Category: Before

The sound of a ruckus coming up behind me – some variety of turmoil, hooting and hollering. It sounds like trouble. When I turn to look though, a pack of bicycle police zip by. They’re pushing the speed limit. The two or three up front have a bit of a lead. They’re working the pedals hard now, trying to sustain their lead. The guys in back are laughing and taunting, “Ride through it, Mark! Ride through it!”

(In retrospect I should’ve yelled out, “Pop a wheelie!”)

• The clouds moved away just as the hail finished up, and we had a brisk clear afternoon.
• There were a couple of dogs waiting outside Vivace for their owners to come out with their coffee. They were a distraction, I slowed down while I was walking by, causing a little congestion in the foot traffic around me. I shook off the dogs’ influence and walked on toward the corner, noticing a neighbor just as we passed each other headed in opposite directions. She caught my aborted wave with her peripheral vision and we turned a little to nod an awkward hello.
• The way the flag is hung at the post office on the corner, it kind of flies adjacent to its flagpole rather than on its flagpole.
• Down on Denny, I tried to get a photo of a bird bathing in a puddle. It jumped into a tree and flexed it’s feathers to shake off some loose drops of water. (Also, at the same time that it was drying itself, it pooped a little.) The bird was nervous of my attention and it skipped away to a farther branch, where it opened its beak and made a chirpy Meow. If I were to personify the birds behavior after that, I would say that it seemed a bit embarrassed. It waited on the branch for a moment and considered something, before flying away, retreating completely.
• Police had put up a set of barriers at Westlake Center to keep any demonstrations contained. There was a group quietly pacing short and tight single-file circles around the little arch. There were no anti-war protesters, aside from the tall man leering at the demonstrators. He had a grimy old flag wrapped around his waste as a skirt. Police, some in riot gear and others wearing bicycle getups, were hanging off toward the side. The policemen’s bicycles were all parked along the open end of the fenced in area, as a porous fourth wall. The one closest to the fence fell over when I walked past it.
• I ran into my neighbor again across from Pike Place Market, we stopped at the same corner at the same time.
• There was a broken window, patched with cardboard, at the classy little hat store. I took a few photos and a woman (wearing a hat) came out and asked, “Anything specific you’re taking a picture of.” “The broken window.” “Just for fun?” I didn’t really have an answer. “. . . I’m wondering if you know something about it?” Okay, time for me to go.

There was another Weblogger Meetup today. It was pretty lively this month. We were chased out of the cafe an hour after it had closed though. Some of the others seemed to be organizing a second stop, but I headed home.

Among those who were present: Anita,
Beth,
Jake,
Jerry,
Jessamyn,
Kayne,
Matt,
Tara,
Timm,
tyd,
and two others,
Update: Mike and Brian.

I didn’t borrow the list from tyd’s site this month. But I just checked her site to find the two names I missed and she missed them too.

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I passed the Federal Building on the way back, there was a small group of protesters. Someone was playing bagpipes. I got home and turned on the TV. NBC was broadcasting an Al Jazeera feed of an address by Saddam Hussein. The audio was drifting between the voices of three different translators, not staying on the same feed for longer than a minute. So I switched to NPR. And now it’s wartime.

If you drop the last letter off of my Scottish last name, you get a common Indian last name.* The telemarketer who just called asked for Sharma Jeffrey. I decided that I must be Sharma Jeffrey and told him so. Then he hesitated before making a short sales pitch in Hindi (I assume). He finished and waited for me to say something. I was pretty much stumped, but in short order, I gathered my bearings and remembered to gather Sharma Jeffrey’s bearings too. “Uh, I’m not interested.” The telemarketer hesitated and then said, “This is not a sales call.” Then he tried to sell me a competitive rate for calls to India. When I told him that I never call India, he tried to sell me some other long distance rates, and the conversation ended shortly after that.

I’m a bit conflicted. My first reaction when he stumbled over my name and I realized it was a telemarketing call was one of annoyance. But I’m also a little bit satisfied with the way the call unfolded and curious about how my number was collected.

* And, on an unrelated subject, if you leave the last letter where it is, you get a homonym for a widely advertised toilet paper brand. But that’s not open for discussion right now.

I put up some labels and signs at the waterfront for Anna Pickard‘s Fluxiness Project, a “Spacial Poem”/art-thing. Here‘s where you can browse through the whole project, and here‘s what I did. The most interesting contributions were more playful than mine, I think.

I was underdressed for the rain and I wandered into Borders Books to escape. I glanced through the little islands of paid-for-placement books. The mild jazz soundtrack was overpowered for thirty seconds by a loud “fssssssstt” from the espresso machine up on the mezzanine. When the espresso machine finished, the cash register started – an unbuffered “zip zip ziiip” from the dot-matrix printers that do the receipts. I headed upstairs and the background music changed from empty jazz to sugary pop. I had passed from an area covered by the jazz feed into an area covered by the pop feed. The area where the two feeds overlapped was surprisingly small, I crossed it in two paces. There was a man crouched low in front of the graphic novel section reading a book that was holding open against the floor. I walked into the fiction section and went instinctively to Italo Calvino‘s books. That’s where I begin all my bookstore visits – I look at Italo Calvino’s books, even though I’ve read all of them. They had one copy each of most of his books, I ran my eyes across the consistently designed spines of the Harcourt-published books folled by the odd spines of the two or three books from other publishers. I’m so used to seeing the familiar covers that I almost missed the new collection of autobiographical pieces. I plucked it from the shelf and ruffled through it. A pop song, maybe the one I came in with or maybe one that followed it, ended and something like Frank Sinatra, but not Frank Sinatra, came on. I wandered around some more, no longer up for browsing after being pleased by the Calvino find. I detected another soundtrack-border as I passed into the music section, the front area was covered by the pop-turned-Sinatra soundtrack, but that faded into silence. The music section had no soundtrack, just a thin quiet bass-line coming from abandoned headsets at the listening stations. I looked at nothing special and headed back downstairs through the Sinatra section, past the man crouched in front of the graphic novels and the three guys reaching to get at something behind him, into the inoffensive jazz which was intermittently drowned out by the zipping cash register printers. I waited in the short line and paid for the book (“zip zip zip-ziiiip”). I headed outside and someone ordered a latte just as I reached the door. I went outside, avoiding the rain by walking in between the raindrops. Okay, not really. The rain felt pretty good, light and prickly, massaging. How’s that?

Am I crazy or did I just break my big aluminum floor lamp with a jacket? I was pulling the jacket up off a chair. The jacket sleeve flopped off to the side and brushed against the lamp. Then the lamp just crumpled. There’s no other word for it. It crumpled. The top of the lamp tipped over, and then the middle segment fell while the base just stayed planted in place on the floor. The parts that screw the three segments of the main rod together just snapped apart. I’m puzzled.

A man came around the corner pushing his things in a Safeway shopping cart. He saw me sitting a few feet away, outside Bauhaus, and stopped. The man left his cart on the corner, took half a step toward me, and asked a question – the beginning of an ethnic joke. “What do you call a white man surrounded by a bunch of Indians?” He was Indian.

I went along with it. “What?”

He misunderstood, thought I hadn’t heard. He moved in a little closer and hesitated before sitting down next to me and repeating the question. “What do you call a white man surrounded by a bunch of Indians?” He had a bloody scratch on the side of his nose, an infection on his lower lip, and his movements were slow and deliberate.

“I don’t know. What do you call him?” I clarified.

He answered, “Bartender,” then fell silent, waiting for me to laugh. I smiled weakly and nodded to acknowledge the punchline.

He asked for fifty cents and I said I didn’t have any change. He told me his name and his tribe and I shook his hand. He told me he was from Wyoming and asked where I was from; I pointed behind me, “Eastern Washington.” He asked if I had a dollar; I said no and failed to offer to get him coffee or a muffin. He got up with more difficulty than I would have expected – getting onto his feet first, then straightening his posture carefully.

“Have a good day.” He said this the same way he’d said everything else – flat, unemotional, and honest.

“Good luck,” I answered. Then I went back to my reading – and my loafing.

I imagine that usually, when faced with the same racially charged circumstances, people would’ve ignored him and just waited for him to leave. That’s pretty much what I did, I avoided my discomfort and embarrassment by waiting a little longer for him to leave.