Author: Jeff

I’ve been spending a lot of time staring at the sky recently – That’s not true – I’ve been noticing the western afternoon and evening sky a lot recently.

Studying a cloud that fills my visual range. The sun playing off its edges. Or, when a cloud is hung just right, the sun reflects off the whole shape, making a sheet of white/yellow/orange/blue light cut with transit cables and powerlines.

I get distracted even when I’m trying to read. If there’s a window nearby, I’ll just study the clouds for awhile holding a book open to the first page of a chapter.

The eastern sky is a rarer sight. I’m never up early enough to catch the sunrise and there’s a hill in the way when I stay in my usual Capitol Hill – Downtown orbit.

I’ve also been fretting a bit lately about the lack of good places to view the city from within my little orbit. The Volunteer Park water tower is closed while the neighborhood’s water lines are replaced and pier 62/63 is blocked off for repairs as of today.

I was walking around awhile back, trying to find a spot. But whenever I had a promising idea, I’d make my way over there and find a block of condos positioned to hide enough of the view to make it not worthwhile. I’ll bet those condos have good views; and I’ll bet a lot of them are vacant too.

Robert has talked occasionally about a photographer he used to work with who he calls Doc Holliday. A lot of their work involved photographing military personnel. Through these military contacts they accumulated a book filled with sensitive information and photographs. Doc Holliday held onto this book when he moved to Burbank, California. The book gives him the power to call in any number of favors from people who wouldn’t want its secrets to get out. So far, it seems, no one has had to use this power.

My heart sank the first time he told me this. I’d never known Robert to carry his ramblings off into any paranoid fantasies.

Doc Holliday isn’t getting any younger – “He’s in the 70’s,” as Robert says. So he’s asked Robert to take responsibility for it. Robert wants nothing to do with it. The book scares him. Once your fingerprints are on the book, they will know who you are. You see there’s this computer –

When he started talking about the computer, I interrupted him. “Robert . . .”

He looked at me shaking my head. “I know this sounds hard to believe . . .”

“This isn’t real. It’s a story that you made up or that someone else told you.”

“No. It’s real,” he said. He dropped the subject.

He stopped by another time and started talking about his hopes for the future. Once he gets back onto his feet, he wants to save up enough money to buy a building that he’ll open up to the homeless. From the building he’ll provide services to help the unemployed find work. When drug addicts and drunks stop in, he’ll somehow get them to quit. Everyone will be happy, especially Robert, he really likes helping people. Some Italians have offered to come up from Burbank to help anytime he needs it. You see, he finally caved in and accepted the book from Doc Holliday.

My face fell in disappointment and he noticed.

“I know you think it’s just a story. But this is serious business.”

He’s too trusting and good-natured. I assume a senile friend told him some version of this story and he embellished it further with his own misunderstandings. Written words confuse him, so it makes sense that he would believe that a book could hold so much power.

Picture – My self-indulgent commentary on Washington state news:

*

My older brother, Chris, had a subscription to Sports Illustrated, he’d cut out pictures and hang them on his wall as posters. It seemed to me that sports were his exclusive territory, in the same way that coffee was my dad’s, and I didn’t pay much attention. Despite my disinterest, I have enough sports anecdotes to fill a long entry. So, here goes . . .

When I call someone on the phone, after they say “Hello?” and I say “Hello!” and they say “Hey, how are you?”, I always assume that they mistook my voice for someone else’s. So I offer a disclaimer, “This is Jeff,” before going on with the conversation.

I don’t know where I got the name “Jill” when I posted a correction of my completely false assumption that Alice at Strange Brew was a Mac user.

Does the fact that the person who pointed out this error has a “mac.com” email address mean that she’s a Mac user? I wouldn’t even speculate. (Her His sig file explicitly says “Mac user”.) End of subject.

Also: It’s “Novoselic”, not “Novaselic”. Robert is from Kentucky Oklahoma, not Tennessee. The joke was that “the bee flew away”, not “the bee got away”. Larry’s Market is neither on Queen Anne Hill or Queen Anne Avenue. It’s in the Queen Anne neighborhood; so it would’ve been more correct to say that the taxi driver took me to “Larry’s Market in Queen Anne”. And I (excuse me, “you”) still haven’t sent that email.

I liked the spot because it had a panoramic view of the city. Once though, I looked more carefully and noticed that I’d been turning in my seat, away from a building that covered half of the scene. I was disappointed – “That’s no panorama!” How could I fool myself into thinking otherwise?

I came back and had another look. I watched people appear from around the corner of the building, cross the street in front of me (sometimes waiting for the WALK/DONT WALK sign to change), and walk past. The building was only one-story – the sky, alternately drab and dramatic, could still be seen above it.

I decided the building was part of the setting – not an intrusion. It was fine where it was. I could appreciate the view again – one-quarter building, one-quarter city, half sky, people walking past.

Finally, regarding the Eyes Adrift show:

It was an early show, starting at around 6:00. The downstairs was filled the all ages crowd wearing their Sublime and Nirvana t-shirts. A short 40-year-old man in a mohawk shared his pipe with a couple of teenagers. But there were a couple of girls hippy dancing off to the side, that was kind of cute. Upstairs was smoky, the of-age crowd stood around with their drinks, watching the stage.

The opening bands, Cookie and Blood Brothers, were both self-consciously cheesy. The first relied a bit on, uh, pyrotechnics and the second had a pair of (literally) screaming vocalists. They were fun bands.

After the nearly unbearably long period where those guys – you know the ones – wander around on the little stage poking at microphones and such-like, the band came on stage and started playing. I stayed downstairs and watched the attention of the audience focus itself on Krist Novaselic towering frame. He hammed it up for the kids, getting up close and striking a couple of poses for the cameras.

The music was good – very much in line with the Meat Puppets – Kirkwood’s nasal voice wandering through semi-stream of conscious lyrics and hard, often countryish, guitar-work. (I don’t have the knowledge of music or the vocabulary to do any better than that.)

About halfway through the set a few people started to make asses of themselves in small ways. There were calls for “Freebird” or “something by Nirvana”. A group of kids started jumping up and down exageratedly and formed a sick parody of a 1994 moshpit.

This really put me off, it was undoubtedly not the intent, but it was like the audience was mocking the band – really disrespectful. I can see that someone might think I was over-reacting. It was a rock show and the opening groups have some self-conscious elements of mockery to them that the audience might have fed on. But, after standing for awhile, my back tenses up and I can get a little uptight, so that was my frame of mind. Maybe it was just me.

I escaped upstairs, the crowd had really filled out up there and there was a low-rumble of quiet conversation. I found a fine vantage point for the rest of the show.

The band finished playing the song that had inspired the moshers and Kirkwood made some dry flip comments, “That’s great! Isn’t this super!”, and he wandered over to a corner and faced the back of the stage where he stayed until his vocal part in the next song came up.

To summarize: The music was great. I look forward to the CD. I was embarrassed to be a part of that audience.

My acceptance of Robert’s optimism is just naive wishful thinking. For the last week or so, he’s been saying that he was supposed to get a subsidized apartment on February 1. But I ran into him yesterday (he’s turning up most days now) and he immediately handed me his case worker’s card and a post-it note that had the name of the facility and “wait list 10 months to a year” written on it in pencil. He said that his caseworker had told him to give it to me.

Three posts today, following up on the three posts from the day before yesterday.

First a correction: I don’t know why I assumed that Jill Alice at Strange Brew was a Mac user. A quick look finds that, aside from today’s denial of my assumption, she has blogged no acknowledgement of any OS affiliation.