with them, where they might go, and time and work, and to analyze or not to analyze their status...what Seattle and now and this point here and now means to them... and it's very loud and awkward, it seems like they don't know eachother very well. I can understand everything over the loud jazz playing, and it makes me want to pack up my Gmail and my online NYtimes and go home, because I find my own dating enough, and don't need the stress of yours, thank you. I can see the other people at the cafe tables (in)conspicuously looking at them and eachother, haha. This can't end well.

ode to my mother

in honor of mother's day

You are insane. I tell you this, and we laugh, but you are really a nut.

I did not realize until I'd been on my own a couple years, after the post-high school graduation release into The World, that most people's Normal was so different from ours. Now that I've been on my own eight years now, developed my own sense of normal, I go home to visit you and I find things to be hilarious and bizarre and annoying at the same time that I never noticed before... one line from the Jeopardy theme whistled over and over, the dandilion-focused method of lawn-mowing that looks like the path of a fruit fly above a sticky countertop, the stashes of pistachios, peanuts, and almonds in a bag below the coffee table amongst their sacrificed siblings' shells for emergency midnight snacking, the collections of random jars and plastic lids that might find valuable uses someday... when I step back into this life, for some reason I feel insane, too, and want to bulldoze through and streamline, sanitize the whole operation, turn the place, this life into something simple and easy. It might be the same urge that inspires me to want to help out with the yard as it's big and you now get AARP stuff in the mail, or then again it might be the growing fear that as my mother's only daughter, there is a tiny cap-collecting, snack-hoarder inside me; as the sole future inheritor of my family's physical and psychological estate, am I destined to be the keeper of closets of World War II military uniforms, christening gowns, as well as the oral histories of Swedish farmers and the family's characteristic wit? I go home to my apartment in the city, with its stacks of magazines at the end of the couch, and bus and subway transfers from all of my travels filed in legal and manila envelopes in long anticipation of their archiving potential, and I wonder, am I training myself to keep house?

I embrace your legacy of wit; I think I have even come to match your levels of criticism and poignant insight whose harshness verges on cruelty... I scare myself as I see the tendencies I attempted to weed out sprouting up nonetheless. You laughingly joke about all the "nasty" genes that came from my father's side, but I lift my feet and find a thick web of DNA chains linking us, too- "cute," as you refer to your genes, and rotten ones alike.

I am pretty cute, sure. Thanks, mom, even though it is kind of self-congratulatory for you to say this, as we've established.

But Nature or Nurture? My fiercely independent spirit (which you take credit for, of course) used to think it could nurture itself entirely into what it wanted to be. Right.

I love you, Mom. Happy Mother's Day.

a hundred miles an hour

...the speed at which I feel like my life is operating, lately...

since before I left for vacation almost a month ago, I have had little time to breathe. not that that's been bad, it's just like I have been eating to refuel, and coming home to sleep. except that one day a couple weekends ago when I hibernated in bed and read an entire novel in protest, hee hee. i've been around the internet very little, recreationally, lately, and when I am, it seems like I've been uninspired to write, due to exhaustion. more to come on that.

feeling moody. listening to feist and radiohead, and thinking in fragments.

observation

I have made the connection between sawdust in the planter outside my window and the lack of leaves outside my bedroom window now that spring has come. The Norway Maple lost its life to the work on the sewer line running to my building a couple months ago. Positives: year-round Space Needle view from bed, view of Lower Queen Anne and Dick's sign (actually reads as "icks" from my place). Negatives: one less tree in the world. Associated negatives include less privacy and arboreal beauty, less birds outside, and those who do come must resort to the utility pole.

:(