Year: 2001

The Mike Doughty show last night was brilliant, just him and a guitar. He developed an immediate rapport with the audience – to the point where people sometimes laughed just because some part of a song was particularly perfect. At one point after a song, he said “I really have to pee,” surrendered his guitar to an audience member, and booked it to the bathroom. He boiled some Soul Coughing hits down to their perfect essential core (His voice is all he needs for these things), played some songs from Skittish, and some new ones. The show was truly inspiring.

Walking home, an older couple slowed down next to me in a white Taurus and asked “Do you know how to find Five? We’re trying to get to the airport.” I gave them some directions and started walking again. They drove timidly to the next block, alongside the bus tunnel entrance and pulled over again. I back-tracked and crouched down beside the passenger side window. They were a bit frazzled from driving around in circles. I clarified my directions again and told them they just needed to follow them, drive confidently, and they’d be on the freeway soon enough. They still weren’t quite sure about something. The woman on the passenger side moved her head a little, I thought she might have been recoiling from my beer breath. I saw that they were anxious about taking advice from some kid walking through downtown Seattle at 1:30 in the morning with messy hair and no jacket. They thanked me and I said, “Good luck.”

I don’t have proper instinct. When I “jump in feet first” it’s on a careless whim or after an unsatisfying deliberation, giddy at my recklessness or just repressing the butterflies in my stomach.

It pleases me today to think that the Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve are rough halfway point in some vague pattern that would be visible only from a distance (or only from a calendar). Both are marked by fireworks.

One year ago – At work, Monday, July 3. An oddball day, nearly everyone took the day off to make it a four day weekend. I finished writing documentation for the processes I’d built over the last year. It was Stnick’s first day back from house-hunting in Munich. At 6:00 we walked down to the Alibi Room for drinks to mark a vague shifting point in both our careers. Stnick going to work in Germany, me finishing the last day of my 44 months At Amazon.

Six months ago – December 31, Chris Canuck visits and I fail in nearly every capacity as a good host.

Today – Hell, I don’t know. Ask me at New Year, I’ll undoubtedly have shaped some meaning out of the day’s events by then.

Last night, a man talking on walkie talkie, rushing across Broadway: “I’m going to the dollar store. . . Yeah, we’re the only underground radio station on Broadway. We’ll be back up in an hour.”

The picture that immediately developed in my head was this buy in the middle of a broadcast, reading some secret manifesto while hunkered over his pirate radio equipment. Suddenly the signal goes dead. He digs around in the hodge podge of loose wires, dismantled stereos, and car batteries, to find what is wrong. Confused listeners start calling, via every means possible. He finds the problem. Luckily the replacement part is available at the dollar store, racked between the phony Star Wars figures and the light switch covers. He grabs his little two-way and runs out to the store.

I was walking up Pine and I stopped at Seventh, waiting for the light to change. A weathered old Indian man with a backpack stopped at the same spot and asked me for change and I turned him down.

He studied me for a few more seconds and said, “Did they make you get that haircut?”

“No,” I answered, not sure who “they” referred to.

“It looks like you got really drunk and cut your own hair.”

I looked at him, laughing. “Wow, thanks!”

This encouraged him and he made a couple of more comments – not aggressive or taunting, just careless and matter of fact.

When I got home, I looked in the mirror. There’s a spot where my hair doesn’t blend exactly right, as if I had gotten up just before the barber had finished. The right third of my bangs stand straight up in an inherited cowlick and I’m starting to thin out in back. He probably has a point.

Back at the corner, I laughed a little more, and thanked him for being honest. He stood there passively. I should’ve given him my change, that was definitely worth fifty cents.

Within a span of three minutes, I just mistook two strangers for other people. I also gave someone the time. I said it was 9:15 when it was actually 9:12, but I think that one worked out.

This morning, drowsing in bed, not ready to get up after a late night. I hear a crashing sound, something like the recycling truck tossing recycling bins around or one of the giant yellow trucks that has been hauling loads of gravel up and down the street for a couple of months. Wait, why’d I think of recycling, that’s too specific. I bolt out of bed, dress, and drag my building’s bins out to the curb in record time.

The construction guys are out there. One truck has a shovel on the front – it picks up the balance of the gravel pile from across the street and drives away with it. There’s a woman standing in the road with one of those signs that says “Stop” on one side and “Slow” on the other. She spins it around restlessly. There’s no traffic and if there were they’d be more likely to respond to the yellow menace than the sleepy flagger. The truck with the shovel returns, it dumps a load of gravel across the street.

I take a shower, sure that I missed the recycling pickup for the second time this month, meaning we’ll have another $12 fine. I fix myself a cup of tea and contemplate the next problem.

I crippled my computer yesterday. I was zealously collecting banner advertisers’ domain names to block using the hack I just learned about. But I forget one rule – the list must be fewer than 2000 characters long. Now, when I log in, I have access to my tool bar for about ten seconds, time enough to launch one application, then my desktop disappears. I knew that the problem was in my registry files, so last night I hunted around using Ultra-Edit, but I didn’t know what I was doing.

I finish my tea and have a bowl of cereal. I sit, feeling useless and stupid, and listen to the Jim White CD.

On the way to the internet cafe, I have a peak at neighbors’ recycling bins – they haven’t been emptied. The truck hasn’t come yet. I will have no problem there.

And, from the cafe’s computer, I will find the Microsoft Knowledge Base article to help me fix my Windows problem.

It’s looking like a good day.

I just had a look at my site from here and it looks totally different. I have the browser use its default font, and I kind of like how that works. Maybe I could trick the page out to use a handful of fonts semi-randomly.

I overheard part of a conversation where a girl suddenly listed off things that she has never done, while her companion read the “Musician Wanted” ads in the Stranger out loud (“Bass player, bass player, bass player, Christian bass player.”):

She has never been to a wedding.
She has never taken acid.
She never graduated from high school.

Today, after getting a haircut at Rudy’s, I headed down to Bauhaus where I sat and read the new issue of the Stranger.

When I was finished, I looked up at the people lounging around. At least two-thirds of them had a copy of the Stranger open in front of them. I looked over at the newspapers piled up next to the cash register. There were three neat stacks of Strangers – each at least four feet tall.

I was bemused to have validated what I’ve suspected all along: I’m a cliché.

I thinned out a few books and CDs today and hauled them away to sell.

Aside from clinically examining the CDs and putting them into little stacks, the guy at the CD store made no motions to indicate that I was present. He rejected a few (I’ve misplaced them at some point) and paid out slightly less than they should’ve gone for.

I have a nodding acquaintance with the bookstore employee. She’s a cartoonist. I went off and skimmed Graham Greene’s autobiography while she went through my books.

When she was done, she came up and said, “Did you know you’ve got some really good books?”

“Do you mean they have some value?”

“No, you have some interesting books. The book of Paul Auster’s poems looks interesting. Poetry’s not my thing, but I’m going to have to check that out.” Then she asked, “Are you a cartoonist?”

We’ve had this conversation before. There were a few comics among my sendoffs and because comics are so marginalized, cartoonists assume that anyone who reads comics must also make them. “No.”

She looked at me like I was withholding some information. “I mean I used to draw and I’ve done a few pages.” But the answer is really no.