Inside the miner’s Landing building, on the Seattle waterfront, is an arcade. The whole waterfront is one big tourist cheese trap, by and large, and out of town rubberneckers clutter up the flow but hey, live and let.
Joshy fact: I love arcades
Bridget and I drop quarters in “whack-a-rat” then move on to “stomp-a-spider”. Each kiddie machine spews a little tongue of blue tickets to collect and redeem for Chinese finger traps, parachute men and Snickers.
She has never played Skee-Ball, the perennial arcade/carnival classic game of balls and holes. A player rolls a ball up a ramp, over a jump and hopefully through a hole. Each hole is assigned a point value based on how difficult they are to land. A game is 9 throws.
Well it turns out that Skee-Ball is not only great marital glue (we were having a spat before we went to the arcade) but Bridget is some sort of freakish Skee-Ball master. She sinks the coveted 10,000 point hole each game… a feat! I have sank the 10k hole like twice in my life. She reels back and throws the ball, that bangs and leaps and POW she beats the high score on the machine…
We high five, we cheer, we collect out tickets and play game after game.
We have 94 tickets but the dude behind the prize counter tells B she has 100…what should we get?
20 tootsie rolls? 3 plastic penguins? 5 brand new pencils?
Then we see the fake jade Buddhas. 100 tickets each I point out that the Divine One is holding a Skee-Ball, or at least what looks like one. It’s perfect.
The Buddha of Skee-Ballers.
The next day we go back and claim another. There are 6 varieties of Skee-Ball Buddhas…we will have a proper shrine by the end of the week.
My first thought walking into a Seattle travel bloggers meet up, several weeks ago, was that everybody looked, well OLD(er). Maybe I am used to the young energy at Matador Travel but I felt like a black sheep, fo sho.
Everybody was nice enough, and there were some youngish people peppered about, but I felt like I was at a PTA meeting or something. Then I realized that I felt like a black sheep because I was one. The travel demographic is dominated, except for rare occasion, by the retiring Baby Boomer demographic. They have the dough that pay for the ad and articles in the magazines. Roustabout backpackers and vagabond 20-Somethings don’t have the financial clout to really matter in the industry.
Right? (please, god, somebody prove me wrong here!)
Baby Boomer types : I like you, some of my best friends are Boomers!
So what’s my market, my niche, my demographic? Does it even matter??
Thank the good lord my new travel Pal Nick Vivion was in attendance! Here’s to you buddy!
SO WHATCHA THINK? ARE TRAVEL BLOGGERS / WRITERS OLD GEEZERS AND GRANNIES?
Yeah, but it’s not as bad as it sounds…I didn’t get tased because I snuck into the creepiest, most abandoned building in Seattle…I got tased because I lost a game of Mancala…
Let’s start from the beginning…
It’s a 3.5 mile ride from hell traversing potholes, angry commuters and roadside shrapnel to bike from Pioneer Square to Georgetown. I get to Joel’s pad just as a 747 comes screaming over us so close I can smell the coffee on the pilots breath…the runway is a mere 2 miles away and at that point in their decent I can almost reach up and slide my fingers along the airplane.
The noise is tremendous.
Then a train comes chugging behind his building, laying on the whistle so hard it puts thumbtacks in your gums.
“geez…nice quiet neighborhood ya got here.”
“Isn’t it great!”
He’s serious too. He loves the planes and trains and the hobo villages and the brick and the way it makes him feel to stand out and smoke cigarettes, one after another as the cacophony reaches a crescendo.
We slink under sodium streetlights that paint the asphalt iodine yellow, into the shadows, peeking over our shoulder. Sometimes a cop is parked there, he points. No cop. We move around the side of the 4 story brick structure that looks like everything else in Georgetown; old, storied, used and done.
Across a pile of debris and into a nook, one more peek to make sure we are not watched and the hatch slides easily open…
Inside the Seattle Brewing and Malting Co. Building it is all diffused light through ancient dust crusted windows and wrought iron and huge spaces where tanks of beer used to be. It is dark. And incredibly creepy.
A central stairway is flanked by two tight coils of spiral stairs that curl up to the top level.
I expect a squatters haven and slip a knife into my fist, more for werewolf raccoons or malevolent pit bulls than men, but even so…
Up the stairs and chalk graffiti glows perfect in the half light. The place is emptied where mammoth mash tanks once bubbled and the spaciousness of the dank air keeps you peering into the dark.
Joel is overjoyed at the creepiness, at the thrill of showing me the secret space. On the roof we look out at the rail lines that are wet tendrils of commerce running North to South.
At his place, under the influence of Adventure and vodka tonics we play a game of mancala with a twist.
I lose, we both get tased from his roommates new personal defense weapon. He loses, we have another drink and forget the whole 950,000 volt idea.
“Come on dude, I did it yesterday (no consolidation there buddy) and it didn’t…it barely hurt.”
The way the taser works is it snaps electricity between two prongs in little bursts of flesh searing pain. Joel proposes one “snap” each, he will go first to put me at ease.
But as his roommate, Blair, pulls the taser from her purse, and as she lays on the trigger bringing the black machine to life with muscle-seizing air-cracking percussion I don’t feel at ease at all.
The taser is loud. It cackles like a live wire, like leather slapping steel, as the brief blue arch blinks in and out of existence.
We are going to take it in the arm. Practice, he tells Blair. She quickly depresses the trigger but not 1 but 3 “snaps” fire off. She tries until she has the precise quick pressure down…he rolls up his sleeve and takes 950,000 volts.
He tries to keep his face immobile and staggers slightly, for my sake, for the prayer that he will get to watch me take the electricity without too much of a fight.
Fine, I tell myself…I will make a good blog anyway!
Bam. Like being punched and pinched and shocked and burned. The muscles spasm that ask me WTF???
Everyone is smiling. I smell the sickly sweet aroma of singed flesh.
I guess I need more practice at mancala
I COLLECT SKULLS, AND OTHER INTERESTING BONES…
THE MOST COMMON question people ask when they notice my 8 skulls and various bone decorating my space is,
“Where do you get them?”
A reasonable question, to be sure. The first skull I ever, um, harvested, was from a cat that I found dead. I took the head, submerged it in bleach for several days and viola!, I had a clean skull.
It is natural, necessary in fact, that humans have a strong aversion to dead animals. That smell, the sight of decaying flesh and that gut twisting shudder of disgust are natures way of keeping you from disease filled corpses.
I like skulls because they are beautiful. A skull is an intricate account of a life lived. The ridges, clefts, holes and contours tell a story, if you look at it the right way.
Now people think of me when they see a skull and I randomly receive skulls and bones for gifts. One elk season, A friend of a friend’s father shot a cow elk and saved me the horse sized head in a black garbage bag. That phone call was odd.
“Hey, my friends dad heard you collect skulls, he dropped it off and my mom wants this thing out of her freezer.”
I got the huge head, this thing weighed a ton, and lugged it into the woods at my moms house. I dug a shallow hole and put the decapitated head inside. I figured after several months in Southeast Asia the skull would be picked clean by critters and ready for a final cleaning.
When I returned, after 9 months, the skull was gone…drug away by some coyotes or something.
I wish I had that skull.
I have only killed one animal for its skull, a rabbit, and I regret that. I shot a rabbit with a .22 rifle and felt like a complete coward for murdering the animal for a trophy. If I could have taken it back I would have. I didn’t know how I would feel after shooting the animal, but as soon as it was dead I knew that I was not a casual killer.
Now I am given skulls, receive then as gifts and keep an eye out for roadkill.
If you have any skulls you are not using… 
Feeling good, I exhaled the sticky blue ether and stepped into the alley. The grooves gouged by the garbage trucks are filled with still black water. My earbuds drown out everything except the deepest resonance of my breath. Up the street I walk. The first snatch of eye contact I knew I was going to do it today.
Up 1st I walk, deliberately searching each persons face. Well, their eyes more specifically. Eye contact, nothing, nothing, nothing.
Eye contact, the most intimate and power of human connection. Dozens and dozens of men and women pass looking at mud puddles and brick and the gray sky and of course, cell phones. Then chestnut brown or yellow-blue eyes meet mine, see I am looking and the connection is made. Then broken. Sometimes I look away first. When I do I ask myself what made me look away. The answer is always the same (fear). Fear, the momentary exorcism of startled eyes, seeing mine, fly away.
Most everyone wants to be ignored, and be allowed to ignore. The top of my head feels like it is wrapped in a fire that doesn’t burn. I won’t ignore them. I will see every single one.
There is a particular psychic pleasure, taking more than people want to give, being the one who is willing to connect, filling up…On Pike st.
Where are you?
I don’t know whether you are a woman or man. I don’t care what you look like, what you are wearing. I don’t care if you are rooting through a trash can or stepping out of a dept. store, I don’t care.
Where are you?
At the cross walk no one was giving me anything. I pull my intention in tighter then I see him.
Looking straight into my eyes, unflinching, uncompromising, knowing, all that, from twenty feet away his eyes shine 9 shades of brown.
Even as I walk across the street I don’t realize it. That’s him…or her.
Laying on the ground, face less than a foot from the curb and the rainwater, his eyes follow me as I pass.
I walk several paces and stop. I lean against a display window for a store that I may never be able to afford to shop in.
This is crazy, I think, not just me and the brown eyes laying on the sidewalk, not just that. This is crazy; this window display, the people on the sidewalks the city the way we are and everything, you know, sometimes you wake up in the morning and you have forgotten who you are and for a second, anything seems possible, you could be anyone.
It feels like that.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“What’s his name?”
“Ash.”
“Is he feeling ok, he looks tired…or sick?”
“He’s fine, he’s just resting. I don’t know why he is facing that way, he usually like to look this way.”
Ash meets my eyes again, all 9 shades of his brown swirl in distilled cloudshine. He is a big dog. A German Shepherd. His owner is a mousey, sweet looking girl with eroded teeth and stained fingertips. Her eyes, beautiful, full, gray blue meet mine in little sips.
She holds a cardboard sign. Someone gives her a dollar. She looks sweet and it is hard not to want to scoop her up and promise her you will fix everything and wash her fingers.
“Where are you two from?”
“I’m from Boston, he’s from Oregon. We met here. Some kids were taking care of him, but they couldn’t anymore. He’s been abused, ya know? So he can snap a little bit, he’s not mean, he just you know…laying out here all day people step so close to him. I can always tell when he going to do it though. He’s not a mean dog though.”
“I can tell. He’s a good boy…I, I just wanted to say hi.”
“Ok.”
“See you.”
“Ok.”
…or shower, or perform many other hygenic functions essential to social acceptance. I revel languidly in this fact. I roll out of bed, hair pointing eight directions and flop into the computer chair in naught but my skivvies.
Bridget comes downstairs and threads my arms through my gray hoodie. Now I am in underwear and a sweat shirt which makes me look like some kind of man-child on Christmas morning…if only I had chocolate smeared across my grinning lips…
Oh the joys of online life, where life is always clothing optional! I am having lunch with some respectable travel media personalities and business people in one hour so the undie party has to end soon…
WHAT LEISURELY ASPECTS OF ONLINE LIFE DO YOU REVEL IN?
The Nightmare, by Henry Fuseli (1781)
At 1:37am eyes unfocus on the paperback and lids slip down.
Bridget makes a spectacle of going to bed at 3:09am, giggling, putting warm too-tickly kisses on my neck I smile, turn over, turn over again and fall down a wishing well of sleep to land in the black waters of a nightmare.
The mare in nightmare comes from the Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse term mara, a demon that sat on sleepers’ chests, causing them to have bad dreams. There were many superstitions surrounding nightmares and their prevention; stopping up the keyhole, placing one’s shoes with the toes facing the door, and then getting into bed backwards were all remedies for bad dreams.
I can’t remember the nightmare that plagued me for hours. All I recall is my mother and grandmother repeating bad news, news I didn’t want hear, news I didn’t want to be true but knew was.
I wake up and the morning doesn’t creep through the curtains. Our loft is like a mausoleum . The mare still sits on my chest as I make strong coffee. That feeling. The feeling of dread like something is falling from the sky, still to high to see but will come down on your head someday.
I walk through puddles all day with this feeling.
WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU HAD A NIGHTMARE?
My favorite idiom for being broke is
Tryin to make a dollar outta fifteen cents!
I am pinching the pennies pretty hard these days, tightening the old belt while I look for work and plot my empire, but I tell you what… I have lost 10 pounds in the last month and a half! Ever since Thanksgiving, which marked the height of engorged calorie intake at the constant bequest of family, I have steadily lost weight.
Instead of hitting the happy hour 3-4 times a week we have gone 3-4 weeks without hitting the happy hour. Beer is out of the budget, and so is anything greasy that sells in bars, so we have been focussing on the basics, cooking for ourselves and eating at home.
I have been killing the oatmeal most mornings (110 servings for 10bucks!) and Bridget makes homemade bread and vats of tasty soup. I feels good to shop then chop and simmer and stir. It feels good to cook together, to visit the market or run out for one last minute ingredient. I read somewhere that the average meal for the average American takes 5 minutes to prepare. And prepare could be discarding packaging and microwaving… but I have noticed in our kitchen that the longer food takes to cook, the better it tastes, the slower you eat it and the more thoughtful the conversation.
Cooking also lends a ritual and warmth to the sodden Seattle days that seem to stretch ad infinitum over the Puget Sound and into the gloom.
But doing the dishes fucking sucks
