Year: 2002

Spring began. It snowed, big flakes. Someone played Johnny Cash somewhere. “Now we are [twenty-]six.”

In Horizon Line: A Spring Day In Seattle.

My brother Justin responded to my story about family folklore (scroll down a bit) with a meticulous (if not always clear) description of how he eats an ice cream cone. He writes off the time that he ate an ice cream cone from the bottom up as a failed experiment.

I was a little worried – Justin doesn’t have any younger brothers or sisters to tell stories about. But since he’s giving an account of something that he did when he was three, I’m guessing he has no shortage of young Justin anecdotes.

My sister Karen mentioned that her son likes the Uncle Jeff stories that she’s been telling him.

I tried to imagine which Uncle Jeff stories might appeal to a five year old. “Uncle Jeff stories? Are these stories that I tell and that you’re repeating or are they stories about me?”

“Well,” she hesitated, “his favorite is about the time you had an ice cream cone; and you ate the cone first and got the ice cream all over everything.”

“What? I remember that. That was Justin!”

Today after a morning of foggy-headed encounters and social gaffes, I sat down at the crowded counter at Bauhaus cracked open my book and sipped my tea. The sun was shining with an intensity that hasn’t been seen for weeks (though the temperature made no concessions, barely creeping above forty degrees). The window in front of me acted as a magnifying glass. A concentrated beam of sunlight drilled itself into my head; while the people lounging outside were bundled in jackets against the cold.

The fog inside my head slowly burned away. I blinked my eyes. The muscles in my back relaxed. I sweated and felt my nose burn. I recharged.

I left reluctantly as the end of the Beatles album that was being played approached. Walking back up the hill, I looked down at my green shoes and felt like running. Though I risk turning up baggage associated with the word, I’ll say that I felt a sense of clarity. Clear mind, clear body, clear skies.

My environment has been a bit rough for the last few weeks. I’ve been suffering through hay fever season. My building’s furnace died a sudden death and I was sleeping restlessly through some cold nights. And finally, the weather has largely been nothing like it was today. That’s the big one, the weather.

Yes. I recommend the sunlight . . . and the Beatles. The sunlight and the Beatles are both very good today.

I was going through some old notebooks yesterday and was reminded of a habit I used to have. I would sit in the window at Espresso Roma (and later at Habitat Espresso) and take notes about everyone who walked by.

5/4/98 Bushy white mustache, 2 inch heels. Pete on his bicycle, pulls over and locks it to a parking meter. An EMT takes a sip from his Pepsi. Garbage truck driver has his name painted on the door of his truck, “Nick”. Pete’s reading Ghost World! Two guys, one in flannel, the other a hooded sweatshirt, carry pieces of ornate iron fence. Preppy boy walks past talking on his cell phone, two minutes later walks past from the other direction. A divorced PhD explains his taxes to a friend. A tulip in an eight ounce Coke bottle full of water.

5/11/98 Yellow shorts carrying black shoes. Vertical stripes, running with his hands in his pockets. Yellow tinted glasses, fuzzy bag. Brow furrowed, flushed cheeks, hands clasped in front bag hanging from elbow. Vertical stripes zips past from the other direction, green backpack over one shoulder. Khaki shirt jogs across the street against the light, cuts the corner, and walks the next crosswalk with the light. Cute girl scrapes the last of the cream cheese out of the packet for her bagel. Leather jacket, baggy corduroys, hitting palm with stick. Former barista, green jacket, blue bag, crosses street with arms folded. Dyed hair, rushes urgently to baseball cap, questions baseball cap, who answers casually, she calms, comes inside to get coffee. Baseball cap hails cab or waves to someone across the street. Teacup handle is made for smaller fingers. Short girl carries motorcycle helmet between visor and chin guard. Cute girl finishes bagel, goes outside for cigarette. Other cute girl, who I noticed twice before walking in both directions, is sitting outside, eating pastry. Mike (bearded), carrying bag of groceries, stops at corner to talk to guy with leather jacket slung over shoulder, when finished, he talks to two others. Bus blocks my view of that corner, when it drives away he’s moved on. Huge orange and green umbrella. Bleached moussed hair. Black coat, hair joins girl in opposite window. I think it’s just about time to go.

I’m enjoying reading through some of them now. I’m surprised by insignificant details that I remember, like Mike disappearing after the bus obscured him from my view (maybe he got on the bus). But I’m also surprised by every detail that I don’t remember; how could I forget the garbageman with his name painted on the side of his truck?

I think Espresso Roma was the only place where I regularly took these notes. That space is Bleu Bistro now and is slightly less conducive to solitary lingerers. I don’t think that’s why I stopped though. I’ve been more of a navel gazer lately, staring and zoning-out more than watching. Since I’ve started blogging, I’ve been consciously trying to crystallize anything I write into a cohesive piece I’ll be able to use here.

The other thing that pops up in those notebooks a lot (aside from attempts to draw myself and friends as Peanuts characters) are outlines and strategies for a hundred different never-started projects – mostly mini-comics, essays, and paintings.

For the moment I think I’m as satisfied with everything in the little pile of old notebooks as I am with everything I’ve typed into the blog-o-matic machine.

The meals I give Robert are barely helping him sustain himself. I buy him lunch and give him a five or a ten dollar bill for “coffee money” every day. I can spare it. But he comes back every day, lost and hungry. And I see no end to this. It has really been weighting me down.

For a couple of weeks Robert was showing up constantly – tracking me down at coffeeshops, finding me on the street. He was dialing my apartment from the building intercom several times a day. He only knows the numbers to press to reach my phone, he doesn’t know the code to hang up and can’t read it off the instructions. So he’d stay on the line through my voicemail message, past the beep, waiting silently. When the intercom system hung up automatically after a minute, he’d redial immediately.

forbear! keep off, hands off! sauve qui peut! devil take the hindmost!

This is why I’m starting to really like Thesaurus.com. A search for “recoil” brings up pages and pages of carefully categorized words and phrases in categories like “relating to the voluntary powers; individual volition”. It’s like having access to the source code behind a traditional single-threaded thesaurus. I end up rattling off on tangents as often as I find a more suitable or more flashy word.

If I had drinks-mixing skills: a) People at parties who don’t know how to mix drinks might ask me for help. b) I might end up volunteer my services anytime I detected a hint of hesitation on the part of a drink-seeker and people would be put off by my eager-to-please attitude.

So, ignorance is bliss I guess.

Robert tracks me down at a cafe. “Doc Holliday sent me some more artwork. And I wanted you to see it.”

I get him a cup of coffee and bring it over to the table. He pulls a big manila envelope out of his bag and hands it to me. I empty its content out in front of me. A couple of dozen slides fall out.

I hold one up. The words “Greece” and “Hellas” (in Cyrillic letters) are stamped into the little white frame. It looks like it came from an educational filmstrip or some other commercially available slide show. I hold it up to a light so that I can make out the picture. It’s an image of a Greek ruin.

We go through the little pile one slide at a time. I look at the slide and describe it to him, then pass it along to Robert.

“Oh, that’s Greece? Interesting!” He squints carefully through the little window, letting it soak in. I’m not sure how much of the picture he can make out. (The word “Greece” will enter his vocabulary for a few days. “I was talking to this Greek guy . . .”)

There are a few more slides from the Greece series and there’s a batch of photos from Mt. Vesuvius, the captions printed on the frames are in Italian.

I come across the first personal slide in the collection and hold it up to the light, “This is a man. Who is this?”

“I don’t know.”

I look again and try to guess when the picture was taken based on the man’s clothes. Then I notice the fish. One would think that I’d notice the two foot long fish that he was holding out beside him in the classic, I caught this fish pose.

There were a few more images of the fisherman and his family and a batch of tourist photos – from Copenhagen according to the handwritten caption on the frames.

Robert will produce another pile of slides every day until his supply is exhausted. Though the subjects of the slides are limited to the Greece, Mt. Vesuvius, fisherman, and Copenhagen sets, each day’s show will be different.

A man in a trenchcoat stands in a doorway holding copies of The Watchtower and Awake out in front of him like they were shields.

A young man with a stylish haircut strolls along offering tiny pamphlets to everyone he meets. He rattles off nonsense words in a sermon’s cadence, “Jolly-rolly Jeedee, peaches-leaches Jeebuz.”

A stern-looking man in a windbreaker holds out a booklet with a picture of the cross on it.

I encounter all these people before I reach the end of one city-block. I’m smiling by the time I reach the end of the block and see a second man distributing copies of The Watchtower. I shake my head and exclaim, “Geez!”

From behind me, the man in the windbreaker overhears and responds, “Exactly!”

I turn to look at him and he takes a tentative step toward me.

I laugh, assuming he’s misunderstood, and I explain, “Not ‘Jesus’! ‘Geez!'” then add, “Though ‘Jesus!’ might apply to.”

We’re grinning at each other – one of us more maniacally then the other. The light changes in my favor and I walk into the crosswalk.