Notes From The First Days In Seattle

1.
Las Vegas wants your sins. Around town, the billboards scream for your attention and for your desires - on Nickerson at the Fremont Bridge, a white quote amongst purple and blue show lights reads "I had to unbutton my pants!" On 4th and Bell, another white quote, "I joined a threesome." In Ballard, "We tried things we don't do at home!" You may have to look at these billboards three or four times before you realize they're attempting double entendre - in small print towards the bottom of the unbuttoning-my-pants billboard reads the quip "Dining can be your excuse." The threesome billboard says "Golf can be your excuse."

I've gone to Vegas two or three times, and I may not have joined a threesome or spent an unusual amount of time unbuttoning my pants, but I did feel the need to smash every beer bottle I passed along Flamingo Ave. at 6 in the morning, and I did once break a vow to not gamble, drink, or smoke cigarettes during an hour-long dinner with my unlce on my way to Los Angeles, only to find myself doing all three within 5 minutes and, in fact, delaying my call to meet my uncle so I could do it. So I can't necessarily say the scent of sin is all that far off, or that the billboards are lying.

They are, however, clearly meant to stir the rapaciousness out of the corporate bore that's taken over. This makes enough sense - to many, at least. Perhaps I'm less romantic than I used to be about Vegas. Once, the brother of a friend from high school was describing his time in Vegas and nonchalantly ended a sentence with, "because, in Vegas, you have to do an eightball in the Caesar's bathroom."

I suppose everyone's Vegas sins are different, but they come from the same place - the desire to shake things up, to release whatever inhibitions keep us from, say, doing coke in the bathroom at Macy's. As for me, things are shaken up enough for one season, I can't see me returning to Vegas anytime soon, even if threesomes are a possibility.

2.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about Beyonce's new single "Ring The Alarm" lately. It's catchy, to be certain, but it's not simply a catchy melody. What works about the single is Beyonce's aggression - the chorus isn't sung, it's shouted, the verses more accurately described as a passionate shout than as singing. Yet you can't turn away from it, from its periodic loud claps that could be thunder or jail doors or even a gun shot. I'm amazed that this song hasn't hit #1, as thus far I wouldn't even describe the song as particularly successful. I'm amazed that everyone isn't at least drawn to that anger, that the anger itself isn't getting stuck in people's heads.

3.
When I think about Fremont, the artsy Seattle neighborhood north of Lake Union, I sometimes hear the clop of horses, as if when I was there last, carriages were wandering 36th Street. A good friend lives there with a balcony giving him a perfect view of the Seattle skyline, and my favorite coffee shop since I moved here has a deck that peacefully looks towards the almost absurdly high Aurora bridge. Here as in Boulder I find myself going to the least conveniently located coffee shop imaginable (I am staying in Magnolia, southwest of the lake), but Fremont is the place in Seattle where most things seem possible.

This week I house sat at a friend's coworker's townhome on 43rd street. At 5 in the morning her grey cat, speckled like a cow, started meowing from her rooftop deck. I opened the door, and felt greeted by the dull grey light, the otherworldly glow of the skyline, the green hills built in every direction regardless of how possible it seemed to build houses or buildings or roads. I thought the cat should never want to be inside, Seattle this time of the year being the only comfort a person could need.

This is, of course, nonsense. I've walked all over this city now and know even a beautiful locale (and, in the late months of summer, during its rare stretches of sunshine, no city is more beautiful), and know that, without a job and a place to live, I can feel as rafish and lost as I did when I was unemployed and sick in Boulder. At least I have more options for coffee.

I left the cats outside when locking up the coworker's house for the last time. I wondered if that would be a problem, knowing the unlikelihood anything would ever happen to a cat - these things that seem unikely to blink at falls from trees, at balancing high above the ground on pieces of wood two centimeters across. It seems that everyone seems a little happier in Fremont, though, and maybe she'd barely think of anything wrong when she could simply go to her roof and watch the city.

4.
If I see a few more of his movies, I think I'll be compelled to write the longest, dullest treatise on the movies of Tsai Ming-Liang. I caught his The River this week and am in love with the way he makes his characters move. Like he did to astonishing effect in What Time Is It There and its perfect epilogue of a short film "The Skyway Is Gone" and to occasionally ass-numbing effect in Goodbye, Dragon Inn, his characters seem to move fully ignoring each other's awkwardness and solipsistic quirks. Characters walk past each other, follow each other, run literally into one another and carry on their blinded way. No one speaks to each other usually, and certainly never about major events.

I must say I love the way in his movies people continue to act in spite of all logical intuition. His movies all have moments that shock or sadden or seem to happen simply because nothing else is happening, and what's most interesting about his movies is that people's best approximation of following each other around makes up the majority of their lives. The rest can so often decoding the bizarre events occurring everywhere, silently, even the ones we're inexplicably in the middle of.

5.
Back in Boulder, I'm told the kid I spent the bulk of my time with at work is doing well. Not just well, I'm told I wouldn't recognize him - that he's participating in class and engaging people in conversation. Back in Boulder, a good friend of mine has decided to move out of the apartment he just moved into and head to Chicago or Dallas, he should decide which this week. Back in Boulder, the second baseman on my old Softball team broke her nose when hit in the face with a baseball. Back in Boulder, a friend called me to tell me he'd just finished surgery correcting his knuckles from "that time I punched a wall in Dublin." Back in Boulder, a friend noticed smoke from his engine and flames behind his dashboard as he pulled up to his girlfriend's apartment; when he got out, he watched his car burn before his eyes. Back in Boulder, a therapist I used to work with died suddenly of a heart attack on the middle of a Monday. It was my replacement's first day of work.

It was a summer in which weird, tragic, funny, or just puzzling things happened everywhere, that everyone seemed to be on the verge of major life decisions, catastrophes, or both. If you wanted to leave your longtime lover or fly suddenly to Portland or start a long distance relationship with someone you met for 10 days in Israel or start crying again or, why not, uproot your life and move to Seattle or New York or Chicago or Dallas or (in one especially unusual decision of a friend of mine) Mauritania, this was the summer for it. The days were longer than usual, hotter than usual, more chaotic than usual, but things getting too hot and too long and too chaotic is often what leads us to getting things done in the first place.