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today was pretty ridiculous. at times it seems the whole world is scrabbling
for pennies dropping out of some rich dick's asshole and that's how i felt
trying to reconcile my ebay and paypal accounts with defunct emails killed
by spam all so i could process a
 payment for $5.24 (plus 9 s&h)
from Yossi in israel who won the dutch pressing of an
american expatriate's jackoff noodling from 1984
i picked up at an amsterdam fleamarket last year. fuck it, i wanted to say,
but ebay is about honor and i've got a 100% positive rating to preserve.
eventually i got myself out of that (payment still lost in limbo but fuck
it) and got down to business. made 50
posters for
carfree day. though
we're not living it large as we did in
2001
and
2002,
i still felt compelled to do something, so
i made a new design and emailed
it down the street to
ups. when i got there, the workers were laughing until
they saw me walk in. then they got all serious and realized someone hadn't
done their job. alan passed the buck like the pro he is: "steve told me he'd
print it..." so i said, "i'll be back in 15 minutes" and went across the
street to
asteroid
cafe where a little piece of paper was taped to the moretti pilsner tap
handle, temporarily replaced by mac-n-jack's and i wonder if they'll clean
the pipes thoroughly before changing it back. i had a beer and listened to
the waitress bitch to the cook's help. after my glass stood empty for some
minutes i had enough of that shit and split.
it really seems that the usa has gotten to that who-gives-a-fuck?
stage--collapsing bridges, fascist regime, half-assing everything is the
new way. maybe it has to do with the canadian dollar and us dollar being
equal for the first time since 1976.
but whatever, i'm not one to complain.
actually, i had a great day (once i exchanged my existential angst and nausea
for some simple action).
i picked up my copies and got on the 28 bus. changed at 3rd and pike to the
10, where a woman across the aisle from me made eye contact so i closed my
eyes and kept repeating a few new lines: "sons and daughters of privilege
/ brainwashed at the best colleges / rise up the ranks and have some kids
/ just as their parents did"
got off between 14th and 15th, buzzed at a new condo's keypad, it was
pre-arranged. bald and gray with a boxload of
freecycle
 homerecorded
vhs tapes
met me at the door, he rooted through looking for the inning of a
mariners'
game he called, "[so-and-so] hit a grand slam!" "how'd you get that opportunity?"
i asked, but he just went on, lost in a reverie: "[blank] and [blank] both
[did something]..." it was as if he hadn't heard my question. i stuffed the
tapes in my bag and went on my way, leaving him with the empty box and a
sense of loss for the lost tape.
but really, after that things started looking up. the second poster i put
up a guy across the way said it was nice and apologized for
 being in his car. he was going to
some bikeworks thing
on saturday and wondered if they were connected. "probably just a coincidence,"
i replied, standing in the road near the double yellow line.
i walked on and on, meeting a guy who was pissed off because it wasn't as
early as he thought it should be. "7 already?!?" it was by the hospital,
he was dressed in doctor's scrubs. well, it was nice of him to be taking
the bus, although i wondered if he'd just sneaked out, a patient in disguise.
how many doctors are impostors, after all?
the walk was long and concrete is hard--it's the worst thing to walk on,
which is why that's what sidewalks are made of.
anyway, i pressed on. postering was put temporaliy on hold because downtown
is all steel poles. there was a huge line of people
 holding white plastic bags where
some sort of food giveaway was going on. a parking lot attendant across the
street looked on them with contempt, a good patriot.
the area near the sports stadia was a wasteland, of course, huge parking
garage and naming rights writ large red in the night--SAFECO. i passed
the metro bus barn, where the fleet gets cleaned and tightened for another
day of running half-empty.
i popped into a thrift store in the hopes of finding 45s. a man was making
everyone nervous, well-dressed but acting completely crazy, he was fawning
and gushing over a table strewn with monster masks and other halloween tchochkes.
"i love purple
 thing-ma-jigs," he said, "this monster
mask makes me glad..." was it basic schizophrenia or an audacious parody
of consumer behavior? i'll never know; i left as soon as i found they didn't
have any
7-inches.
my destination was western
bridge, a private non-commercial art gallery owned by the scion of an
oil family. my financial advice is this: make your money the old-fashioned
way--inherit it. lots of money with a little creativity can go a long
way, especially when most lots-of-money is guarded in the most banal ways.
too bad the area around the building looked like a used car lot, as if there
were no other way of getting there (it only took 90 minutes of pounding brutal
pavement for me to get there from capitol hill--why should i have been the
only one to suffer for their
art?).
but the long haul was worth it--western bridge has the best food and booze
deal of any art in town. the building is neat and there are always some ringers,
in this case
Dan
Webb's amazing photo-and-sawdust document.
i chanced into eric
there. we hovered around the buffet, then it was time to go because he was
dj'ing at re-bar, davey
schmitt's Harsh, a combination of techno and noise flavors. one guy was dressed
as a bee and made screechy sound with a
 laptop, but eric and i both agreed
to really get texture you need to work an analog source.
a young redhead in a meth-fest t-shirt kept misplacing his cd wallet and
kept looking through other people's stuff after he'd found and then re-lost
it. after annoying everyone in the place (which didn't take long, really),
he finally found it again, donned some black
glo ves and a terrorist mask, and then
bumped eric off the decks, which was almost enough to set me swinging except
his set was so pathetic we just felt bad for him and left.
eric dropped me off at 46th and fremont where i went to gas station for a
nightcap can of foster's and a little more postering. on the way i saw
Science
through her window trying to master lionel richie's
hello on acoustic guitar so i asked to be let in cz i
had to piss. we got to talking about the
inquest i juried on in december--it was remarkable
how little i could remember except this: the whole thing was rigged.
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