Category: Before

I’ll be in Phoenix until Monday & may or may not post based on access and time. It’s my sister’s wedding. My entire family will be there, so I’ll no doubt be completely recharged with everyone’s favorite, childhood stories.

The lower-echelon of workers clamor for positions in Two Union Square. Once granted a position in the building, they wait anxiously every day for the chance to run an errand at an odd hour – when elevator traffic is relatively light. These are the fastest elevators in the city.

When someone scores a down elevator without the company of strangers or management, the lucky rider steps inside and waits until the doors have just closed. He makes a quick leap as the elevator floor begins rushing down away from him. And he’s in freefall . . . for the long moment that it takes gravity to catch up with the floor plunging away beneath him. He lands gently, finishes his ride, and goes on with his business. One worker has gone so far as to sabotage the coffee machine, so his boss will send him out for an espresso.

It takes only a month of elevator jumps to log the equivalent of a short skydiving jump.

Grandview was a land of Opportunity for those that wished to do the taking. And one guy who wanted to do the taking was a guy by the name of Chuck, who opened up a barbershop. He had the dream of eventually turning it into a barbershop/tatoo parlor/beauty salon. I never went there, because the haircuts are horrid, but my dad got his haircuts there.

He found his way into the distinctive cultural rut of the town. Decorated the place one Christmas. Won the newspaper’s Decoration prize. Next year, he decorated the shop again. He didn’t win the prize. He left the Santa Clause up on his roof, unlit. It clashed when he put up his halloween decorations. He never did take it down.

The story goes that Chuck rode into town with just $30 on him. He opened up a barber-shop, having mastered the 8 minute haircut wherever it was that he picked up his trade. He lived in his store. Eventually, the store was foreclosed, and it looked like his barbershop was dead. But, somehow, Chuck landed on his feet, found a new location to work and live, expanded his business operation to fit his dream of combination barbershop, tatoo-parlor, and beauty salon, and there the place sat… 10 years later and Chuck still has the $30 he came in with.

Next thing you knew the tatoo-artist left after the police nabbed him for selling tattoos to minors, and the beautician simply never bothered to move in. Chuck was disillusioned. Where does the store go from here? I always thought he could have eventually expanded to a barbershop/tatoo pallor/beauty salon/motorcycle club, but alas it was not going to happen and he was stuck back at square one.

Confused?

I first caught a glimpse of this car a couple of weeks ago. I automatically made some assumptions about the owner. He or she must be the kind of person who frequents a place that they call The Lake. As in, “What are you doing this weekend?” “Oh. We’re going down to The Lake.” But I saw it again a few days later, the canoe was still attached. I puzzled over that a bit and presented a new theory to some friends. “It’s amphibious,” I told them. As soon as I spoke, I saw the flaw in my logic. I had only seen the car twice and it’s possible that its owners may have been on their way to the lake the first time and on their way back the second time. Hardly conclusive.

I saw the car again today. The canoe is still attached; and I’m convinced that my theory is rock solid. This car is obviously a homegrown amphibious model. When the driver needs to take it out onto the water, they simply drive onto a pier and flip the car over into the water. The driver, and hopefully at least one other paddler, get into the canoe, ducking their heads so that they don’t hit them against the Volvo. They paddle around and when they get back to shore, they simply flip the car up out of the water and drive away.

Robert came by earlier than usual, in tears. He sat for awhile, recovering somewhat over a pot of tea and a bowl of corn flakes. I eventually shooed him out, and we walked down Broadway a bit, untalkative. I could see that he was barely holding himself together, weighted down by his bag, a pained expression, his occasional comments barely lucid. I imagined that once we’d parted, he’d be alone like this, lost on Broadway, crying again, with eight dollars to get him through the day. “What are you doing next?” I asked him. “I’m going anywhere that has coffee,” he laughed bitterly, “But I’m so confused right now – I don’t know where to go.” I rearranged the vague plans in my head and took him down to Bauhaus. He selected the donut with the most colorful sprinkles and then chose the most out-of-the-way table to sit at upstairs. He slowly perked up as he worked his way through two cups of coffee and as he let the words tumble from his mouth. Soon after he’d reached the point where I could picture him making it through the day without crumbling, I got ready leave. “Take care of yourself Robert,” a hand on his shoulder. It was the wrong thing to say, he looked hurt. I tried again, “It sounds like you have a couple of things in the pot brewing?” He answered briefly and we parted ways.

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A woman is wailing in Spanish at one of the reserved busker stations in Pike Place Market. She expertly works the strings of a tiny guitar with her bare fingers. I’m surprised that her fingers aren’t bleeding – I’m surprised that the guitar isn’t bleeding. Her voice is loud and confident, amplified by the acoustics of the cement walls around her. If these walls don’t crumble in the wake of a sustained note, then they’ll withstand an earthquake with no problem. I think I recognize her voice, she’s the woman with the unlikely last name, a city or a country. (Yves Las Vegas.) She was in a short-lived band with Krist Novaselic. Her hair is cut close to the scalp and she’s wearing a heavy jacket, she could almost pass for a boy. Her guitar case, open in front of her for donations, is guarded by a trio of naked Barbie dolls. She has a pile of homemade CDs and a little sign that says “Breast-Reduction Surgery Fund – Really”. I listen from upstairs for awhile. Everyone who walks by is compelled to stop and listen for awhile. Eventually after she’s finished a song, I go downstairs. She’s already ringing out the next song. I hold up a twenty-dollar bill before dropping it in the guitar case, to show that I’m paying for the CD that I’m taking. She doesn’t see me, her eyes are squeezed shut. I doubt she’d see me even if she were playing with her eyes open. She’s somewhere else entirely.

Yesterday after a game of Sorry!, which we decided leads children (ages six and over) to lives of cynicism and insincerity, Ingrid walked down to the waterfront with me to take the daily picture. I got a new camera a few days ago and I’m still pretty tentative with it. So I was kind of self-conscious whenever I took it out to snap a photo. At the beginning of the walk, I started rambling on about future ideas for Horizon Line. I told her that I wanted to have the little horizon picture open up into a page with a collection of photos from that day and I started talking about some half-baked ideas I had about how the other pictures would comment on the main horizon-picture. As I tried to articulate this for the first time, I realized how neurotic I was getting with all of this photography business. In my mind, I’ve overblown the scope of the thing into some big conceptual thing that’s beyond my abilities. I should just be having fun, taking pictures, and if the one’s I like fit somewhere on the site, then great. If not, then too bad. (It was a good walk though.)

Take the pictures, worry about the picture frames later.

Spring began. It snowed, big flakes. Someone played Johnny Cash somewhere. “Now we are [twenty-]six.”

In Horizon Line: A Spring Day In Seattle.

My brother Justin responded to my story about family folklore (scroll down a bit) with a meticulous (if not always clear) description of how he eats an ice cream cone. He writes off the time that he ate an ice cream cone from the bottom up as a failed experiment.

I was a little worried – Justin doesn’t have any younger brothers or sisters to tell stories about. But since he’s giving an account of something that he did when he was three, I’m guessing he has no shortage of young Justin anecdotes.

My sister Karen mentioned that her son likes the Uncle Jeff stories that she’s been telling him.

I tried to imagine which Uncle Jeff stories might appeal to a five year old. “Uncle Jeff stories? Are these stories that I tell and that you’re repeating or are they stories about me?”

“Well,” she hesitated, “his favorite is about the time you had an ice cream cone; and you ate the cone first and got the ice cream all over everything.”

“What? I remember that. That was Justin!”

Today after a morning of foggy-headed encounters and social gaffes, I sat down at the crowded counter at Bauhaus cracked open my book and sipped my tea. The sun was shining with an intensity that hasn’t been seen for weeks (though the temperature made no concessions, barely creeping above forty degrees). The window in front of me acted as a magnifying glass. A concentrated beam of sunlight drilled itself into my head; while the people lounging outside were bundled in jackets against the cold.

The fog inside my head slowly burned away. I blinked my eyes. The muscles in my back relaxed. I sweated and felt my nose burn. I recharged.

I left reluctantly as the end of the Beatles album that was being played approached. Walking back up the hill, I looked down at my green shoes and felt like running. Though I risk turning up baggage associated with the word, I’ll say that I felt a sense of clarity. Clear mind, clear body, clear skies.

My environment has been a bit rough for the last few weeks. I’ve been suffering through hay fever season. My building’s furnace died a sudden death and I was sleeping restlessly through some cold nights. And finally, the weather has largely been nothing like it was today. That’s the big one, the weather.

Yes. I recommend the sunlight . . . and the Beatles. The sunlight and the Beatles are both very good today.