Tag: seattle

“thanks, I’ve been working out”

365 days seventy-four: getting better

From where I sit at my computer, I can lift my left arm up to point at the sky and directly impale the moon.

I came out of Seattle on the wings of swords, dizzy from lack of blood, thin with anemia, in love with long hair and laughter at three in the morning. How is it that we slept so little and said so much? Sheets stained, a hallway, dancing in the main room, ghosted in, refusing to exist for three days running, the colour of his hands in the sink. Revitalized, starving, everything blurring into a week of living out of town, trying to learn where all the streets joyfully go and how they knit together. Red like bricks, white like sheets, windows running, the darkness of a night-club, an arcade of easy decisions lain out to take, simply, delightfully, right.

Monday I arrived and Monday I left, a line on the calendar, traditional and far away, a sweet stretch of time, between an inhale of wind and exhale of sunshine, just long enough to remember what I want and how much of it I can create.

Back in September, the Brickhouse was crowded with loud, unexpected, off-season patrons, drinking while on their way to a club. The bartender glared at them as I took Mike past the main area, the 70’s upholstered couches cluttered with shaggy pillows, a short row of inaccurate pool tables, to the close seats lining the back where our group generally collects. There’s a Ms. Pacman there and murky fishtanks in-set into the wall full of dubious looking fish we always feel mutely sorry for.

!!!!!!

I could see the taxis had been quicker, already our friends were there, a pitcher of dark beer resting on every table. Our evening, as the only people who didn’t smoke, the two playing accordion with language, slid from them into late dinner at a Pho place that played porn on a small television in the back next to a table of beat-boxing Korean boys. Laughter, neon, mirrors along every wall. With dawn threatening, the clock reading older: “Where are you staying?” “Nowhere yet.” “So what you mean to say is that you’re staying with me.” Four hours in a bed together before working up to the common revelation we call a kiss. He looked at me like a child who’s seen something truly marvelous, like the astonishing miracle of a talking sock. I felt like a gift, a treasure worth having, a lesson learned well enough to speak a new language, which was an old language, which was exactly a story waiting to bend itself to fit the confines of my personal mythology as well as my bed.

Seattle, where we met-went next, as architecture, as a patch-work of memories I am beginning to sew from day to day. This is where I took a picture of a walk/don’t walk sign, next to where someone grinned and played the rake, taller, thin, dry, not as everything as I knew before, but better, improved. This is where I stood for the bus that took me to Ballard, where the streets are paved in brick, Norwegian History, a story of a dead son, an Italian dinner, and the sound of back-stage banter at the Tractor, “give me your hand”, climbing the fence and staring down at Nicole as she argued with the buttons of my camera, as I wore Mike’s hat and smiled as if the expression were newly minted just for me. How everywhere is named the spot or the dot or the spatter, from sex clubs to breakfast places to all night diners, dark, noisy, crowded, and low. Dancing all night, walking past another day, sitting on the floor of the beating heart of the downtown library, knowing which bus route will take me back up the hill. Refusing to use anything but his full name, two syllables, originating in Hebrew, meaning “he will add”.

365 days seventy-eight: what happens at half ten?

Who was that naked in the fountain? It’s doubtful we’ll ever know, but it is a friend os the family who lives in the pink house basement a block away from the full force impact of forgetting how beautiful his eyes can be, I’ve never seen him need such a shave, December could never be so far away as this moment here, again recognizing my lover and finally feeling my heart breathe.

I am meshing with the city, overlaying memory with memory – a hotel, how strange, sleepless long nights, better than last time, the changes in my life forcing me into a little more. This time with friends, watching my ties as they grow, thrusting roots into the unknown pattern of streets. Eyes stinging from the water as the stars walk by, lights I can’t even pretend to see. Blind. Sitting in a car in a parking lot, realizing that I’m apparently talking to a Jewish martial arts expert composer who runs a store where everything sold is purple and thinking that’s entirely normal and more than a little bit okay. Obviously. Evident like walking through snow, the shape of movement imprinting in the weather. Fire in a room, the shivering unlikely, improbable, and unexpectedly matched up like polarized film. Collected moments accruing into a future avalanche, an altar to where we’re all be next year.

It was nice to meet you, I hope to see you again. With love, and everything else the heart needs around. Knee deep.

I can’t believe I forgot how glorious his eyes are. Now comes the count down to April.

I’m staying in a rather potentially beautiful antique apartment above a card games workshop that used to be a porn studio. (Terrible carpet for it, is all I have to say.) The workshop is as most of these places, lined with folding-leg tables piled high with luminous hologrammatic sheets printed with animistic instructions reminiscent of Magic: the gathering, designed by men who, though friendly, look overly pale, as if there’s an unspoken cliche need to go outside. The only hint to its former residents is an inconspicuous electrical outlet smack dab in the middle of the ceiling.

Joe’s place, upstairs where I’m staying, is almost the antithesis. Hardwood floors, large windows, high ceilings, comfortable cupboards built into every convenient wall, it’s significantly nicer than where I live in Vancouver, very much the sort of place I would love to live someday. I feel lucky to be here. It is, however, a Boy’s Mess of an apartment as well. The kitchen, as fantastic and inspiring as it is, is empty of everything but untouched cleaning supplies and some dubious condiments left over from a previous incarnation, and everywhere else is covered in clothes and the untidy detritus of card game design.

I like it anyway, though. It goes well with the marvelous weather and my equally marvelous company, setting it off like a misbegotten off-shoot of a more epic nerd chic.

THEY HAVE SUNLIGHT!!!

I made it to Seattle. Someone even paid for my ticket on the promise that I go to some masquerade party with them and their ridiculously hot girlfriend on Friday. Somehow, just somehow, I couldn’t say no. Oddly.

I’m staying downtown, within a block of the Space Needle. I really like it here. There’s clothes to return this week, a corsetiere acquaintance to visit, and friends and extended chosen-family to have tea with. Joseph and I went to a park earlier up on Capital Hill with some fruit cobble and there were pretty naked people laughing and splashing in the water fountain, drunk from St. Paddy’s day, and delightedly giggling like they had just invented joy. (Once I’m done this, we’re going to watch American Astronaut).

Tomorrow is Mike’s gig with Buckethead, which should prove to be wicked and by wicked, I mean delightful.

another day where I haven’t left the house yet

This makes me happy.

A city dressed in shadows, constant cloud. It was nice to be out of it, alive under sunlight, meeting new people, a trick I have all but lost in Vancouver. Ran out of people, somehow, ran out of patience. Things, moments, miniature adventures dressed like tedious hotel rooms, anonymous, sterile with interstitial furniture.

Getting away was good for me. I’ve come back from Seattle with e-mail addresses and stories of dancing all night, interesting possibilities, and more than one bit of revelation. (Apparently someone’s hard-wired into my system. This would bother me, except that at least I’m aware of it.)

Friday night was a failed attempt to see the laser graffiti up from San Francisco, (they couldn’t get it to work, so after having us stand in the rain for 45 minutes, they gave up, packed up, and left), and Duncan’s yearly party, aka the sort of evening that goes late. I didn’t get home until almost three, at which point my friend Dan came over to crash the night rather than going all the way home to Deep Cove after working downtown, so three turned into four which turned into my alarm, the snooze button, the alarm, then the realization that I was going to be late unless the taxi managed to get me downtown in under eight minutes. A brilliant start.

Once I was on the bus, everything was easier. No one even asked for a ticket. The border snuffled a little at my silly hat, but smiled wryly at my jokes and let me go, and I was picked up immediately when I arrived by a young man with wonderful eyes who canceled out all possible nervousness intelligent people might have had about getting into a strangers car. (I am discounting myself from this group, we all know I get into strangers cars far more than my mother would like). Ten points all across the board. The party itself proved to be a little much at first, as there seemed to be a table-top game being played in every room, but I met some of Silva’s friends outside and stood in the sun long enough that the currents of the house had time enough to shuffle some people out who weren’t obsessively rolling dice.

It was comfortable, settling in, and I’m sorry I didn’t get more contact info for some of the people I spent time with. One girl in particular, short black hair, eyes like jewelry, Erica? She braided my hair into thin whips that fell out over the course of the evening. I didn’t even catch when she was gone the same way I’m not sure when the sun went down.

Eventually the games wound down and the bid to go dancing began in earnest until Sebastien Jon Karl, the man with many names, his friend Robin, and Dan, our host, piled into the car to drive downtown to a place called Noc Noc. Red, black, a giant nailed to the wall above the bar, arms spread, lights in its eyes. I laughed as I ditched my coat, glad at the scurrilous decor, already moving to the music as I rolled ear-plugs out of napkins at the bar.

I hate that Vancouver doesn’t have any all-night dance clubs. I used to practically live in such places, bruised feet every morning, sore muscles at least twice a week, so Noc Noc was perfect, minus the early crowding. (Until the floor, mostly dominated by people who’d been drinking, maybe too much, thinned as the hours went by, I continually felt like killing people who didn’t give me space to properly move.) We lost Robin somewhere around four in the morning, but adopted Steele, a here-to-actually-dance with an uncanny resemblance to a 20-something Antony, and kept going until dawn. It would have been longer, but the prospect of soaking in a hot tub as the sun came up was too nice to pass up. When the sky started showing blue, we threw ourselves out of the club, and drove back to Dan’s house around seven, deciding not to get out of the water until it was officially tomorrow. And, with the fogged lucidity that only the blind-tired can have, that’s what we did.

Breakfast was next, ridiculously huge portions at an odd diner papered with an anarchistic riot of crayon illustrations. From what I could see, the surreal drawings had been created by every skill-level possible. There were scrawls that were barely recognizable as possibly maybe it’s a tree if you squint to hyper-detailed anatomy studies of cthuloid anime characters who may or may not have been sodomizing a smurf underneath a wiccan symbol. (My favourite was a purple realist cartoon of a stripe-tailed lemur wearing a yarmulke and holding a menorah with the words JEWISH LEMUR at the top.) Highly entertaining. As I’m told it’s a 24 hour diner, I’m almost certain to be back there this week. Maybe I’ll get a picture.

We met with Kris there, which was great, and when Sebastian and Steele begged out to go sleep and get boots fixed, she came back to Dan’s house to hang out a bit, meet the cats, and drink some tea before driving home. It made me smile when I found some blurry pictures of us together on my camera during the bus-ride back to Vancouver.

Dan made sure I got to see Gasworks park, finally, before I had to go, for which I’m thankful. That park is some sort of fairy-tale, like the model ruins of an abandoned Wizard of Oz city. It hit home, standing there, why so many artists come out of Seattle, a sense I’d only lived in the edges of before. Suddenly I felt a biting urge to move there, escape Vancouver like a bad relationship to go stay with the neighbor, no matter the guns and dirty politics. Impossible, as of yet, but a new thought. A nice one.

I’m going back for Mike’s gig on Tuesday, though no plans have formalized yet. I don’t know when I’m going or how long I’ll stay.

the cheapest form of time travel

I found a stranger dancing at Noc Noc, an all-night club I went to in Seattle, who was a striking image of my last lover, but fifteen years younger. I had him hold me and kiss me on the crown of my skull, just so I could close my eyes and pretend I was still home.

Some times I feel like I am sinking into an alternative to my own life.

I don’t think the kids will mind.

famous on the internet

December 31st, I woke to cats sleeping on my legs and chest, purring, their little black noses touching, paws intertwined, tails even curled together. Ridiculous, really. I almost didn’t want to move, but plans were afoot! Great plans! Wonderful plans! Ray had agreed to come to Seattle with me! Begone kitties, take your adorable cute little selves and go sleep somewhere else. I am getting up!

We saddled up and hit the highway around four:thirty, certain I had everything needed. Goth-tastic outfit? Check. Cherie‘s phone number? Check. A basic working knowledge of Seattle? Sure. I’ve been there a whole four or five times. Once even (mostly) during the day. We’ll be fine, right? And we were. We didn’t arrive in time for dinner, but with the help of a gas-station map and a borrowed phone, finding parking on Capital Hill was trickier than finding where she lives.

Cherie lives upstairs, apparently, neighbour, through a quirk of urban planning, to my friend Ellen, with a husband, Aric, a fish, Howard, and a cat, Spainy. All of which I was aware of through her blogging, though never so immediately.* Added to this charming mix was Aric’s “heterosexual life-partner” Alex, who I met by walking into the livingroom while taking my shirt off. Go me.

After lacing ourselves in to various cliché-yet-fabulous required black, we split like atoms and went off in two cars down the hill to an odd little anonymous back alley with an industrial door at the end, on the right, the entrance to a private goth club named The Mercury. A thing which I did not think existed. Really because, well, why would it? The answer – smoking laws. When public smoking was banned in Vancouver, most people either dimmed their filthy habits down or went and huddled outside in the rain. Not so in Seattle, where some sort of cabaret license has granted private venues the right to shelter smokers, similar to the odd-ball restaurant laws of California.

It was dark inside, low, with cement floors, narrow halls, fake red velvet everywhere, and not quite enough seating. It reminded me of an illegal basement apartment as done up by a I’m-so-spooky runaway with an Ikea addiction. Absolutely perfect, like a silver bullet crucifix clutched to the heart of fourteen year old Sisters of Mercy fan.

We pinned down a corner all to ourselves, just off the dancefloor, (incongruously, it was a swing night, so the music was mysteriously superb), and cheerfully settled in with terrible goth mockery and some silly attempts at fake swing dancing. We had tremendous fun. Alex, how excellent, even found some cherries. Also of note was Cherie’s magnificent tumble, being her abrupt discovery with the frictionless effect of multi-layering with taffeta on a bar stool, but she didn’t spill all her wine, just some of it, and not on her so much as the rest of us, so the verdict was that she did okay.

Somehow, in the midst of everything, midnight crept up on us. This resulted in a tremendously over-complicated drive up the hill, then a complete and utter abandonment of the car when we discovered the fireworks had already started. We ran, whooping, wonderfully nutty in all our finery, past terrible hipster parties, (you can peek at Cherie’s post to see what they shouted at me), to discover, at the roundabout at the end of the block, that something had gone incredibly wrong and the fireworks seemed to have sputtered into a start then quit. “Hear that?” I asked, “That’s the sound of five pyrotech’s having panic attacks.” Later we discovered that there was a computer error, but at the time, there was no way to know. We were standing, chilly, laughing, and turning down offers of champagne from strangers, uncertain how long we should stand there until we gave up and turned around. We hadn’t met the fellows at the pre-agreed fireworks watching spot, after all, we were just standing at a rather random intersection. Thankfully, our perseverence was rewarded. It kicked in again with obviously programmed cues being set off by hand by people who hadn’t planned for it at all. I tried to take a picture, but I think I was laughing too much for anything steady to have come from it. The fireworks had the exquisite shape of people swearing, of trying not to think of the obscene amount of money that had been spent on the show that obviously wasn’t happening. I loved it. Those people have my utmost respect.

We regrouped at the apartment to schism into the booty-shakers and the people going to bed. This is where we lost Ray, Ellen, and Cherie to the monsters of sleeping-at-night-like-sane-people. Aric, Alex, and I went back to the club, where the music had shifted into more traditional stomp the floor flat industrial. I don’t know how long we were there, I lost track of time in dancing, but it was awhile. Hours, at least. I was introduced to some rather nice people with violently red hair and to the unpleasant fact that there will always be someone who shows up dressed as a trashy fetish santa. Eventually the smoke got me, though, and it was time to go hunting for something to eat.

People spiralled off in all directions, leaving Alex to prowl me about town, trying to find a 24 hour place with the temerity to stay open on New Year’s Eve. Eventually the clever thing found us a kosher hot dog stand where we were rudely muttered at by a slightly addled older man who sounded astonishingly like Tom Waits. We stood there, blinking back laughter as best we could as he swept leaves around us, swearing, Alex singing the first few bars to The Piano’s Been Drinking. It was terrible and we loved every minute of it. Even the hotdog.

*(Seeing Ellen was a treat rivalling her legendary cookies, and it turns out Cherie is possibly the most bubbly person I’ve ever met, instilling new life into that overused word, awesome, every ten minutes. I will never be able to read a word she writes again without her voice in my head, excitedly reading it to me.)

I will say real things later, after I try this sleep thing I’ve heard is neat

Seattle was the escape I needed. Not only does it have a refreshing amount of honest-to-mercy architectural and social diversity, it seems everyone I know there is brilliant, fun, and good-looking.*

It’s almost spooky.

*(in this particular instance, I am referring to the delightful novelist Cherie Priest, her wonderful husband Aric Jym, their marvelous friend Alex, and our favourite kitchen genius Ellen, who I met here, but who somehow ended up living in the same building as the first two.)

Also, not only did I get to go home with the hot guy, it was only when I was back in Vancouver that I realized I’d stolen his shirt:

t-shirt death threat

Which begins, if dubiously, my first attempt at the 365 project.

So! Hey 2008! What’s shaking?

some things are less unexpected than others

HEY SEATTLE!

That 1 Guy is playing this evening at the Tractor Tavern. (watch the video) (listen to the music)

His gig here was so phenomenal that I can’t, in all reason, pass up the chance for a second show. It’s looking like I might be in attendance, so this is our chance to finally get down and shake some booty together. Who’s in?

Edit: Alright, there’s no “might be” anymore. “Might be” was before we spent 12 hours together. I’d have left with him this afternoon, but there’s no busses back, so Nicole and I are going instead. We’re leaving in an hour.

I could still fall in love with you

Does anyone know of a professional alteration shop that won’t break the bank?

I have a line on a fairly simple gown that I would like to be a bit more complex. Mostly the skirt ruched up with tulle put underneath as the green one is on this page, or with something on top, as the red one is, yes, flowery bits and all, if that’s easier. It’s about time I admitted myself a flowery bit of girlishness rather than have certain aspects of femininity drift blankly past me like a painted-eye shopping mall crowd after a fire.

  • the feeling of some love.

    Last Sunday I went to Seattle, and after a pleasant ride down with Brian’s friend, Jane, long silver hair, the pretty violet mannerisms of a relaxed bird, I found myself in the grand company of Eliza, who walks like she really means it and takes two hours to decide what to wear. It felt somehow like I was speaking with an echo of something I used to believe in. Three days of barely sleeping, being thrown into a car with a familiar stranger, a city I’m not familiar with. I felt like a game of jeweled cards was playing inside my head where I didn’t know the rules. I appreciated her friends, they were relaxing, a black clothes contingent to take my hand and keep me standing through my weary run. more pictures soon.

  • the feeling of my workplace.

    People have been repeatedly sending Robert Newman’s History of Oil to me the last few days. I am remiss in not posting it immediately, I’m sorry. (I forget more people read here). It’s a shining and clever monologue that discusses the critical political issues of war and energy use in an exceedingly accessible manner. He gracefully binds imperative information in laughter and ties it all up with a fun sense of charming levity, which may sounds silly, but it really needs to be seen to be properly understood. Watch it as soon as possible!

    Quote of the Day: Andrew: “I think it says bad things about me when I try and go to the site http://super.cali.fragi.listic.expi.ali.do.cio.us/ and get disappointed that no one has made it yet.”

    • ‘she offered her honour, he honoured her offer, and all night long he was on her and off her.’


    Pike Place Market
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    http://twas.brillig.and.the.slithy.toves.did.gyre.and.gimble.in.the.wabe.all.mimsy.were.the.borogoves.and.the.mome.raths.outgrabe.jabberwocky.com/

    Another letter arrived after the long weekend. This one with a different stamp.

    Cherished Jhayne,

    Once upon a yesterday, when hearts still
    hardened and stones still bled, a boy
    grew up listening to the wind. “It sounds
    almost like singing,” he would say, and
    friends and family would laugh at his
    fancy. As a youg man he bought a pair
    of boots and took to travelling, and did
    not say that he was following the voice of
    the wind. To himself he would say, “She is
    almost singing, but cannot find the melody.”
    A traveler one day came across the man as
    he stood among the rocks, arms upraised.
    “I am teaching the wind to sing,” said the
    boy-who-was-now-a-man. The traveler moved
    on but many years later passed by the
    same spot, and paused upon hearing a
    beautiful song. No singer
    stood there, merely
    the wind, who spun
    around a rock
    shaped like a
    man, with his
    arms upraised.

    X

    Love.