Category: Before

Is it a message from someone at Borders?

The water boils and if the steam weren’t able to escape through the opening in the capped spout, it would reach dynamic equilibrium inside the kettle. (Dynamic equilibrium – one of a handful of things I remember from high school Chemistry.) The cap is a whistle. The escaping steam causes it to vibrate and a tone is generated. I rush over and lift the kettle from the glowing hot burner. I tilt the kettle back, expecting the tone to fade, but instead it gets momentarily louder, then fades to nothing for a second as I tilt the kettle forward again. The tone is only silenced when I flip the cap back before pouring the water into the French press or a mug.

The whistle on my newer tea kettle is high and shrill. When it goes off I find myself rushing over to silence the kettle as quickly as possible, not because the sound bothers me much, instead I have vague thoughts about my neighbors hearing it. Why should I be worried that a neighbor will hear my tea kettle whistle and deduce which times of the day I drink tea? Maybe I’m concerned that someone will hear it and think, “That sounds like a minor key . . . looks like D3 couldn’t afford a tea kettle with a decent whistle.”

The whistle on my old tea kettle made more of a sputtering sound than a whistle. The whistle component appeared to be better made than the one on my newer kettle. But it didn’t fit into the spout very snugly, it only rested against the spout’s opening when in the lowered position. The steam that was meant to force itself through the tiny whistle hole would leak through the gap between the whistle and the opening.

Fittings for tea kettle whistles should be standardized. You should be able to mix and match kettles to whistles. Also the whistles should have tuning adjustment.

“I knew a guy who ate a chair just because nobody stopped him.”
–Lakeboat

I walk through the wind and arrive for coffee with my ex-girlfriend as a rattled, worn down, tensed up wreck. And I stink, I have big stinking pit stains. We chat and old acquaintances walk past the window. Discussion turns serious. It goes badly – but I guess it would have if I’d arrived fresh and clear-headed too. On the way out I see Victoria, another old coworker and I steal a “Wow, it’s been a couple of years.” I head down to Dale‘s to turn over the bookkeeping project I’ve been working on for him. He asks if I’d like something to drink, “Some tea?” “A glass of water would be good.” “That’s not very interesting,” he says. “Okay, make that a scotch on the rocks,” I joke back. And of course he brings me a scotch on the rocks. He goes over the document I’ve made for him and finds a number of problems – one stupid mistake after another. We go through the changes, talking to crossed purposes, confusing each other. When I’m done, Dale gives me a ride home. He offers me a couple of other bookkeeping projects. I hem and haw, noncommittal. I don’t want to think about this, or anything else. I just want to get home. I think I was looking forward to getting home as soon as I stepped outside today.

I’d misread the movie listings, so I found myself at the theater hours before the first showing of Lost in La Mancha. So I was in the University District with no movie to see. At the University Bookstore, I lost and then found again a collection of vintage photobooth pictures. I walked up The Ave, or what’s left of it. The street is a trench now, filled with yellow bulldozers and heavy construction machinery, and there’s an empty store front on every block. I was a little sniffly and my eyes were feeling slightly irritated and I experimented with a few deep breaths, trying to work out whether or not allergy season has started up. I had tea at a coffee shop, where a clean-cut student sat silently at an out of the way table, laying her head down on a pile of text books, an alarm clock on the table beside her. A grad student type wearing an outdated sports jacket played pinball, putting a new quarter in the machine every few minutes. When I was thinking of getting up to go, the Built to Spill album, There’s Nothing Wrong with Love started playing – (first stopping a few seconds into the first song, like someone was skipping to another CD, then playing again from the begining) – so I stayed through the end of the record. Eventually I ended up seeing The Quiet American, which was pretty interesting – upsetting and messed up. Michael Caine looks a lot like Graham Greene – which was a nice touch.

I was glued to the TV through the two hour Joe Millionaire finale; and I was invested enough in the show that I had come up with some half-baked theories. (I was right that he chose Zora, but I thought that it would turn out that she’d been an undercover millionaire the whole time.) The show ended. The local news came on and I flipped through the other channels. There were two news magazines with competing stories about how creepy people think Michael Jackson is. I turned the television off in disgust. Who watches this?

At 4:00, the sun shined through a hole in the flat colorless layer of cloud that had filled the sky for most of the day. A few of us may have looked up, blinking our eyes, expecting the cloud to close over the sun again. But the seam cracked wide open and the cloud rushed away somewhere else, leaving the sun naked, playing off some last remnants of haze. There weren’t any cheers, no one stopped and pointed, and there were no high-fives. Everyone just continued doing whatever it is we’re doing.

Workers have taped off a large section of Westlake Park while they disassemble the Sound Transit exhibit that’s occupied the space for the last couple of weeks. The 100-foot length of train that’s sitting up on bricks will be loaded onto a truck and hauled away. (Maybe this is how the train will cover the last unfunded seven miles to the airport that Ron Sims insists is still part of the current plan, but I digress.)

There’s a red pickup parked illegally on Pine Street. Two marketing-types in red polo shirts are moving cans of Coke and melting bags of ice around in the back. A teenage girl is filling a black backpack with the Coke cans.

Across the street, there’s a frustrated looking man handing out flyers for an anti-war rally. Beside him, he has a crate of “No Iraq War” signs. He holds a flyer out to a man who’s walking by. The man responds with, “You’re a sick bastard,” and walks on. An older woman walks up and confronts the protestor, “You don’t listen to him. We need people like you.” He flinches at the finger that she’s wagging in his face.

At the corner, there’s a fashionably dressed girl waving a bible at people and ranting at nobody. “I was afflicted! To be afflicted means to be hopeless. I was afflicted! And I was lost before I was afflicted.” There are three more girls giving similar performances, one on each corner. The girl on the southwest corner lowers her voice to a whisper and hugs her bible tightly whenever people walk by.

There’s another set of four girls who’ve found themselves paired up with the ranters, one to a corner. They each have distant looks in their eyes as they hand out cans of Coke to the people walking by.

One passerby looks at his can curiously and asks, “What is this?”

“It’s Coke. It’s just in smaller cans.”

“How long are you going to be out here?”

The girl looks back toward the pickup truck, “I don’t know.”

Up the street, there’s a crew of three people wearing yellow rain jackets trying to make eye-contact with passersby. “Do you have a minute for Greenpeace?”

Four more Bible-girls have the corners at Fifth and Pine covered. One of the girls stops and looks at her watch before ranting on. She’s sharing the corner with Pablo. Pablo is holding a painted stick over his head and pointing at his, by now familiar, sign: “Seattle Police. You are communist devil!” He says thank you when he catches me taking a photo and then continues with his speech, “Hey, Seattle. Listen up!”

A short and tough-looking busker has the entrance to Pacific Place staked out. He and his bulldog, who is installed beside the tip can, are wearing matching sweaters. He’s playing an electric violin and is accompanied by pre-recorded synthesizer music. He lowers his violin briefly to talk to someone, and the violin part continues without him. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he’s playing over a recording of a synthesizer and a violin and not simply miming his violin-playing.

While I’m digesting the busker’s apparent subterfuge, I detect a change in the atmosphere and look back the way I’d come. The four Bible-girls have quit simultaneously and are heading back toward their associates at Westlake.

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(There was also noise at the waterfront today.)

Packet of strawberry jam in the Olympic Broiler’s window
(2001(?) – February 2003)

(Also, paper towels. The paper towels that were stuck in one of the windows are gone too.)