Author: Jeff

My stock, my apartment, and my loads of books, comics, & things are grounding me. I’m thinking of getting rid of most of it, getting an around the world ticket, traveling for a year, and moving to NY or another city or back here.

Though I’ve certainly benefited from owning it, I’ve never had a good grasp of what to do with my stock. My apartment needs some remodeling, the bathroom, the kitchen cupboards, the false ceiling should be removed. But I don’t have the inclination to work on those now. I don’t have control of my living situation or money. These things are liabilities to me right now. To gain control, I need to simplify the situation.

When discussing (or rather IMing) this with someone for the first time, I went into a reflexive defensive stance. I’ve proposed similar strategies several times and haven’t followed through.

I will pare down portions of this plan to fit the practicalities of my world. I will regain my momentum, become the confident, active person that I’ve occasionally been in the past.

Sweeping statements like this and the sentiment behind them might seem immature, at least in the hands of an introverted, passionless, semi-compulsive 25 year old with a history of not walking the walk. But it’s different this time. In the past I’ve felt it, sometimes in my bones. Now I might not feel it as much, but I believe it. I believe it’s necessary.

Tentative calculations from a few days ago seem to indicate that my expenditures for July-September 2000 were approximately the same as my expenditures for the several months before and after. Whereas I generally stayed put & only had mortgage/co-op payments and day-to-day costs for all the other months, I paid mortgage/co-op costs plus travel expenses last summer.

Maybe further study will reveal something misleading in my math – irregardless, this is very interesting.

A setlist, black sharpie on unruled white paper, found at 12th and Pine, a block up from where the Capitol Hill Block Party stage was located yesterday. As usual, please refer to If on a winters night a traveler by Italo Calvino.

Poisoned Water
Drink
Inside Job
Thousand Forms
Drivin’
__________
Slide
Sweet
Touch
Make It Now
Schtik
___________
If
Suck
You
Long Way To Go

Blinding Sun
Tomorrow
Grace

Blue ink on a sheet of notebook paper from a spiral notebook. Found on 11th, all spelling is correct.

name top right hand
Enter 2x
Center title of essay

Travis

In this essay I will be talking about symbolism in the book Huckleberry Fin. During the 1800’s the Mississippi River served as the center of life in the United States. Many people depended on it for food, transportation, water, and a source of life. I think Mark Twain used this river because just about everybody in the United States knows where the River is located. In the 1800’s the Mississippi River was the backbone for the United States and I also think it is the backbone for this book.

In the book Huckleberry Fin, Huck and Jim travel the River. The book shows how much they change durng the adventure phisicaly but mostly mentaly. Huck starts to relize that Jim isn’t just a slave and he is just like Huck.

Later in the book Huck decides he would rather be with a slave than his white people. Huck would and did lie to people to hid Jim even though he thinks its very wrong and he thinks he will be going to hell for lieing about what he did. I think Huck doesn’t have raceism at all. If he did I think Huck and Jim wouldn’t be togeather.

A cup of tea at Bauhaus. The brand new released-today Built To Spill record is playing overhead and for now that’s a more satisfying kind of predictable than the crimes that were witnessed there earlier.

I assume there’s something important going on, like a key baseball game or a special taping of Wheel of Fortune or something, because there’s a blimp with a beer advertisement on it flying around over the city.

At the natural foods grocery store I go to, the skinny checker was ringing up the groceries of the woman in front of me. After handling the other groceries, she carefully slipped a package of ground beef into a little plastic bag, scanned the barcode, and dropped it into the grocery bag – all without touching the meat’s saran wrapped packaging.

“Your total is . . . exactly ten dollars.”

“I have a twenty.” The customer fishes around in her purse and passes a crisp twenty over to the cashier.

The cashier started punching up some numbers on the register, while studying the portrait of the Queen of England on the front of the $20 bill. Nothing happened for a couple of seconds while the cashier decided how to respond to this, something one wouldn’t have considered happening, “This is Canadian.”

“Oh, sorry. The customer dug around in her purse again and replaced the QE2 with a Jackson.

The Mike Doughty show last night was brilliant, just him and a guitar. He developed an immediate rapport with the audience – to the point where people sometimes laughed just because some part of a song was particularly perfect. At one point after a song, he said “I really have to pee,” surrendered his guitar to an audience member, and booked it to the bathroom. He boiled some Soul Coughing hits down to their perfect essential core (His voice is all he needs for these things), played some songs from Skittish, and some new ones. The show was truly inspiring.

Walking home, an older couple slowed down next to me in a white Taurus and asked “Do you know how to find Five? We’re trying to get to the airport.” I gave them some directions and started walking again. They drove timidly to the next block, alongside the bus tunnel entrance and pulled over again. I back-tracked and crouched down beside the passenger side window. They were a bit frazzled from driving around in circles. I clarified my directions again and told them they just needed to follow them, drive confidently, and they’d be on the freeway soon enough. They still weren’t quite sure about something. The woman on the passenger side moved her head a little, I thought she might have been recoiling from my beer breath. I saw that they were anxious about taking advice from some kid walking through downtown Seattle at 1:30 in the morning with messy hair and no jacket. They thanked me and I said, “Good luck.”

I don’t have proper instinct. When I “jump in feet first” it’s on a careless whim or after an unsatisfying deliberation, giddy at my recklessness or just repressing the butterflies in my stomach.

It pleases me today to think that the Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve are rough halfway point in some vague pattern that would be visible only from a distance (or only from a calendar). Both are marked by fireworks.

One year ago – At work, Monday, July 3. An oddball day, nearly everyone took the day off to make it a four day weekend. I finished writing documentation for the processes I’d built over the last year. It was Stnick’s first day back from house-hunting in Munich. At 6:00 we walked down to the Alibi Room for drinks to mark a vague shifting point in both our careers. Stnick going to work in Germany, me finishing the last day of my 44 months At Amazon.

Six months ago – December 31, Chris Canuck visits and I fail in nearly every capacity as a good host.

Today – Hell, I don’t know. Ask me at New Year, I’ll undoubtedly have shaped some meaning out of the day’s events by then.

Last night, a man talking on walkie talkie, rushing across Broadway: “I’m going to the dollar store. . . Yeah, we’re the only underground radio station on Broadway. We’ll be back up in an hour.”

The picture that immediately developed in my head was this buy in the middle of a broadcast, reading some secret manifesto while hunkered over his pirate radio equipment. Suddenly the signal goes dead. He digs around in the hodge podge of loose wires, dismantled stereos, and car batteries, to find what is wrong. Confused listeners start calling, via every means possible. He finds the problem. Luckily the replacement part is available at the dollar store, racked between the phony Star Wars figures and the light switch covers. He grabs his little two-way and runs out to the store.