Laundromat

In books and movies laundromats are always the setting of some romantic meeting or misadventure. The dryers hum, the washing machines spin in unison. Eyes meet over folded linen, hands brush as a stray item is returned. An excuse is made to meet again.

The only person who talks to me at the laundromat is the old woman with thinning hair. She is always there on Tuesdays. She asks me how my cat is doing. "fine" I say and scrape the cat hair out of the lint trap. "yours?". She launches into a story that I can't quite hear due to the noise from the tumble dryers. I nod and smile. We fold our laundry, say goodbye.

Art Faliure

(he)Art Failure.

White gallery walls, bare wood floor.

[You] and your projector in the empty space.

Cord plugged into the metal outlet on the floor.

The images flicker, are slow, superimposed with type. Drab colors. Basic font.

Overhead the voice speaks in a measures tone, continues. The reel keeps going.

I left.




Were you trying to convince me to listen to what you had to say?

taxi porn/taxi scorn

So, I have crossed the line into criminal and made my first foray into the world of vandalism. Graffiti by way of a size large black sharpie pen.

Shhh. I know, a terrible thing defacing someone else's property, and without any artistic value either.
But let me tell you about the Yellow Cab taxi advertisements. All of the taxi's have advertising boards on the top and recently they were all bought by a chain of strip clubs in the city. Now wherever you go photos of scantily clad women follow you around the city trying to entice you to visit a "gentleman's club". Downtown, in residential neighborhoods, next to the school, on the freeway, in the 7-11 parking lot.

Finally it got to me, I was walking to the grocery store late last night only to be faced with yet another cab-with-pole-girl. So.
I casually added a black sharpie to my shopping basket and once out in the empty parking lot, tiptoed up to the empty car. The marker made a satisfying squeak on the billboard paper and then I was carrying my shopping bag home, heels clicking on the pavement. The picture of innocence.

Discovery

I was walking in the park on the wooded paths on one of those very blue days last week. Way out past the abandoned restrooms, locked and overgrown. On to one of the lesser used trails not teeming with runners and dog walkers, quiet, just trees, birds, and an occasional unseen rustling in the undergrowth.

At first I thought it was a statue, obscured by branches in a small ravine. Large and craggy in the form a rhinoceros. Then a gust of wind rippled the leaves and one of of the eyes blinked, slowly turned to look at me and, unimpressed, back to the foliage at hand.

Rhinoceros!

I had thought I was alone on the trail but as I looked around in shock I saw a blue tarp and an old man just a few feet away off of the trail. He was sitting on a log and almost blended in to the woods in his tattered brown jacket and greenish-gray trousers. He was what one might classify as a "bum". Two brown beady eyes looked at me from under a squishy battered hat. He winked, almost imperceptibly and then turned and disappeared behind the tarp, somewhere into the woods.

The rhinoceros paid me no more heed and I skittered back into the sunlit clearing and back to the populated trails, to the happy dogs, the joggers intent on their cardiovascular rhythms, measured pace.

In which city budget cuts lead to my arrest.

Well, ok, I didn't actually get arrested. Just a strong reprimand from an SPD officer who told me in no uncertain terms that I could get arrested for public indecency if I urinated in the wooded area of the park again.

Why was I peeing, discretely, or so I thought, in Golden Gardens park? Not because the name suggested such an act was permissible. Rather, I found myself for the second time this week in a Seattle park on the day that it happened to be closed for furlough i.e. not staffed, i.e. locked bathrooms.

On Monday I held it, today I could not.

This season of something

All seasonal cynicism aside, It really was nice to celebrate Christmas with the whole family.

Thanksgiving with friends in Minneapolis was fun, and my mother, of course, went to Paris for that holiday. But for Christmas my brothers and I all ended up in San Fransisco at 'home'. Home because my parents live there, but not home since I never have. Now, having left and returned home, home here is ever so much better.

My brother, Evan, brought his boyfriend home for the first time, and he was charming and awkward and in the end not frightened off by the by our family traditions. I think we are the only family I know to hold a masquerade party on the night of the 23rd. My father topped everyone else by going in a full suit of chain mail, knights helmet, and sword. (My other brother Thomas had to hide the sword halfway through the evening after a certain amount of wine had been consumed).

So now I am again home, with only a disgruntled cat at my feet.
She meows, but stalks off with her tail twitching every time I try to pet her.
Better than my friend Justin's cat at least. Annabel does NOT have the habit of using my bed as a litter box when she is displeased.

For fictional my nose is awfully cold

I really like Christmas lights. Some part of my subconscious nags me that they belong to that category of commercialized, shiny propaganda that you bought into as a kid but have now become disillusioned by. I think they probably do fall into that category but they are also pretty and that lends me to be illusioned a bit longer.

I put up a tiny tree in my apartment. Mainly Fiona decorated the tree and I strung lights in the window because she is a Perfectionist. The tree looks almost perfect except that there are no ornaments on the lower branches because Annabel, my cat, likes to eat them.

Speaking of eating, tonight we celebrated Hanukkah with our downstairs neighbor Sarah. We ate so much food an there was still so much leftover. There would have been a lot more leftover if Sarah's dog hadn't eaten a whole plate of latkes right off the table when she turned around. Then she proceeded to fart intermittently through the rest of the dinner. The dog that is, not Sarah.

Sound Symphony In the UW Fountain

I am afraid I haven't written in awhile. I went to Minneapolis for Thanksgiving and have been utterly consumed with work since I have been back. Not the fun kind of work either, the work to pay the bills type work.
I met a friend for lunch today in the U dist and I ended up walking through the UW campus. I don't spend much time there anymore and I forget how beautiful it really is. (on a sunny day of course).

The fountain was frozen over and an industrious student had broken large sheets of ice and collected them along the side. I watched him toss the fragments across the frozen pond where they shattered in bell like tones across the fountain. I really wished I had a recording device to capture the symphony of chimes and tinkles created by the breaking pieces of ice. A loud deep creak as the sheets were separated and then a cascade of lighter sounds. I wonder if he was paying attention to the sound or just exhilarating in the smashing.

This spectacular sequence was punctuated for me by a couple of students at the bus stop discussing the fact that the library computers had been tested and found to contain a strain of fecal bacteria. Being me I didn't want to butt in, but I felt a strong urge to tell them that I am pretty sure there are traces of fecal matter everywhere. It always comes back to feces in the end I guess.

Capitol Hill, denied

I was supposed to go out dancing on Capitol Hill this Saturday, but due to my foray into jogging and subsequently being too sore to walk down the stairs, I didn't go.

Turns out I missed my friend getting crowned Mr Gay Seattle at Neighbors. I am not sure how this award works since my friend was a she and is now a he but I am very excited for him.

Saturday AM: Greenlake

So, firstly I made the mistake of driving there.

I circled the parking lot several times and by the time I found a place to park on a residential street several blocks away I was, 1.) late to meet my friends and 2.) had to go to the bathroom so badly I thought I was going to defecate in my pants.

Luckily only the former happened.

We went into the Greenlake Starbucks. I know... disgusting, but it was only because my friend HAD to have an eggnog latte. For the record I did not spend a single cent there. I tried to block my ears so I didn't have to hear the travesty of unseasonably early of Christmas music but I was less successful in this.

The place was overflowing with customers clad in every sort of athletic wear, and one guy in the corner in shiny leather pants and cowboy boots. Mainly he sat in the corner on his laptop and occasionally flipped his hair.

One of my favorite things to do at Greenlake is to piece together the parts of conversation that I hear as I pass. Power business people still frenetically taking about their all important deals, gossip from the power walkers and mothers shoving their strollers, the weathered north Seattle hippie types expounding... Unfortunately, I have no jumbled conversation to report today since I was with friends and probably generated my fair share of inane conversation and gossip.

Instead, I started wondering about how many of this mass of morning joggers and walkers were even aware of the rumors that surround this tranquil gray lake and the reflection of the yellow leaves on trees.

Sure we heard about the lake when it had so much algae that it was unsafe to swim, and when random spikes started emerging from the bottom of the lake, not a dangerous prank after all but the result of poor planning (seattletimes.nwsource.com/.../2008074408_spikes26m.html)

But no one ever seems to talk about the 'Greenlake Monster' our own Seattle version of Nessie. The legends started in the 1940's or 1950's I think. The first Seafair was held at Greenlake and one of the performers of the Sea Follies swore that she saw a giant turtle like creature during the practice session for one of the routines. She went into hysterics and was almost admitted in to a mental hospital. I think the only other reported sighting was by a couple out late by the lake in the 1960's.

Maybe the Greenlake monster was there today, waiting beneath the surface to overturn an unsuspecting Kyaker or snatch a passing dog.
Maybe, maybe not.



P.S. When I got back to my car I realized I had left the headlights on and parked in front of a fire hydrant- no ticket though.