sw 2 nw by mw

The journey from Phoenix to Seattle now complete, the housing situation now settled, some of the sights now seen, I awake one morning and realize I start a new job the next day. Dang, you mean this doesn’t last forever? I’ve been enjoying it so – clearing out my head, getting out of the box for a little stretch. But it was after all a job that brought me here, so it must be done. And from what I hear it’s no slacker job either. Cutting edge web programming, a few notches above anything I’ve done before. Others had assured me I can handle it, it’s just going to make my head hurt for a while. It’s nice that other people have confidence in me, because I don’t always have it myself. I’ve always believed I’m smart enough to rise to any mental challenge, but I haven’t always sought them out. My ex-wife once accused of being mentally lazy, and I didn’t disagree. But if it came down to it, is there anything I couldn’t wrap my head around? I don’t know, I’ve known people much smarter, and a lot of them didn’t go to college. But I digress; the main challenge at this new job is an academic one, and that was always my strength.

So the first day was spent surfing the company’s website from a user standpoint. I did not have to sit down and prove my worth just yet. The rest of the week was more training, eventually with some glimpses at the code itself. The guy training me, Tim, is 25 years old with 10 years of web programming under his belt – about the same as me – but to a much deeper level and at a lot younger age. Like many web developers, he did not go to college. Until recently universities did not teach this stuff – you had to learn on the job like I did, or by trial and error on your home computer. There is a whole generation of young programmers creating the internet as we go. Marketing execs may tell us what to use the internet for, but the nerds make it happen. And then they invent the new stuff before the bosses even know it’s possible. They are plumbers, carpenters, bricklayers, electricians and architects all rolled into one. It continues to amaze me. Tim knows cold fusion, java, javascript, sql, .net, c++, EXT, as well as the usual supporting languages. I only know a fraction. I was intimidated by his technical superiority. But he was not trying to make me feel that way, he was very supportive and knows that this company is working at the highest levels and anyone coming aboard will have a lot of learning to do. On top of that, he has been the only programmer on his particular project for a while, so he’s desperate for someone to share the workload with. It’s very much in his interest that I succeed.

Life:

I have today, Friday, off to travel to Sacramento for my cousin’s wedding. I’m on the plane right now. We just passed right over the pit mouth of Mt. St. Helens. It’s fascinating from the air, frightening from the ground. I drove by it a week earlier, on the way to Portland. It’s a jagged smashed out shell of a volcano, like a sandcastle kicked by God. And I remember when it happened. Seeing it in person reminded me of a dream I had a couple years ago: the visual image of looking up at the night sky and seeing the moon with half of it missing, terribly torn out by a huge meteor or some engineered explosion. To see something so massive, so basic, that has been there your whole life, for everyone’s whole life, to change so suddenly and by such violence.

Anyway. The long summer days have allowed for continued exploration of this new city after work. When work ends at 5 the sun is still high in the west, about what 2 oclock looks like in Phoenix. I could fit in a full round of golf, and just might once I get back to town with my clubs. My mom brought them up from Phoenix on the plane to this wedding, along with 2 suitcases full of clothes. I somehow neglected to bring anything with long sleeves, and only a few collared shirts for work. People in Seattle don’t dress anything like Phoenix. They dress up more for work and for going out, and for casual attire most people in my neighborhood dress punk, goth, gay, or if nothing else a cultivated trashy look – anything but lazy and scrubbish like me. Girls do not wear makeup here, it’s weird. I’ve always liked the natural look, but here it makes for a lot of plain looking girls because the other thing people are not is as good looking as in Phoenix. Homely faces, soft unexercised bodies, pale vampire skin. I’m the tannest person wherever I go. Oh but the tattoos you’ll see. Every man and woman is covered, sleeved, and for no reason. Nobody has one tattoo, they have one hundred tattoos. I don’t have any. You see so many spider webs on elbows you’d think we were IN prison.

The downside of downtown:

After about 3 weeks here, some of the novelty of downtown living is wearing thin. Foremost, the constant strain of finding parking. In my neighborhood there is nowhere you can park all the time for free. Most street parking is free from 6pm – 8am every day, and all parking is free Sundays. But in some areas you always need a permit, like in front of my building. It’s taken a lot of circling the block and running downstairs to pump the meter at 2 hour intervals, but I’m getting the hang of it and have not gotten a single ticket yet. There’s actually a spot next to the building where no one seems to park because it looks like a bus stop. So that’s been my spot every night this week. To acquire an actual guaranteed spot in a parking lot a block or two away would cost $200 a month. I look at that as raising my rent $200, and that would make the rent unacceptably high. Fortunately I don’t have to worry about it cause there aren’t actually any of those spots available right now. So we live day to day.

Another growing annoyance is the traffic noise of I-5 about 100 yards out my window. At first I kept the windows open all the time and enjoyed the wall of sound. It was charming. Then it started waking me up at 430 in the morning, so I closed most of the windows. When they’re open I can’t talk on the phone.

Then there’s actually being in traffic. The freeways can get slow to and from work, but it’s not too bad because I don’t have very far to travel – 9 miles. But earlier this week I got a terrible taste of what they must mean by gridlock. I drove “Fred” home after work – he lives near me and got rid of his car over a year ago. I dropped him off right around 5pm the other day and started back to my place. It’s only a mile and a half, but it took more than half an hour. I literally could have walked there and back. I watched pedestrians pass me and keep going, eventually disappearing over the hill. It was so bad, it took 2 or 3 cycles of the traffic light to get through an intersection. Because you would get to the front of the line, and when it turned green you couldn’t go because the car at the back of the line in front of you was stuck with its back end still in the intersection. And then a couple cars would turn from the cross-street into the spot you wanted to take. So it became an endless, terrible, futile game. I turned onto some side street and drove a mile out of my way to get to my neighborhood from the back side. When I finally got home I just sat down with a beer and did nothing for a while to let it dissipate.

You can’t find a proper grocery store downtown. The closest place is a quik-e-mart where everything is overpriced and underquality. The best beer there is Redhook – and that ain’t very good. It’s passable, like Sierra Nevada, but nothing you want to live on. I did locate a specialty beer store in the neighborhood and learned that there are several other breweries in Seattle, and most of them do make an extra hoppy IPA, but they charge crazy for it. Some are $18 for a single 22 oz bomber. Cmon, it’s not GAS for christ’s sake. Finally though, I found a pretty decent sized grocery store a little further up the street, and they carry Butte Creek IPA from Chico, which is probably my favorite outside of Sonora’s. Yeah, I’ll say this now – I was really spoiled living a mile from the best brewery in the world. In all my travels of the west coast or anywhere else, I’ve never found a beer I like as well as theirs.

The final gripe is on behalf of Petunia. She’s used to a doggie door and a yard, and now she has to hold her bladder for 9 hours while I’m at work. And she’s cooped up all the time. I take her out of the apartment 3 times a day but sometimes it’s just for 10 minutes. But then there’s…

The upside of downtown:

Greenlake Park, which I wrote about previously, is heaven for Petunia. A long trail to walk, lots and lots of dogs and people to check out, and most of all a big lake to play fetch in. If I chuck the ball as far as I can it takes her at least a minute to retrieve it. And that water is cold, even in July. She gets a hell of a workout, and always wants more.

The closeness to everything. Pike Street fish market, a major icon of this city, is just a stroll away. You could flick a marble down the street and it would roll all the way there. Aside from watching the men throw fish around, you can eat in restaurants or better yet buy your groceries from the fresh-daily selection of every fruit and vegetable you can think of, and every flower too.

No air pollution. I have not seen that brown layer of smog since passing the Bay Area. The air here is clean – clean as can be. I don’t know why, there’s not a lot of wind, but the air must keep circulating. My skin has cleared up completely, after living with some acne for years in Phoenix. And they said it was stress. Yeah, the stress of living in a shitty environment.

Water everywhere. Puget Sound to the west, lakes to the north, south and east. I cross beautiful huge bodies of water dotted with boats every day. Whitecaps when it’s windy. When it’s clear you can see the Olympic mountains to the west and 14,000-foot Mt. Rainier to the southeast, covered in snow in July.

Out of town:

This weekend I’m in Sacramento. Next weekend I plan to camp in the mountains. Last weekend I camped along the Columbia River. The picture below isn’t a lake or an ocean, it’s a river. I’ve never seen one so wide, ever.

Imagine how much rain and snow the northwest gets. Well, it all drains into the Columbia, making it the largest American river after the Mississippi. In places it is over a mile wide, or several. It divides the land. There is no sense that this is a moving water that has carved a path through the land. This is simply a water, and land north of it and a land south of it. Three separate things. For most of it’s length there is no possibility of spanning it with bridges. The only bridges I know of are at Portland, and at Astoria about a hundred miles downstream at the mouth. Where the Columbia empties into the Pacific there is such turbulence and constantly moving sandbars that literally hundreds of ships of all sizes have gone down there in the past 150 years. They call it the Graveyard of the Pacific.

I drove highway 4 on the Washington side of the river, twin to another highway on the Oregon side. I got out late enough from Portland to know I wouldn’t have the time – much less the tent – to do traditional camping. So I drove until it was late and dark enough, and pulled into a wildlife preserve. The sign said it was protecting the Cascades Whitetail Deer. I wasn’t sure if car camping was allowed, but at that hour I wouldn’t be caught until morning, so I drove slowly down the road and pulled into a pullout that seemed designed for the purpose. My car is not large but it is a wagon and believe it or not if the rear seats are down I can fully stretch out in the back. Petunia slept in the front seat, and it was downright cozy. In the morning this was the view:

That’s now my desktop photo. I can’t claim any skill, it was just that beautiful a sight. We drove off quickly before any rangers came along, and continued toward the coast. The next picture is in a little town nearby in Wahkiakum county. Everything has native american names here. Like most places in America I guess.

Eventually you reach the coast at Long Beach. It’s a peninsula that stretches north from where the Columbia reaches the sea, and it claims to be the world’s longest beach. By the map it’s about 25 miles, so I guess I believe it. You can drive on it, so I did. With the fog that morning you could only see 150 yards in any direction. I could hear sea gulls crying before I could see them fly into view. It was eerie but beautiful. It’s the most pristine beach I’ve ever seen. There wasn’t a single cigarette butt, candy wrapper, or even a footprint except what Petunia and I made.

The only litter is the empty shells of dungeness crabs, red and brittle from the sun and wind. The wind blows hard from north to south, and makes tiny dunes in the sand that run perpendicular to the sea, which looks strange. This would be a wonderful beach to camp on, but by morning you could be driven insane from the wind. It was blowing constantly about 20-30 mph. Relentless, making everything difficult, even talking. But travel 200 yards inland and the sky is clear, fogless and calm. A strange and intriguing place I will go back to.

From Long Beach the road turns north and you pass through Wilapa Bay, oyster capital of the world. There are a lot of capitals of the world up here it seems. I figured I ought to try these oysters, so I bought a plastic pint tub of raw ones to take home and cook. They were called medium size, but each was as big as my tongue, and far slimier. Earlier in the day I had stopped to fish in a creek and landed what I guess is the largest trout I’ve ever caught. Now I had seafood for my first home-cooked dinner back in Seattle.

Further up the road is Aberdeen – obscurely famous as the place that produced Kurt Cobain. I loved Nirvana in their time. I have all their stuff. They were extremely influential on me musically, but Kurt was a real downer and a jerk. What exactly was he complaining about? He was a punching bag in a little redneck town and somehow became as big a rockstar as there is, and he had to kill himself? Don’t blame it on Aberdeen though, it looked like heaven to me – woods everywhere, water to fish, close to the coast. Try living in Phoenix.

On a more personal level, Aberdeen is also famous for being next door to the reservation where my very good friend Catie grew up. In fact she and Alex and their son Flynn were just there a few days before me, but our schedules didn’t jibe. I really really hope she can show me around there some day. She’s described it as the most beautiful place on earth, and I don’t doubt it. Aberdeen is a logging town, and the reservation is somewhat lawless, she says. A place of immense natural beauty but where children are afraid of the woods at night and sometimes bad things happen in them. But that’s mostly confined to the edges of the forest near Aberdeen. The reservation contains a couple wild rivers full of salmon, and several miles of unspoiled beach. It’s odd after hearing so much about it back in Phoenix where such a place can’t properly be imagined, so that it seems like a fictional place existing only in her memory, that I should come so near the actual place and still not get to see it.

From Aberdeen it’s a quick drive to Olympia, the state capital. That’s on I-5 and an hour or so later you’re into Tacoma, then eventually Seattle. Like most everywhere, the distances are shorter than in Arizona.

The fireworks turned out a lot more fun than anticipated. My friend here, who I’m going to call “Fred” for now, and I spent the whole day moving more of his stuff from what is apparently now my apartment into his new apartment. I have some mixed feelings about all of this. He is leaving this nice highrise for a tiny joke of a place nearby that isn’t all that much cheaper. He said the landlord told him it was 400 square feet, and when he took me there the first time I took a look around and said ‘You mean 400 cubic feet?’ It’s the size of 2 parking spaces. I have questioned his reasoning at least a dozen times now and insisted he reconsider – enough times that I feel any more would be insulting, and still he refuses to change his mind. It makes no sense to me. He insists it is what he wants. Even though I have repeated that I may only be in his old place for one month. If that happens, he would then have two apartments, two rents to pay, and one very big headache.

It also happens that he shouldn’t be doing any moving at all because 2 weeks ago he had an accident playing soccer and *severed* his ACL (a knee ligament, the same as Tiger Woods famously had surgery on last month, but Tiger’s was only torn, not completely severed). So heavy lifting is totally unrecommended pending his surgery in a couple weeks. Well, we were moving a couch up some slick marble steps and suddenly he lets out a cry and crumples to the ground. I had been fearing such a moment all day. I watch helplessly as he crawls up the steps and curls up on the couch holding his breath in silent agony for about 2 minutes. I couldn’t say anything, I knew he was in a kind of pain I’ve never felt, and here I was accomplice to it even after objecting to the whole idea of moving. When he could speak again he said he could feel he had re-torn everything. And a few minutes later he regained his composure and we were working again like nothing happened. It may be stupid, but damn is he tough.

Anyway, we called it quits around 8, in time to get ready and meet his girlfriend across town to watch the fireworks at the Gas Light or whatever it’s called. A marina. There’s a lot of water around here, I haven’t gotten it all straight yet. We drove as close as we could find parking and then walked about 4 miles further until we ran into her and her cousin on the street. Four miles with a re-torn ACL. Petunia was with us, dragging me along the sidewalk on a mission of her own. We found a spot amongst a large crowd standing where they could between road and the waterfront. The display commenced with a slow motion flyby by a Chinook military helicopter dangling an American flag in its spotlight. That helicopter is huge, it carries tanks into battle. Twin propellers thumping as it crawls through the air. Then proceeded an hour-long fireworks display that literally filled the entire sky. It might be the most impressive I’ve ever seen, and this includes the many years as a child that I got to witness the Washington DC fireworks from the Potomac River with my cousins I used to spend summers with there. But they say pyrotechnics advance every year, and I believe it. There were cube-shaped explosions, star-shaped explosions, ones that looked like Saturn… except to me it looked like the Planet Hollywood logo.

Petunia I have to say handled herself well, but was definitely shaken. Dogs tend to get spooked by fireworks. She kept looking up at me for some kind of explanation, panting, wide-eyed, and I could only pet her head and tell her she was ok. She tried to hide behind my legs, then pushed her way into a rose bush oblivious to the thorns, and finally only calmed down while hiding amongst all our legs. Several years ago I had her and Tibbs at a beach for the 4th in the little town of Cayucos about an hour north of Santa Barbara. Kids were lighting sparklers and bottle rockets on the beach 10 feet from us. Both dogs were so scared they tried to burrow under me in the sand. It was one of only two times I knew them to show fear. The other was a parade with big Clydesdales that went by our old house downtown. Everyone was standing in the backyard watching but the dogs hid under a couch, afraid the giant animals were going to crash the fence and come for them.

Some mornings here I am awakened by the sun, sometimes by the traffic on the freeway below. The next morning I woke to the cries of seagulls. I planned to drive 20 miles south to a place called Redondo Beach and meet Brad from Portland and his girlfriend Pee Wee and their other Phoenix transplant friend Drew. The two men came to scuba dive and I had brought my fishing gear hoping to get a first chance at these productive northwest waters. Unfortunately I got hung up on not having a fishing license and not wanting to splurge for an out of state license just yet. They’re expensive and I couldn’t find a place that sold them nearby. So instead, Pee Wee and I wound up drinking beer in the parking lot across the street from the water all afternoon. Yes: we tailgated a scuba dive. It was great, we leaned on the truck through rain and sun, drinking beer after beer until the boys emerged from the water black and shivering. This picture is posed, but they really were cold.

Pee Wee coined a new phrase which I’m going to use from now on. See, she only drinks Bud Light, which was coincidental because I had inherited a case from Fred, who had it left over from his Super Bowl party. Yes, he had a case of beer that was untouched since February. I don’t understand it either. I had brought some of them in a cooler on the off chance they would come in handy fishing or perhaps I’d have to shove one up a chicken’s butt and grill it. You never know where the day will take you. None of that happened, but PeeWee was happy to take them off my hands. She doesn’t like the fancy beer that Brad and I like and that Drew homebrews. She explained that she had tried some one time, and it tasted like when she had accidentally gotten lipstick on her teeth and licked it. So anything fancier than Bud Light is now called Lipstick Beer.

I shared the lipstick beer I had brought in addition to the Bud Light with Brad after the dive, and another guy Scott who was in their party, then we all went to the nearest dive bar and had a couple pitchers and got to know the locals a little. This was in Federal Way, part of the southern Seattle/Tacoma metro area but you couldn’t tell by the people. In fact they denied being part of Seattle. Some of them had wicked bad teeth, and one female bartender, no older than 40, was actually missing two in the front. I’m no longer passing judgments, but I really don’t get it. It’s pretty normal to have crooked teeth, it’s another thing to have one or two rotting teeth, and then it’s another thing altogether to be missing front teeth. Isn’t it? But the people were down to earth and fun loving. Reminded me of Glendale. No offense anyone.

The next morning I woke up hung over back in the apartment, pulling the pillow over my eyes and ears until 11. Being Sunday and the last day before I start this new job, I wanted to do some touristy things while I still could, and the first order was to get some good seafood which I hadn’t really done yet. I walked 8 blocks down the hill to the Pike Street Fish Market and looked around. It was a mad house. Streets closed off, art displays everywhere. There was one stand with a placard that said ‘proDUCTive’, and I quickly realized it was the same stuff that January had read about and made a year ago – wallets, purses, keychains, etc made from different colored duct tape. I snapped a picture with my phone to send her and made the mistake of talking to the girl tending the display, and she insisted I delete the picture. I said ‘are you serious?’ She said yeah the artist is very particular that no one take pictures of it. I said ‘Artist?’ This is fucking duct tape. This is not art. It’s craft. I’m sorry but if an artist is afraid of people stealing their idea, that means they have no talent. Talent means only you can do it; even if someone else watches you, they cannot do it because they lack your skill, creativity and originality. I’ve sometimes been a musician and I don’t hide it or ask people not to record it. It’s a compliment if they want to. I’ll perform for anyone who cares to see and hear. I’m not afraid someone will see how I do it and go do it better and thereby take food off my table. If I’m any good, then you can’t. The day before, walking down Pike Street again I saw a crowd of 50 people standing around a black man on a corner with spray paint doing something with what I think was a surfboard and some tin cans. He was so in the moment that he didn’t even seem to see the crowd which was so close any of them could have touched him. That’s an artist. He wasn’t afraid of anyone stealing his idea because no one could have done what he did even after watching him do it. This duct tape artist hack doesn’t even show up to sell his or her own crap. Give me a fucking break.

A restaurant had crab benedict and bloody mary, which totally cured the hangover. I’ve been wanting crab since I got here. It was ok as benedict, there was no hollandaise sauce but that’s ok cuz it’s not in the diet. Then I went to a shop that sold fresh whole fish and got a big juicy chunk of smoked salmon for snacking on, and a whole boiled dungeness crab to go, for dinner. Two and a half pounds that sucker was. This is what she looked like before…

And this is after I got through with her, using only my bare hands. Not so fuckin tough now, huh crab?

Not many of you know this, but as alluded to before I spent every summer from age 9 to 19 with my cousins in northern Virginia, and went to the University of Virginia for 2 years before coming home to ASU. Virginia shares Chesapeake Bay with Maryland and Delaware, and that region is home to the famous Maryland Blue Crab. It’s smaller than a Dungeness crab, and perhaps more tasty. We used to go catch them by hand in little swampy places with names like Wachapreague and Chincoteague, and then buy a couple bushels from the docks, and take them home to put on a crab feast for the whole neighborhood. The family contest was to see how long you could sit at the picnic table and eat these suckers. It would go all day. Dismantling crabs is so time and labor intensive that you could actually sit there and work through two meals. We’d start at lunch and work until dark, cracking the shells and legs apart without aid of mallet nor fork, pulling the meat out with out teeth or dipping them in pure vinegar. It was great, and now that I see the potential up here, I’m going to resurrect the tradition. Forget ribs and jerk chicken for now, crab is the new frontier.

After the fish market I took Petunia to Greenlake Park about 5 miles uptown. It’s a small lake with a trail that runs about 3 miles around it, and on this sunny day I would guess at least a thousand people were there jogging, biking, walking dogs, playing frisbee, fishing, paddle-boating, swimming, diving, tanning, making out in the grass, all the things you do in public parks. The mission was to give Petunia a solid afternoon of fetching tennis balls in the water after the long car ride and being cooped up in the apartment. Let her know this is her new home and it’s full of grass and water. Swimming and fetching are her favorite things in the whole world. I would throw the ball as far as I could and she would swim out, further than she’s ever swam before, and come back all out of breath, then shake off and be ready to go again.

And then came Monday and the first day of work on the new job. The first vision today was a perfectly clear blue sky out the window from bed, just like in Phoenix but without the heat. It’s the clearest day here yet. On the way across the bridge to work I got my first glimpse of Mt. Rainier huge in the southeast and not even as far as the horizon. It’s covered in snow, from top to bottom, just like it’s winter. Un-fucking-real. This is still July right? There aren’t even trees on it, just snow.

Work was fine, and I may have found the answer to my dilemma. It turns out most of the people in this company work remotely from all over the state. In fact, if you live more than a reasonable commute from the nearest office, they let you telecommute 100% of the time. So if I play my cards right I can do this 6 month contract in Seattle (telecommuting Mondays & Fridays), get hired on permanent and then move down to Vancouver, WA, across the river from Portland, thereby living in the Portland area but making Seattle wages. Come to think of it, that would be the fucking dream come true. We’ll see how it goes. The main thing in my control is to do such a good job that they can’t say no. They’re desperate for people who do this work.

So you want to know how to tell if someone is gay? It’s not by their dress or their voice or how they act. No, you can tell someone is gay by the fact that they live in my neighborhood. Every man and woman here is gay. This is called First Hill, and two blocks uphill is Capitol Hill, and that’s the famous gay part of Seattle. I didn’t realize this until yesterday. Two blocks here is about the distance I can throw a baseball. With a good tailwind, you could spit a block if it’s downhill. And it’s all either uphill or downhill. I have my bike sitting in the living room ready to go but in no danger of being taken out just yet. I’m scared to. It’s like climbing Squaw Peak just going to get coffee in the morning. After work today I went to a pet store up the block – majorly butch lady owner. I went across the street to the urban furniture store – tan blond gay guy smiling extra big at me from the register. I went back toward home and stopped at what I was pleased to learn was one of just 3 McMenamin’s brewpubs in town. They’re based in Portland and provide the main supply of lipstick beer there. The bartenders: gay. The patrons: gay. Finally a good looking latin girl came in to pin up a poster for some performance art show this weekend. She sat down and had a beer and eventually we started talking. Turns out she’s from El Paso but has lived here for 7 years. I told her I’ve lived in Phoenix until 5 days ago. She tells me all about the winters and the social scene here and I’m scared. She said in winter it gets dark at 3:30pm – WHAT THE FUCK!?!? And the people get real passive aggressive and downtown it quickly becomes a small world. And then she says ‘Are you by any chance gay?’ Now, isn’t that just what you like to hear from a nice looking person of the opposite sex? I say ‘No, I’m not’ and she says ‘Well I’m queer and….’ yadda yadda that’s where I tuned out. Just kidding but damn damn damn, why did I move out of the gay part of Phoenix and smack dab into the gay part of Seattle?