Author: Jeff

A few notes about the tactile experience of reading my copy of A Sort of Life by Graham Greene:

Greene described particularly adventurous events as “Buchan-like”.

In the upper right hand corner of my copy a previous owner has written his name, “Ross Jones”. On the same page, placed carefully between the Los Angeles Times and Time review excerpts, there’s a pink and white file folder label. Typewritten on the file folder label is, “February 21, 1973 Bellevue, Washington”.

Used as a bookmark inside was a bank receipt for a deposit of $515.13 on May 1 1973 into a checking account at the Bellevue branch of Seattle-First National Bank.

There were a few more typos in the book than one would expect from a book published pre-spellcheck. Among them was “kidnaper”. I notice the same misspelling on the same day in one of the Gasoline Alley strips that appear in the new Drawn & Quarterly.

The man who sold me my digital camera had the posture of the Jack Lemmon character in Glengarry Glen Ross.

Another customer was paying for his top of the line unit at the same time that we went over to the cash register to finish up my transaction, my salesman maneuvered awkwardly around the other man’s salesman. The second salesman confidently shook his customers hand, passed him his double-bagged box, gave him his card (“I’m the manager.”) and invited him to drop his camera in a sink – they’ll replace it with no questions.

The customer headed out. As the manager (Kevin Spacey in Glengarry Glen Ross) walked away and I signed the credit card slip, my salesman turned toward the manager and said, “Thanks for doing that.”

The salesman saw me notice and confided that, “I was working on that guy and thought I was losing him. But my manager stepped in and closed it for me.”

I nodded my head and said, “Coffee is for closers.” He looked at me quizzically. Handing me my bag, he remembered himself, “Keep the packaging. You can bring it back anytime in the next 30 days and return it for an upgrade.”

My friend Jessica is doing what I merely dare myself to do. She quit her job, is selling all but a couple of boxes of her belongings, flying down to San Francisco, and taking the Green Tortoise to New York where she’s moving in with cousins.

Justin writes about vending machines here and here. My thoughts on the subject:

When you put money in those spiral-powered vending machines you’re not buying candy, so much as you are gambling for the chance of getting candy. Sometimes it pays out, sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes it pays out particularly well. The odds are good anyway, compared to slot-machines.

At the Amazon warehouse I was particularly good at shaking loose refreshments that were barely being held by the mighty spirals. Usually I only attempted this when the machine hadn’t paid out on my coins, though there were others who would periodically shake it down just to see what they could get. It was my opinion that the spirals should have been rotated an extra 45 degrees to increase the machine’s reliability.

Years ago, at another job, there was one Coke machine that would often offer up 2 cans if you hit the button twice quickly. I was pretty good at getting the second can and would always give it to whoever else was in the break room.

Once while waiting for someone in the lobby of a hostel in Amsterdam. I put a guilder into a machine, and selected my candy, the spiral rotated, and the package didn’t drop. I restrained myself, thinking it would be fairly ugly-American to beat up on a Dutch vending machine. I went back to my seat and waited for my friend, sulking.

I finished up Huntingtower this morning and then headed off for lunch at the Green Cat. The place was packed and it took awhile to get my salad. When it finally arrived I scarfed most of it down and rushed off to Bumbershoot. I headed across Seattle Center and got in line for the Sarah Vowell and Dave Eggers reading. The long line folded in on itself several times. I didn’t get in but stood in line for a bit, hoping enough people would leave early and I’d be let in. It wasn’t looking good, so I split.

There were a couple of bands I wanted to see, the shows were still a couple of hours away. I didn’t have the patience to deal with the crowds, so I thought I’d browse at Titlewave Books a bit – I’d like to pick up some more John Buchan and Graham Greene, and have a cup of tea somewhere. Titlewave was closed. Tower Books was out of business. And I couldn’t think of any other bookstores in the neighborhood.

I sat outside Uptown Espresso with a chai and the miscellaneus bits of different newspapers that I’d scraped together. I considered the generic concert-in-a-box nature of Bumbershoot shows and the fact that both of the bands that I wanted to see were local – meaning they probably play a show here at least once a month – and decided to forget about Bumbershoot.

I walked up to Pike Place Market to check for some Buchan and Graham at the bookstores there, but had no luck.

On a whim I wandered into a little thrift store that looked like it specialized in dust. I chatted with the little old lady. (What kind of stuff do you collect? Do you want to look at baseball cards?” “Don’t go back there.”) I ruffled through a little stack of comics. It was an interesting little collection of odd ’50s and ’60s non-superhero fare. I skimmed through a no-name Mad imitation, remembering that I’d read recently that Jack Davis had worked on a couple of those things, but this wasn’t one of them. The next few were Road Runner books or something. Then there was a Dell published Mad rip-off, Yak Yak. And, speak of the devil, it had a Jack Davis cover. I flipped through the book and every page was by Davis! And at the bottom of the stack, what do you think I found? An issue of Kurtzman’s own Humbug!

The day is looking up, I’ll read the comics later. And I’ll go over to Twice Sold Tales, where I know they have some more Buchan and the Graham Greene autobiography.

After seeing The Crimson Rivers and listening to the Orson Welles production of The Thirty-Nine Steps, I felt compelled to seek out a book in the thriller/adventure genre. Specifically I went looking for a Penguin collection of the John Buchan‘s Richard Hannay novels (of which The Thirty-Nine Steps is one) that I’ve seen before.

I didn’t find it, so I picked up Buchan’s Huntingtower. I’m only a few chapters into it, but I’m already bowled over by it (despite the stuffy & somehow dismissive introduction and the latter-day editor’s intrusive footnotes* that pollute this Oxford U. Press edition).

I cringe to a degree when the main character’s attitudes match some of my own tics. It’s really funny. Regarding his book collection: “He had a liking for small volumes – things he could stuff into his pocket in that sudden journey which he loved to contemplate. . . . Only he had never taken it.” Then a couple of days into his retirement, he decides to finally take that holiday. Only after carefully selecting a book to take with him does he think to contemplate what his destination should be. To make an allusion to a book I’ve set aside once again, he’s a bit Quixotic.

McCunn, the main character, gets into a conversation at one point with a jaded young writer wannabe who is filled with half-baked half-formed ideas. I smile as these characters, both of whom seem to mirror conflicting aspects of my own personality, talk. One, slowly building a case against the older. The other, good naturedly feeling his way through the discussion before arriving at his conclusions about the man sitting across from him.

*intrusive footnotes – I know what a “safety razor” is, thank you very much.

Yesterday evening I was walking over to Safeway to get some ice cream. Halfway through the Safeway block, I looked up and saw Lisa walking toward me. I was a little surprised – this isn’t her neighborhood.

When I said “Hi, how you doing?” and she started to respond, the guy that she was walking with made some quick gesture that I didn’t catch and just kept walking, not missing a stride. As that happened I almost caught a puzzled expression on her face – as imperceptible as his gesture had been. If not for these ticks, I would have thought that they weren’t together, that they just happened to be walking at the same pace.

We stood there puzzling over the situation for a minute, she asked me if the Indian restaurant a few doors down was good, and we sort of confirmed our vague plans to “do something sometime” (recycling part of a previous phone conversation). We parted, and she headed over to the Indian restaurant to rejoin the mystery man.

Now I can ask her what that was about. It’ll be fun because it’ll be weeks from now and the whole play-by-play will be more complicated than if I’d asked about it as it happened.

Our fine summery weather has been replaced today with a consistent drizzle interrupted occasionally by minor downpours. A good day for reading, you say? Well on that note, I started Don Quixote again yesterday. I’m not sure I’ll get through it, since I’ve already gone in search of other reading material. First, I went over to Bailey-Coy to have another look at a book of travel essays about Cuba. I balked at the price and headed out to some other stores to see if I could find a discounted copy. I ended up picking up Take Me With You, more expensive, but it looks interesting. At the checkout counter, I noticed that I was missing my ATM card – I’d left it in a cash machine. I headed back up to the bank and, luckily, got there while someone was servicing the machine. Came home, wheeled the recycling bins back from the curb (got to wear my raincoat). Good stuff.

Catching up with Lisa yesterday, I was pleased to think about how she always has an ongoing secret project tucked away somewhere. She’s just finished a class in documentary film-making and today she’s competing in a triathlon. (Which briefly brings to mind my friend Cedric, who within a short period after I met him released an album, ran a marathon, and read James Joyce’s Ulysses.)

Regarding a former coworker – best known for his knee-jerk defensiveness and his repressed bitterness and resentment – Mari remarks about how laid back he’s become since he was laid-off and went leather-biker. “He’s even given up being vegetarian,” she says. “And vegetarianism is a symptom of uptightness?” I ask, knowing the answer. “Well, . . . yes!”

All this as I continue to hem and haw about vague travel plans, push back invisible departure dates, and fret over the deflated stock price of the only holding in my portfolio (which costed me nothing).

One might rate their humility on a scale, with genuine humbleness at one end and shame on the other.

These are strange days and I’m starting to convince myself that this is a strange place. Appropriately, with this essay about the re-gentrification/suffocation of Pike/Pine (from nine months ago) and this current, less personal editorial about the simple degeneration of Broadway, the Stranger chronicles two contradictory phenomenon. How can they both be true?

More on this later, I think.