Author: Jeff

There’s a crowd gathered at the end of a downtown hotel’s driveway. There’s a folding chair leaning against one of the sapling that’s planted in the sidewalk – it’s covered in signatures. One man is down on his knees, flipping through glossy autographed 8×10’s of professional wrestlers in a three-ring binder. This seems familiar. It’s the same hotel and maybe it’s the same group of fans. Looking for pro wrestlers in Seattle? It seems that the Hyatt is the place to start.

I wore khaki slacks, but before that I ironed khaki slacks. I’ll tell you about it sometime. How about now? It’s a good time for me, I’d be out somewhere, but I’ve just painted my front door and can’t close it until it’s dry. You’re stuck with me. So you might as well make yourself comfortable while I tell you about my pants and how I ironed them.

I don’t have an ironing board, so I did the work on a towel spread over the corner of my coffee table. When I finished ironing, I tried the pants on. They looked fine in the mirror, but the thought crossed my mind that they might need to have a crease ironed down the front of each pant leg. Do you do that with khakis, or only with more formal slacks? I couldn’t remember. I found some catalog photos online – pictures of smiling men enjoying their pants. Every pant leg had a neat and crisp crease down the front. So I set up the makeshift ironing board again, swapped the slacks for the jeans I’d been wearing earlier, and went back to work, carefully ironing a crease down the front of each leg.

When I finished I put the pants back on and checked out my handiwork in the mirror. The right leg was fine. The crease on the left leg veered off course from the front of my thigh, down toward the outside of the leg at the cuff. The left pants leg didn’t seem to be straight, it was trying to point out in front of me. The inseam twisted itself out about sixty degrees from the inside of my leg, so that at the cuff it was almost at the front of my leg. Someone had sold me a pair of irregular pants.

In the end, to compensate for the twisted leg, I ironed in a new crease that angled from the front of the pants leg down toward the inseam. The original seam didn’t iron out as completely as I’d hoped, so I ended up with a forked crease on my left leg. By the time I was out the door, the whole thing was a rumpled maze of wrinkles. They would impress nobody.

That’s the story of my pants.

The sound of a ruckus coming up behind me – some variety of turmoil, hooting and hollering. It sounds like trouble. When I turn to look though, a pack of bicycle police zip by. They’re pushing the speed limit. The two or three up front have a bit of a lead. They’re working the pedals hard now, trying to sustain their lead. The guys in back are laughing and taunting, “Ride through it, Mark! Ride through it!”

(In retrospect I should’ve yelled out, “Pop a wheelie!”)

• The clouds moved away just as the hail finished up, and we had a brisk clear afternoon.
• There were a couple of dogs waiting outside Vivace for their owners to come out with their coffee. They were a distraction, I slowed down while I was walking by, causing a little congestion in the foot traffic around me. I shook off the dogs’ influence and walked on toward the corner, noticing a neighbor just as we passed each other headed in opposite directions. She caught my aborted wave with her peripheral vision and we turned a little to nod an awkward hello.
• The way the flag is hung at the post office on the corner, it kind of flies adjacent to its flagpole rather than on its flagpole.
• Down on Denny, I tried to get a photo of a bird bathing in a puddle. It jumped into a tree and flexed it’s feathers to shake off some loose drops of water. (Also, at the same time that it was drying itself, it pooped a little.) The bird was nervous of my attention and it skipped away to a farther branch, where it opened its beak and made a chirpy Meow. If I were to personify the birds behavior after that, I would say that it seemed a bit embarrassed. It waited on the branch for a moment and considered something, before flying away, retreating completely.
• Police had put up a set of barriers at Westlake Center to keep any demonstrations contained. There was a group quietly pacing short and tight single-file circles around the little arch. There were no anti-war protesters, aside from the tall man leering at the demonstrators. He had a grimy old flag wrapped around his waste as a skirt. Police, some in riot gear and others wearing bicycle getups, were hanging off toward the side. The policemen’s bicycles were all parked along the open end of the fenced in area, as a porous fourth wall. The one closest to the fence fell over when I walked past it.
• I ran into my neighbor again across from Pike Place Market, we stopped at the same corner at the same time.
• There was a broken window, patched with cardboard, at the classy little hat store. I took a few photos and a woman (wearing a hat) came out and asked, “Anything specific you’re taking a picture of.” “The broken window.” “Just for fun?” I didn’t really have an answer. “. . . I’m wondering if you know something about it?” Okay, time for me to go.

There was another Weblogger Meetup today. It was pretty lively this month. We were chased out of the cafe an hour after it had closed though. Some of the others seemed to be organizing a second stop, but I headed home.

Among those who were present: Anita,
Beth,
Jake,
Jerry,
Jessamyn,
Kayne,
Matt,
Tara,
Timm,
tyd,
and two others,
Update: Mike and Brian.

I didn’t borrow the list from tyd’s site this month. But I just checked her site to find the two names I missed and she missed them too.

I passed the Federal Building on the way back, there was a small group of protesters. Someone was playing bagpipes. I got home and turned on the TV. NBC was broadcasting an Al Jazeera feed of an address by Saddam Hussein. The audio was drifting between the voices of three different translators, not staying on the same feed for longer than a minute. So I switched to NPR. And now it’s wartime.

If you drop the last letter off of my Scottish last name, you get a common Indian last name.* The telemarketer who just called asked for Sharma Jeffrey. I decided that I must be Sharma Jeffrey and told him so. Then he hesitated before making a short sales pitch in Hindi (I assume). He finished and waited for me to say something. I was pretty much stumped, but in short order, I gathered my bearings and remembered to gather Sharma Jeffrey’s bearings too. “Uh, I’m not interested.” The telemarketer hesitated and then said, “This is not a sales call.” Then he tried to sell me a competitive rate for calls to India. When I told him that I never call India, he tried to sell me some other long distance rates, and the conversation ended shortly after that.

I’m a bit conflicted. My first reaction when he stumbled over my name and I realized it was a telemarketing call was one of annoyance. But I’m also a little bit satisfied with the way the call unfolded and curious about how my number was collected.

* And, on an unrelated subject, if you leave the last letter where it is, you get a homonym for a widely advertised toilet paper brand. But that’s not open for discussion right now.

I put up some labels and signs at the waterfront for Anna Pickard‘s Fluxiness Project, a “Spacial Poem”/art-thing. Here‘s where you can browse through the whole project, and here‘s what I did. The most interesting contributions were more playful than mine, I think.

I was underdressed for the rain and I wandered into Borders Books to escape. I glanced through the little islands of paid-for-placement books. The mild jazz soundtrack was overpowered for thirty seconds by a loud “fssssssstt” from the espresso machine up on the mezzanine. When the espresso machine finished, the cash register started – an unbuffered “zip zip ziiip” from the dot-matrix printers that do the receipts. I headed upstairs and the background music changed from empty jazz to sugary pop. I had passed from an area covered by the jazz feed into an area covered by the pop feed. The area where the two feeds overlapped was surprisingly small, I crossed it in two paces. There was a man crouched low in front of the graphic novel section reading a book that was holding open against the floor. I walked into the fiction section and went instinctively to Italo Calvino‘s books. That’s where I begin all my bookstore visits – I look at Italo Calvino’s books, even though I’ve read all of them. They had one copy each of most of his books, I ran my eyes across the consistently designed spines of the Harcourt-published books folled by the odd spines of the two or three books from other publishers. I’m so used to seeing the familiar covers that I almost missed the new collection of autobiographical pieces. I plucked it from the shelf and ruffled through it. A pop song, maybe the one I came in with or maybe one that followed it, ended and something like Frank Sinatra, but not Frank Sinatra, came on. I wandered around some more, no longer up for browsing after being pleased by the Calvino find. I detected another soundtrack-border as I passed into the music section, the front area was covered by the pop-turned-Sinatra soundtrack, but that faded into silence. The music section had no soundtrack, just a thin quiet bass-line coming from abandoned headsets at the listening stations. I looked at nothing special and headed back downstairs through the Sinatra section, past the man crouched in front of the graphic novels and the three guys reaching to get at something behind him, into the inoffensive jazz which was intermittently drowned out by the zipping cash register printers. I waited in the short line and paid for the book (“zip zip zip-ziiiip”). I headed outside and someone ordered a latte just as I reached the door. I went outside, avoiding the rain by walking in between the raindrops. Okay, not really. The rain felt pretty good, light and prickly, massaging. How’s that?