Author: Jeff

The heads side of the penny has been wiped clean by white and green patterns of oxidation. “Liberty”, Lincoln, and the year are completely obscured. Actually, if it’s held up to the light, you can barely make out a few shapes – Lincoln’s collar and the shape of his forehead and nose. The the outer edge of the tails side is even more heavily corroded, you can still clearly read the larger words off the tails side. (“United States of America”, “One Cent”.) There’s an area in the middle that’s clean and shiny – the pillars and steps of the Lincoln Memorial emerging from a green and brown fog.

He’s turning heads. Matching leopard-spot shirt and pants, leather jacket painted metallic gold, gray cap, new green Chuck Taylor’s, dancing dancin’ the last few steps across the street. He can’t be more than seven years old. He passes by. Written across the back of his jacket it says, “Elvis Lives!”

It’s raining lightly at the corner where I’m waiting to cross the street. You would hardly even call it rain actually. It’s barely a sprinkle. The interesting thing is that the sidewalk is dry, the rain is only hitting the street. (I look up at the office towers around me to verify that it’s not actually just water falling several stories from window washers’ buckets.) The light changes and I walk over the crosswalk, through the sprinkling rain. I reach the sidewalk on the other side where, it turns out, the rain isn’t falling either.

I head into the store and select a couple of t-shirts. While waiting in line to pay, I watch a shadow that’s being cast against the translucent window from outside. It’s the profile of a woman. All of her features are obscured, all I can tell is that she has a short ponytail. She stands in the same place the entire time I’m in line, at one point pulling the shadow of a cellphone out from somewhere and talking into it for a minute.

When I get outside again, the weather conditions are identical to the way they were when I went inside. The street is being hit by something less than a drizzle – the sidewalks are dry. This little micro-weather system hasn’t moved an inch. (I check for window washers again.)

I wait at the corner for the light to change. I’m walking back in the direction I came from. Across the street, where I waited for the light earlier, I see a man who I’ve seen around before. Usually he stands silently outside the Bon Marche, hiding behind dark glasses, holding up copies of The Watchtower and Awake. It looks like he just came off-duty, he’s carrying the little leather portfolio that he stashes his magazines in and he seems more relaxed than usual. He’s laughing with a couple of people. They’re strangers – when the light changes they all walk into the crosswalk at different paces taking diverging paths. I walk into the crosswalk, through the light rain, and out onto the other side.

There were seals flopping around in Elliot Bay while I was down their today. They were splashing around and making so much noise that for a moment, before I had a good look, I thought they might be orcas. They were swimming back and forth, floating on their backs and waving their flippers in the air, jumping up out of the water, turning somersaults, and just generally making a ruckus. Very unusual – in the past all of the seals I’ve seen in Elliot Bay have been pretty sedate, only surfacing long enough to catch a quick breath before heading back underwater to catch some fish.

At one point the seals were only about ten yards away from the pier and I was walking alongside them trying to get a good photo. They stopped short and one of them looked up at me – his face was bigger and fuller than I’d expected. I’m anthropomorphizing here, but the expression on his face seemed to be saying something along the lines of, “What the hell do you think you’re looking at?”

I was mulling this over a few minutes ago, when I was posting today’s Horizon photo, and it dawned on me. I did a quick Google-search that, had I landed on someone’s weblog, would have been borderline-eligible for Disturbing Search Requests. My suspicion was confirmed. It’s mating season. Oops. Sorry, guys. I’ll leave you alone next time.

The Turf, a remarkable seedy little dive down by Pike Place Market, is being pushed out of its space by its landlords. (A number of low income housing units in the same building will most likely also be cleared out soon as well.) There’s something about that place, I can’t quite put my finger on it. It’s unnerving.

The fragments I’ve been piecing together don’t really do the place justice. To really fill out the picture, read the hard-boiled portrait of an evening at the Turf that the Stranger published a couple of years ago along with this more balanced obituary of the Turf’s former owner from Real Change.

• Hey, look. Beans for Breakfast is the title of a Johnny Cash song.
• I tried to rent Human Nature the other day. But the two video stores that I went to only had the movie on DVD. Neither store was stocking a VHS copy. (Now I’m officially behind the times.)
• There’s a superfluous zipper-pull on my jacket that’s pulled down the front zipper. It’s gotten kind of loose lately. After I’ve been wearing the jacket for awhile, the zipper-pull creeps up the zipper a few inches. So I’ve found myself having to pull it back down again whenever I’ve been out walking around, a motion which I suspect doesn’t look entirely unlike someone surreptitiously adjusting his fly.

Within the span of an hour there’s a shift from heavy rain to a cloudless sky. Later a bulky purple-gray cloud passes across the sun. A number of low clouds are being carried by the wind at a faster speed than the large cloud; and they’re gone by the time it’s allowed the sun to shine through again. Now the sky is covered with an entirely different variety of clouds. The quality of the light is changing constantly.

We usually experience the day as a long steady shift from darkness to light to darkness again marked by handful of exceptional phenomena – sunrise, sunset, dusk. This day was filled with notable light changes, so the day seemed to pass more quickly. It always seemed like the sunset would be coming along at any minute.

A grey grey day: Grey sky, grey plants, grey buildings, grey streets, grey rain filling grey puddles.

Only a few splashes of color: A red Honda parked nearby. A red Jeep parked across the street – (its headlights were left on). A pink and blue flyer pasted to a (grey) lamppost beside the Jeep. Half a block down the hill, a billboard (dimly lit by an overhead light) printed in fluorescent colors. Beneath the billboard, a pale blue phone booth, its hood is decorated by a backlit sign bearing one of the local phone company’s old names. (Everything else is sky, plants, buildings, streets, and rain – grey.)

At the coffee shop, there’s a ragged, bearded, middle-aged man sitting two chairs down from me. For awhile he’s turned around sideways watching the chess players gathered in the corner. They give him a quick glance, and return to their games. He mimes interest for awhile, then turns around and stares out the window, sometimes taking notes with a blue Bic pen on the front of a newspaper. Now he taps on the window as if trying to get someone’s attention. He climbs down out of his seat, picks an umbrella and a plastic grocery bag off the floor, and drops them onto the seat beside mine. A minute later, he’s pacing back and forth outside, smoking a cigarette. On one of his passes, he taps on the window right in front of his chair. His seat has been taken by the time he gets back inside, so he pushes his things off of the chair next to mine and moves in there, where he sits quietly for a long time. He eventually breaks his silence with a string of incoherent muttering – nothing aggressive. He wrestles with the newspaper that’s still in front of him on the counter and crosses out some of what he’s written before climbing out of the chair. He gathers his things and walks out. He heads down the hill, toward downtown. Later, I gather the newspaper to see what he’s written. On the front page he wrote a name, his own I assume – first, middle, and last -, repeated several times. On the sports page, he wrote out the alphabet and then the numbers “101 202 303 404 505 606 707 808 909”.