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Sunday June 7, 2026 |
| as much as i enjoy
country life, there are times i heed the siren song of seattle, so i walked onto 11:10 a.m. bremerton ferry after leaving the car in a municipal garage, $9 for 12 hours, a ticking clock deadline for my return. a glorious morning for a boatride and i roved the decks like the ghost of a sea captain keeping watch. gps told me it was 2.5 miles on foot from terminal to music practice space, which is coincidentally the same distance as from our apartment. it would be the longest test of my torn calf's recovery, but i figured i could always hop on a bikeshare if it gave out. tourist or local, what's the difference? we're all just visitors on a one-way ticket. i paid 50 cents to render a penny worthless, but such a souvenir is like a little shovel--"to come from below," we unearth remembrance from the soil of experience. hard to shake the feeling that the city is anything but a big cash register when everything one sees can be described as economic activity: buskers busking, hoping to turn music into bucks; henry pushing hard to subjugate every surface to his trademark brand of whimsy; strapping stevedores conducting cargo crane ballet for the amusement of first class passengers on a floating tenement. what did i expect? the waterfront is all business. |
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my route then took me
up some challenging hills but it felt good to put my leg through its paces and i plodded on in shade of concrete canyon, past the freudian balls of this town's least favorite oligarch, across a 6-way intersection emblematic of ad hoc urban planning, by the whole foods where Vital 5 art gallery once stood and the residual spirit of creativity lingered in this woman's wearing a dog bed for a sombrero. seattle keeps reinventing itself but parking lots are forever and at the SE corner of thomas and westlake i recalled that time i projected epitaphs on the side of a building, writing in light what had been etched in stone, ephemeral both. at mercer the traffic flowed in fits and spurts, chain- link fence protected weeds of vacant lot, and float plane pilot pulled back hard on the yoke to clear the big tech corporate labor camps of south lake union. these flowers didn't know any better than to grow in an attenuated niche, but every toehold matters and perhaps soon the world will again be theirs. finally arrived, we jammed, and afterwards i caught a ride with Will to pioneer square, where some friends are opening a bike shop/cafe which i expected to be a hole in the wall but turned out to be pretty swank! couldn't stay long, though; had to catch a boat, but luckily it was a short walk. quite pedestrian but big for me after laying low so long. |
