Year: 2002

You know that move where your nose is either a little too dry or a little too wet and you run your finger under one nostril to make sure your nose is still there? Yeah, I happened to be pulling one of those when the groom, my new brother-in-law, came up and introduced himself.

It had been pointed out that Mary’s wedding would be the first time in ten years that my core family would all be together in one place. And there was this moment at the reception when all the brothers and sisters happened to sit down at the same table and we realized – oh hey, here we all are. I made a little joke, apologising for not letting anyone else play with the Mickey Mouse bowling set that I’d opened one Christmas. We decided that we needed a picture. So everyone got out their cameras and siblings-in-law were pulled in and forced to stand behind us. Everyone was getting restless after the first picture was taken, there were shouts of, “Hey, don’t move. There’s one more camera!” Most everyone had had enough as soon as the last photo was taken, and we all wandered away in different directions.

On the trip from the airport to my sister’s house, I looked down at the dashboard and noticed that the odometer had just turned over to 10,000. Why was I chosen to witness this milestone for this anonymous little rental car? Poor Daewoo, no one who cares was there to appreciate this birthday. I grabbed my camera and recorded the sad moment for posterity.

Endless subdivisions of winding roads. Houses, painted the color of dust, look like they’ve grown out of the ground. Palm trees, cacti, orange trees, and lemon trees.

I played babysitter at various times throughout the week. Whenever Natasha was gone, Masha would cry for her mama until falling asleep. I’d sit down next to her and try to comfort her, “She’ll be back soon.” Once when I got up before she was asleep, she ran after me and leaned up against my legs crying. I picked her up, my heart in my throat, and sat down with her in my lap until she fell asleep.

It was a madhouse when my sister Rachel arrived with her kids. There were eight kids running around and wrestling. Chris had a spontaneous nosebleed earlier in the evening; and somehow he became the target of most of the tackles. Seeing three kids holding down a kid with spots of blood on his face and shirt was a little disturbing.

At the wedding reception my Uncle John showed everyone a baseball card with a picture of his grandson on it. “His team was in the Little League World Series. The only team they lost to was the crooked one, with the fourteen year-old pitcher.”

When I was little, Uncle John showed me how to crush a soda can into a perfect little hockey puck. We compared our current crushing techniques, my can turned out more compact, but he’s able to crush his in one fluid motion.

In the car on the way back from the reception, my brother Chris played with my camera, snapping a few pictures out the window. When I got home and looked at all the pictures, I noticed that the three photos he’d taken were pretty much the only good ones from the trip.

I’d gone to Arizona with a little bit of a cough, it cleared up pretty much right away. On the day of the wedding I developed a slightly harsher cough, it got worse after I tried to pack too much into my first evening back home. I had an unlikely theory that it was caused by a reaction to orange juice. But now I’m running a fever and sleeping through most of the day, I guess I caught the bug that was being passed among my nephews and nieces. Ugh.

Ryan asks me to push him on the swing. He goes outside while I get my shoes. Masha sits down in the gravel in front of Ryan’s swing. He criticizes her, “She follows me around all the time because she loves me so much.” I ask him, “What’s wrong with that?” Ryan resists when I ask him to move over to the other swing, but switches soon enough. I push him a bit and Masha climbs onto the free one. I give Masha a couple of cautious pushes, she’s small and I don’t want her to fall. Nate comes over and says he wants to use one of the swings, so I ask Masha if she wants to get into the baby swing. I’m not sure how much she understands me, though her one year old English is definitely better than my Russian. She just sits contentedly. And she doesn’t complain when I lift her out of the big kid swing and set her into the more secure baby swing. But now Nate wants to sit in the baby swing – I point out that Masha is the smallest. I offer him the swing that Masha has just vacated. But he takes up a position a few yards away in the gravel, whining occasionally. I give Ryan a push and then give Masha a push on alternating swing-backs.

Imagine you’re at The Comet on a Wednesday night. Someone comes in and starts setting up equipment in your vicinity. A band? The long table that you’re sitting at is moved and replaced with the big round industrial-spool table and an extension cord is threaded behind your legs. You take the hint and find a new seat at the end of a table where an old man is staring blankly at his Budweiser.

Two guys are across the table from you, one with frizzy curls and the other dressed a little conservatively. They keep telling you that they’re from California. “So, what are you doing up here?” “Oh, we work at Amazon.” Of course they do, where else would they work?

You don’t figure out what’s happening until the tables are seeded with song-directories, despite the fact that the equipment in the corner has started to resemble a karaoke machine.

Ingrid perks up. “Karaoke? It’s been awhile!” She pretends she’s not interested. But after the slightest encouragement, she starts making a list of all the songs in her repartoire. She says they’re all men’s songs. Songs with female singers tend to be kind of syrupy. (You don’t recognize most of the titles.)

She chooses Knock Three Times. She frets a bit before taking her selection to the karaoke-guy, and she worries a little while she waits for her turn and a singer pours her heart into an Alanis Morisette song.

Ingrid is introduced and she shuffles over. She takes the microphone, the music starts, and she closes her eyes. And she is into it! She sings with complete confidence, not looking at the lyrics scrolling by on the monitor, hitting every note. And she’s good! She punctuates every other note with a practiced hip swing or an arm motion – different knocking motions for “knock three times on the ceiling” and “knock two times on the pipe”.

That’s it.

I’ll be in Phoenix until Monday & may or may not post based on access and time. It’s my sister’s wedding. My entire family will be there, so I’ll no doubt be completely recharged with everyone’s favorite, childhood stories.

The lower-echelon of workers clamor for positions in Two Union Square. Once granted a position in the building, they wait anxiously every day for the chance to run an errand at an odd hour – when elevator traffic is relatively light. These are the fastest elevators in the city.

When someone scores a down elevator without the company of strangers or management, the lucky rider steps inside and waits until the doors have just closed. He makes a quick leap as the elevator floor begins rushing down away from him. And he’s in freefall . . . for the long moment that it takes gravity to catch up with the floor plunging away beneath him. He lands gently, finishes his ride, and goes on with his business. One worker has gone so far as to sabotage the coffee machine, so his boss will send him out for an espresso.

It takes only a month of elevator jumps to log the equivalent of a short skydiving jump.

Grandview was a land of Opportunity for those that wished to do the taking. And one guy who wanted to do the taking was a guy by the name of Chuck, who opened up a barbershop. He had the dream of eventually turning it into a barbershop/tatoo parlor/beauty salon. I never went there, because the haircuts are horrid, but my dad got his haircuts there.

He found his way into the distinctive cultural rut of the town. Decorated the place one Christmas. Won the newspaper’s Decoration prize. Next year, he decorated the shop again. He didn’t win the prize. He left the Santa Clause up on his roof, unlit. It clashed when he put up his halloween decorations. He never did take it down.

The story goes that Chuck rode into town with just $30 on him. He opened up a barber-shop, having mastered the 8 minute haircut wherever it was that he picked up his trade. He lived in his store. Eventually, the store was foreclosed, and it looked like his barbershop was dead. But, somehow, Chuck landed on his feet, found a new location to work and live, expanded his business operation to fit his dream of combination barbershop, tatoo-parlor, and beauty salon, and there the place sat… 10 years later and Chuck still has the $30 he came in with.

Next thing you knew the tatoo-artist left after the police nabbed him for selling tattoos to minors, and the beautician simply never bothered to move in. Chuck was disillusioned. Where does the store go from here? I always thought he could have eventually expanded to a barbershop/tatoo pallor/beauty salon/motorcycle club, but alas it was not going to happen and he was stuck back at square one.

Confused?

I first caught a glimpse of this car a couple of weeks ago. I automatically made some assumptions about the owner. He or she must be the kind of person who frequents a place that they call The Lake. As in, “What are you doing this weekend?” “Oh. We’re going down to The Lake.” But I saw it again a few days later, the canoe was still attached. I puzzled over that a bit and presented a new theory to some friends. “It’s amphibious,” I told them. As soon as I spoke, I saw the flaw in my logic. I had only seen the car twice and it’s possible that its owners may have been on their way to the lake the first time and on their way back the second time. Hardly conclusive.

I saw the car again today. The canoe is still attached; and I’m convinced that my theory is rock solid. This car is obviously a homegrown amphibious model. When the driver needs to take it out onto the water, they simply drive onto a pier and flip the car over into the water. The driver, and hopefully at least one other paddler, get into the canoe, ducking their heads so that they don’t hit them against the Volvo. They paddle around and when they get back to shore, they simply flip the car up out of the water and drive away.

Robert came by earlier than usual, in tears. He sat for awhile, recovering somewhat over a pot of tea and a bowl of corn flakes. I eventually shooed him out, and we walked down Broadway a bit, untalkative. I could see that he was barely holding himself together, weighted down by his bag, a pained expression, his occasional comments barely lucid. I imagined that once we’d parted, he’d be alone like this, lost on Broadway, crying again, with eight dollars to get him through the day. “What are you doing next?” I asked him. “I’m going anywhere that has coffee,” he laughed bitterly, “But I’m so confused right now – I don’t know where to go.” I rearranged the vague plans in my head and took him down to Bauhaus. He selected the donut with the most colorful sprinkles and then chose the most out-of-the-way table to sit at upstairs. He slowly perked up as he worked his way through two cups of coffee and as he let the words tumble from his mouth. Soon after he’d reached the point where I could picture him making it through the day without crumbling, I got ready leave. “Take care of yourself Robert,” a hand on his shoulder. It was the wrong thing to say, he looked hurt. I tried again, “It sounds like you have a couple of things in the pot brewing?” He answered briefly and we parted ways.

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A woman is wailing in Spanish at one of the reserved busker stations in Pike Place Market. She expertly works the strings of a tiny guitar with her bare fingers. I’m surprised that her fingers aren’t bleeding – I’m surprised that the guitar isn’t bleeding. Her voice is loud and confident, amplified by the acoustics of the cement walls around her. If these walls don’t crumble in the wake of a sustained note, then they’ll withstand an earthquake with no problem. I think I recognize her voice, she’s the woman with the unlikely last name, a city or a country. (Yves Las Vegas.) She was in a short-lived band with Krist Novaselic. Her hair is cut close to the scalp and she’s wearing a heavy jacket, she could almost pass for a boy. Her guitar case, open in front of her for donations, is guarded by a trio of naked Barbie dolls. She has a pile of homemade CDs and a little sign that says “Breast-Reduction Surgery Fund – Really”. I listen from upstairs for awhile. Everyone who walks by is compelled to stop and listen for awhile. Eventually after she’s finished a song, I go downstairs. She’s already ringing out the next song. I hold up a twenty-dollar bill before dropping it in the guitar case, to show that I’m paying for the CD that I’m taking. She doesn’t see me, her eyes are squeezed shut. I doubt she’d see me even if she were playing with her eyes open. She’s somewhere else entirely.

Yesterday after a game of Sorry!, which we decided leads children (ages six and over) to lives of cynicism and insincerity, Ingrid walked down to the waterfront with me to take the daily picture. I got a new camera a few days ago and I’m still pretty tentative with it. So I was kind of self-conscious whenever I took it out to snap a photo. At the beginning of the walk, I started rambling on about future ideas for Horizon Line. I told her that I wanted to have the little horizon picture open up into a page with a collection of photos from that day and I started talking about some half-baked ideas I had about how the other pictures would comment on the main horizon-picture. As I tried to articulate this for the first time, I realized how neurotic I was getting with all of this photography business. In my mind, I’ve overblown the scope of the thing into some big conceptual thing that’s beyond my abilities. I should just be having fun, taking pictures, and if the one’s I like fit somewhere on the site, then great. If not, then too bad. (It was a good walk though.)

Take the pictures, worry about the picture frames later.