Category: Before

All of my socks are white (or off-white probably) with gray patches on the toes and heels. (That’s not completely true. I have one pair of dark blue socks, but they’re not important.) The gray heels don’t line up exactly with the heels of my feet – the sock heels ride up a little, covering my ankles and barely hugging the tops of my heels.

Socks come in bundles of 6 or 8 pairs – the packages are labeled with a range of shoe sizes and those ranges overlap. For example, the package for one size of sock might say “for shoe sizes 6-12” and the next larger size will be labeled “for shoe sizes 11-15”. My shoe size happens to fit right in that narrow range of overlap, so if I’m shopping for socks, I have an extra decision to make.

Every time I buy socks I forget which size I chose the previous time. But I have a good track record. I’ve only bought the smaller size once, and that was pretty recently. I’ve learned my lesson.

There’s one anamoly in my sock collect. (I’m not talking about the single unmatched sock. I’m not overly concerned about that situation.) Two of my socks don’t have gray patches on the heels and toes. It’s a pair of plain white socks, a little brighter than the others. (I didn’t mention that the gray patches are a relatively new development. The sock manufacturer first introduced them a few years ago. It was a marketing thing – The package said “Now with reinforced toes and heels!” or something to that effect. The gray heels and toes were supposed to be an improvement. But I can’t tell the difference.) I’m kind of worried that they might have been left in the dryer by one of my neighbors before I put in my laundry. I might be wearing someone else’s socks, I’m just not sure.

My brother Justin wrote: “My musical taste was slow in forming… In general, more mainstream than my brother’s… as an aside, it’s kinda fascinating that we more or less discovered David Byrne / Talking Heads at the exact same moment. I had picked up on Talking Heads from 94.5 KATS, a rock radio station that I listened to by virtue of the fact that there wasn’t anything better which, occasionally, played their 4 biggest hits of ‘Once In A Lifetime’, ‘Take Me to the River’, ‘And She Was’, and ‘Burning Down the House.’ Once or twice a dj showed some individuality and snuck in ‘Psycho Killer’ (something I imagaine they’d never be able to do under the auspices of Clear Channel Communications.) So, at a used music store in Seattle, as I was rummaging for something good — my brother picked up the Talking Heads album ‘Stop Making Sense’ — looking for David Byrne for some reason (because one of his songs was used as a theme song for a by now 4-years since cancellation tv show, if I remember his explanation correct), and I ended up snatching it out of his hands.”

Later that day, after Justin, our parents, and I got back to my apartment, Justin put Stop Making Sense on to see if “Once in a Lifetime” was the “This is not my beautiful house” song. There was already a CD in the CD player, David Byrne’s self-titled album. Justin put it back in its case, glanced at the cover and asked, “David Byrne? Who’s that?” I answered, “He’s the guy on the back of your CD case.”

The significance of the otherwise forgotten sitcom was that I’d liked the theme song and had tried to catch the name of the performer in the closing credits, but it had always flashed by too quickly. A few years later, after I’d been listening to a couple of David Byrne albums for awhile, I picked up Uh-Oh. It had “A Million Miles Away”, the song I’d forgotten I was looking for. I found the singer even though I forgot that I was looking for him.

This afternoon while walking down Capitol Hill I watched a jet draw a long white vapor trail starting in the sky above me down to the north. It wasn’t dissipating. The tail end was spreading a bit and the wind was blowing it into a curved shape. Later at the waterfront I tried to work out where the remnants of the vapor trail I’d watched had gone. There was the long rope of cloud near the west horizon; but there was also the wispy mass crowding the daytime moon in the south and now being bisected by another jet that left only a temporary disappearing vapor trail. The wind was giving mixed signals. I could feel it blowing lightly against me toward the east; but the vapor trails were moving to the southwest.

Fallout Records is closing.

I wandered into Fallout Records while walking aimlessly around Seattle at some point during my first few weeks in town. It was the first store I’d been to where I could find a copy of Lowlife without having to dig around behind copies of some Batman comic; or where I could center in on something weird like a Halo Benders CD without having to dig through piles of corporate rock CDs. At Fallout, I found Hutch Owen’s Working Hard, Underwater, Jim Woodring‘s micro-comics, Dishwasher, Cometbus, King Cat Comics, Doris, and Canadian poetry comics printed on brown grocery bag paper. I was a cynical 18 year old printed-media-junky from rural Eastern Washington, so Fallout was simultaneously both a godsend and exactly the kind of thing I’d expected to find in Seattle. I figured that there were probably a dozen places like it around town that I didn’t know about. (Of course there are no other places like Fallout because every other place like Fallout is unique, if that makes any sense.) Today there’s Fallout, Confounded Books, and Left Bank Books (of course there are other great bookstores and record stores in Seattle, but not a lot of specialized coverage of small press things). Next week there will just be Confounded Books and Left Bank Books.

There’s a little boy, three or four years old, stomping around at the coffee shop. When he manages to get a cabinet door open, his mother collects him and takes him back to the table where she’s talking to a friend. When it’s time to leave, he’s bundled in a jacket with a wooly hood and they head for the door. The kid leads the way, the mother is behind him pushing an empty stroller, and the mother’s friend brings up the rear. The door is swinging shut and the boy takes a couple of bold steps over to it, grabs the handle with both hands and pulls. But the door continues it’s swing shut, taking the boy with it. He tilts forward without losing his footing. His mom began to react as soon as she saw him reaching for the door handle above his head, she stretches around the stroller to steady him, but only reaches the handle as it’s closing. The kid has already regained his balance. She swings the door open, giving the kid a paper cup to hold onto. The kid skips outside, studying the cup, which he’s holding out in front of him with both hands. He tips the cup to the side to test the lid and a little bit of liquid dribbles out of the cup onto the sidewalk. His mother talks to the friend outside for a few minutes, before she heads up the street with the boy trailing behind her, drinking from the paper cup. He walks straight into one of the sidewalk chairs, stumbles back a step, and maneuvers around the chair – his two hands clenching the cup up in front of his face.

In the early afternoon, it’s raining and the sun is shining. The rain touches my face and is evaporated, or is absorbed by my skin, or something happens that leaves a light pleasant sting. The two contradictory weather conditions are canceling each other out.

In the late afternoon, a dark raincloud rolls in. It’s blue-tinged in the north and a backlit brown in the south, Bob Ross would’ve used a fair amount of burnt umber. The rain starts up again. Just like before, it’s a bit heavier than mist. With the sun covered, it’s a different experience. I start a list of descriptions. It smells fresh. It tastes wet. It feels sweet. It smells cold. But the rain eases up and then stops; and, though it’s a windless day, – (Damp flags are draped against their flagpoles at half-mast.) – the dark cloud moves east, into the mountains I guess. We still have a layer of cloud-cover, but the air didn’t develop the bite that I’d anticipated.

“Hey! How are you?”

“Good. Wow, I haven’t seen you in a couple of years.”

“Yeah, it’s been awhile. I heard you’re living at Ron’s house.”

“Heh. Yeah, I was there for a few months, . . . unfortunately.”

“You and Ron didn’t get along?”

“No, we didn’t. Ron’s a total prick.”

“Oh, sorry. So he’s having trouble with the house now?”

“Yeah. He’s losing a lot of money on it, so he’s really happy about that.”

“Uh, . . . I was going to ask you for his phone number, but . . .”

“I’d be happy to give it to you, but if you talk to him make sure you tell him that I called him a prick.”

“Uh, okay.”

Thumbing through a pocket-size address book: “The last number I have for him is 323 . . . ”

“That’s an L.A. number?”

“Yeah. 323-_____.”

“Okay, thanks.”

“He really is an asshole, just ask his brother. He’s never going to sell that place.”

A disclaimer comes up on the screen before the Swingers DVD will play the director’s commentary, “The following audio commentary is for entertainment purposes only,” because non-entertainment uses would be dangerous, I guess; and because, when it’s played without the commentary, the movie is for serious business only.

A woman talking to her kids in line at Dick’s Drive-In –
Woman: “Do you want Chinese or Dick’s?”
First kid: “Chinese.”
Second kid: “Dick’s! Dick’s!”
Woman: “There’s also Russian burgers.” (looking across the street at the little piroshky bakery.)
First kid: “Russian burgers! Russian burgers!”