Category: Before

On Saturday I drove out to Grandview for my high school reunion — escaping Seattle’s 100 degree heat for Eastern Washington’s 100 degree heat. It had been four or five years since I’d been back. My parents were out of town, but my brother Justin Justin was there, sort of pacing around. Babe, my parents’ dog has gone blind. She sniffs and snorts around like a warthog or a mole, venturing outside only as far as her supper dish, and the cat sometimes sneaks food from the dog’s dish.

The left lane was coned off for construction and the right lane was blocked by construction vehicles. The digger up front finally pulled away. The utilities truck stayed put, though signaling right. I pulled around it tentatively, looked to the driver who seemed poised to pull forward at any moment. I looked to the flagger who signaled for me to move. He seemed irritated. I pulled into the intersection and turned right. The marquis of the Paramount Theater flashed in my peripheral vision for a moment — it said, in giant letters, “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”. I slowed as I was coming up to the steel plates in the next block. A police officer in a flourescent safety vest stood in the middle of the street and aggressively signaled for me to keep going, ignoring the pod of pedestrians crossing in front of me.

Grandview, Washington … more photos soon

In summer, the setting sun hangs over the horizon for longer than in other seasons. People are gathered at the end of the pier to watch, they’re crowded two or three deep. The orange sun eventually sinks behind an Olympic.

A couple next to me are holding each other; and right at the moment that the last little fingernail clipping of sun disappears, the man let’s go of the woman and says, “That was it.” They turn back to the city and walk away from the sunset. Within a minute, half of the rest of the sunset’s audience have walked out too.

A few photos from the last couple of months…

Four or five washings later, my shorts’ pockets are still dusted with fine white sand from a Florida beach.
I half-imagine that I can feel the sand and salt digging into my pores and scratching against my legs.

It feels the same as my shirt collar brushing against the day old bee sting on the back of my neck.

My older brother Chris had two friends named Robert. One was our next door neighbor. He made a go-cart with a lawn mower engine. He let me ride on the back of his motorbike as sort of a peace offering after he and Chris teased and tricked me.

The other Robert’s family lived at the corner next to the hop fields in a house that had a “Beware of the Dog” sign but no dog. I couldn’t handle knowing two people with the same name, so I changed the second Robert’s name to Ribbit.

Ribbit was trouble. He was banned from the Mini Mart for using slugs – counterfeit quarters – in the video games. Chris was banned by association. I don’t know if he scammed the machines too. But he wouldn’t have needed to, since he could keep a game of Pac-Man going for at least half an hour on just one quarter. He had all the high scores on the games at Hubby’s Pizza.

I saw Ribbit at the public swimming pool one time and said hello. His friends laughed at him, “Did that kid just call you ‘Ribbit’?” and I reverted back to calling him Robert after that.

Carolyn was Robert’s (not Ribbit’s) sister. She and my sister Karen were friends. For my birthday once, after Karen was in college and Carolyn was married, Karen took me to Portland so that I could go to a Star Trek convention and she could visit Carolyn. Carolyn confessed that she was a Star Trek fan too after they picked me up from the evening Patrick Stewart Q&A. She and Karen had spent the whole day together while I was at the convention, and she’d never mentioned it. When we got to her apartment, her husband was watching Star Trek and recording it for her.

Someone mapped out the Cold K mutations on this sticker on Broadway. The word on the sticker is fluxus, an art movement that seems to be defined by its obscure boundaries.

“Fluxus” is followed by a colon and – on the next line – a progression of different Cold K ghosts. The last of the Cold Ks is a question mark. One (overly-?)close reading of the sticker might be that it’s saying that the progress of Cold K is fluxus.

There’s a cartoon character standing on the first Cold K. He might be part of the flow of ghosts. Or he may be the sticker artist standing on a Cold K soapbox and saying, “This is fluxus.” If he represents the latter, is he in on BOTW, or is he an outside observer and commentator?

Cold K is evolving, or devolving…

“May it [The Declaration of Independence] be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.”
-Thomas Jefferson, June 24, 1826

Among the grievances against the King of Great Britain listed in The Declaration of Independence, there are a small number that could be levied against a modern administration:
“For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury”
“For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments.”

It has as many reference to the rights of men as to the rights of people, and there’s at least one passage where one fundamental point is ignored entirely:
“He has . . . endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction, of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

But it’s interesting and relevent, and is entirely readable: