Category: Before

The goose was sold today, he was the last taxidermied bird left in the store after an ’80s evening soap opera star bought up the other remaining birds. The supply of ceramic chickens has slowly been selling off. But earlier this week, Samantha’s boss brought her pet bird to live at the store. Maytag (his cage used to be on top of the dryer) is a nervous finch of some indeterminate variety. He doesn’t seem to like being photographed.

11th Avenue

14th Avenue

16th Avenue

These are some of the things I noticed yesterday when I loaded up my building’s recycling bins and hauled them out to the curb: cardboard boxes for outdated household appliances printed with sharp angular letters in aesthetic schemes that might be unreproducable with modern printing technology, the box for a tranistor radio kit with a little white mono earphone inside, hundreds of crumbling newspaper clippings – recipes cut out of decades worth of the Seattle Times, a pile of ’60s women’s magazines – Ladies’ Home Journal and McCall’s, an issue of The Saturday Evening Post with a Norman Rockwell cover, and a copy of the National Enquirer from the year I was born.

There’s an older woman who lived here, in my building, for decades. Her health has declined recently and she’s moved into a nursing home. She’s about the same age as the building. It looks like her family has cleaned out her apartment.

The recycling is picked up every two weeks. Every two weeks the bins are empty and we start filling them up again with our newspapers, wrappers, bottles, and Ikea boxes – things that we’re done with. It just happens that among the things that my neighbors finished using over the last two weeks were these lifetime collections.

from Smith Tower

c. 1/98

In winter 1997, several of my coworkers and I worked for a month at Amazon’s Delaware warehouse. At the end of our first day there, Glenn and I were waiting in the break room, as the rest of the Seattle group was finishing up before heading back to the hotel. A local named Donnie was in the breakroom talking to us. This is what he said: “The University of Delaware is the second biggest party college in the country. I go down there all the time. And I know everyone, so if you want to party some weekend, I can set you up. The bitches, . . .” here he hesitated and decided to backpedal a bit, “. . . uh — the girls — are all crazy chicks though.” We didn’t react, so he clarified the last part for us, “I don’t mean they’re bad looking, . . . I mean that they’re hoes.”

I’m back on Eastlake, back at that coffee shop. There’s a crowd in the back gathered around a table. The table is covered in glasses of coffee, bowls of dark roasted beans, and a variety of coffee accessories. It’s a coffee tasting. The tasters slurp frequent sloppy spoonfuls of dark coffee. After each slurp, the taster stops and freezes his facial expression while he tries to measure his reaction to the latest vintage.

At Elliot Bay Books today, I was waiting while my purchase was being rung up. A cashier stood at the end of the counter twisting a length of kite string around a perfectly round foot-in-diameter ball of string. Three of his co-workers hung back, waiting for customers. They paid no attention to their co-worker — or anyway, they paid him no more attention then they would have if he had been straightening a stack of magazines. I ignored him too, pretending that I wasn’t both confused and impressed by his creation.

At the grocery store checkout there’s a group of three women – all different ages. They’re wearing ankle-length skirts with conservative blouses and have matching polka dot scarves tied tightly over their hair. A man with a squared-off beard pushes a shopping cart a few steps behind them. In the cart there’s a copy of the free Seattle Weekly, a case of bottled water, and a case of Pepsi. He drags his feet at the end of an aisle while the women get in line. He considers something for a moment, then chooses to add a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon to the cart before joining the women in line.