Tag: Seattle

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From Sutafed to Seattle

I got an email the other day from someone in Australia, who was looking for an old Sutafed commercial and happened upon my Trip East travelogue. It’s a strange coincidence, because I’ve been thinking of Seattle lately, for a lot of different reasons. Part of it is that tomorrow will be the 7th anniversary of when I left Jet City and headed out here to New York, and nice round numbers make me think back. And I think part of it is also the weather here, how it’s jumped from a steady 30 to some days when it’s actually light jacket 50s. Hell, I just looked down at my weather widget, and it’s saying 62. That’s almost a solid spring day.

Something about spring always pulls my brain back to Seattle. A lot of natives tell you the winters are mild, but they’re only half right. You won’t see feet of snow, but that persistent darkness and muggy gloom really sits on you after a while. After about 100 days of 40 degrees, rain, and dark, you really start thinking Kurt Cobain had the right idea. I guess when I lived there, I didn’t really have the means to fly down to Vegas for the weekend or otherwise escape the grasp of the PNW. Maybe it would be different with my current worldview. I don’t know. But I do know that once the sun crawled back out and spring hit, I really LOVED Seattle. I loved driving around in my car, going everywhere and nowhere, when the sun was out and it was a crisp fifty degrees, and the air had that fresh smell that everything had been showered down for six months, and in a couple more, it would be summer. Spring anywhere makes me think of Seattle.

Every once in a while, someone will ask me if I miss Seattle, or what I thought about it, or why I left. It’s a hard question to answer. I do miss it a lot sometimes. There are certain albums that instantaneously transfer me back there faster than a Star Trek transporter could. One of them is Queensryche’s 1997 album Hear in the Now Frontier. I listened to these fourteen tracks so many times while driving around the city, they’re inseparable from that year of my life. I first heard the title cut when I was stuck in Longview, Washington on a Monday. This was when I dated Karena and before she moved north, and we used to trade off weekends for who had the 100-mile commute. I was heading back late Sunday night, and got a blowout in my Escort. I only had the baby spare, not rated for 100 miles of highway driving in the rain, so I called off work, borrowed her Saturn, and spent the next day getting a new tire fitted. When I was driving around this tiny town hidden in the evergreens of southwest Washington, the new Queensryche song came on the radio, and I made a mental note: “go buy that album.” A couple days later, I went to Silver Platters, my old CD hangout, and picked up a copy. I made a dup on tape for the car, and played it 200 million times.

When I think of that whole story, there are so many great nostalgic things to pick up on. First, there’s all of these trips to Longview. Now, things with Karena didn’t end on the greatest of terms, and I’m not longing for her or anything. But there was a certain charm to when I went down there. The place was about as big as Goshen, Indiana, for those who know my hometown, and it’s the kind of place where we ended up going to the Red Lobster that shared a parking lot with the Target a lot. The biggest shopping experience in Longview was driving a half hour to go to the mall in Portland. Otherwise, we rented a lot of videos, bought a lot of Papa Murphy’s premade but not baked pizzas, and just hung out. It was nice. And the story makes me think about my old Escort, which I hated so much when I got it, but now I’d pay cash on the barrelhead for a car just like it now. And man I miss going to Silver Platters, going from A to Z through the racks, and dumping a c-note on double coupon Tuesday, because I was totally locked into their little coupon scheme to get free discs, even if it meant I bought way too many CDs I didn’t need.

That kind of nostalgia kills me. And it makes it hard to answer the simple question: would I go back? I haven’t even visited Seattle since I left in 1999. And I don’t know that I would move back. I mean, I think about when I went back to Bloomington last for more than like a lunch or an evening, which was probably back on that 1999 trip east. I was writing Summer Rain hardcore when I left Seattle. I spent three or four months basically poring into the draft full-time, doing nothing but thinking about Bloomington. Then I drove halfway across the country, opened the car door, and basically stepped into my own book. Yeah, a lot of things changed in the seven years since the book took place. But I remember walking from the Union to my old apartment on Mitchell Street, and probably 95% of everything I saw in the spring air around me was identical to what I saw in 1992. It really freaked me out. But then I got hit with this really heavy “you can’t go back” vibe, when I realized that I didn’t know anyone on campus anymore, and everyone that was there looked like they were about twelve.

So yeah, you can’t go back. And I’ll be honest: I’m not going to stay in New York forever. There will come a time when we will bug out of here and go to the next big stop down the road. And I know my relatives automatically assume the next and last stop for me will be when I “grow up” and decide to move back to Elkhart and buy a house right across from my parents’ house and spit out some kids and come over every Sunday for dinner. And of course, that’s all shit. It’s gotta be something new for me on the next stop; I can’t have a do-over. I’m not saying I want to zip all over the country like I’m following the Dead, but I wouldn’t mind trying something else someday. It would also be nice if they had real grocery stores. But there’s Trader Joe’s now, so that’s huge.

Speaking of, we’ve booked our next vacation, and will be going to Alaska at the end of May/beginning of June. Sofar, we’ve got airfare, a week of hotel in Anchorage, and a rental car. From there, we’ll drive around, see some glaciers, take a lot of pictures, eat some food, and who knows what else. I’m going through Frommer’s now. There will probably not be any above Arctic circle exploration, and given my knee condition, I doubt we’ll be climbing Mount McKinley. But I’m hoping for some flightseeing, and it would be absolutely golden if I could get in a flight lesson while we’re up there.

Alaska also has a weird Seattle connotation, too. Seattle’s always had a tight bond with the 49th state. A lot of people that fly up there end up with a plane change at SeaTac, but even back in the old days, Seattle was the last big outpost before you headed north. Some of the culture of Alaska is second-tiered in Seattle in some weird way; salmon’s big because of the fisherman bringing it down. Lots of commercial boats winter down in Seattle, too. There are a lot of street names and other places and buildings in Seattle that are named after Alaskan cities, features, or explorers. And the whole time I was in Seattle, I thought hard about making the jump up the Alcon to get up there. I’d sit in bed with my Rand-McNally, tallying the miles and trying to find the shortest route, the number of hours and days it would take me. Growing up, you look at the big map at the front of the classroom and it looks like Alaska’s just one state’s worth of Canada up from Washington. Really, you have to drive like 24 hours straight through the mountains of British Columbia to get to the most remote southernmost point on the tail of Alaska. If you wanted to get to a city that was actually in the meat of the state, add another 24 hours of solid driving. It’s basically like driving across the entire United States, but up, and on much worse roads. So I never made it further north than Vancouver, and I’m glad I will be able to do it now.

Not much else. Still working on the book of Bloomington stories. It’s getting there, slowly. I should get on that now, actually.

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Ten years of unhoosierdom

I was just thinking about this the other day, and I realized this weekend marks the ten year anniversary of when I packed up and shipped out of Indiana for Seattle. It’s a nice round number, which is the only reason I thought about it, but it is pretty weird. I guess ten years seems like an eternity to me, and it doesn’t seem like that long ago that I left. On the other hand, living in Seattle does seem like forever ago to me, and my whole time at 600 7th Ave and working at Spry seems like another lifetime.

Lots of other little flashbacks remind me of things, but it’s more about Seattle than Bloomington. We went to Newport mall out in Jersey city yesterday, and that little area right around the PATH train station looks so damn much like Bellvue or Redmond, the east side of Seattle. It’s all of those office commercial buildings with mirrored glass outsides that look like airport motels, plus the subtle roads and open skies. It looks just like the area surrounding the Bellvue Mall, the building I used to work at in Factoria, and all of the other stuff around I-405 in Seattleland. And sitting here in Sarah’s apartment, looking out toward the skyline from a few floors up with lots of sunlight from a couple of big windows, it almost reminds me of the time in my place in Seattle, except it’s not raining and there’s no Kingdome anymore. But sometimes the weather’s just right and it makes me think for a half second that I should go down to that ’94 Ford Escort and take a drive up I-5, and then I remember I made my last lease payment on that thing 7 years ago, and all I’m driving is a MetroCard these days.

Ten years… I still haven’t written up a suitable story for that cross-country drive. I wrote a story for this Bloomington short-story book that probably will never see the light of day, but it covers all of the events up to me leaving, and not the actual trip. I drove nonstop, by myself. I went through so fast, there was no real vision of a trip, as much as there was a huge blur. It rained a lot in part of Montana; I blew through all of South Dakota in the darkness. I stopped at Devil’s Tower at about 2AM, technically on the 4th of July. I don’t remember Wall Drugs, but I do remember a few other gas stations with slot machines and nothing else. I listened to every tape I packed at least five times. For every meal, I stopped at McDonald’s, because I didn’t want to hunt around for some other alternative 19 miles off of the off ramp. Montana was really shitty, 12 hours of uphill and curves, almost no roadstops, the few around were no more than barns with a single gas pump that was overpriced and so low-octane, you could safely drink it. Then I crossed into Idaho, and it was all downhill, all beautiful. I regret not taking the trip slower, spending some time and money exploring the nature, taking a few more pictures, relaxing for a couple of days before I reported for duty for my first real job. But I regret a lot of things, and I made it here, so who cares.

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Seattle nostalgia

I think I’m already stuck on this book. Maybe I just don’t feel up to it this weekend, but I can’t even think about it without thinking it isn’t that good. I don’t know, I never had this problem with Summer Rain because the whole plot was there and it was just a matter of doing the work and coming up with the details, and Rumored had its problems and there were many second thoughts, but it eventually pulled through. The problem now is that a lot of the notes I’ve taken in the last few months don’t really fit this book, and it makes me wonder if I should just finish this and start something else with those notes, or just start the something else, or do both, or do neither, or who knows what. So tonight I’m just dicking around, maybe editing the web site, and playing video games.

I was thinking about Seattle today, which is always bad news. I was playing around with traffic cameras on the web, because part of an underpass collapsed here, and I wanted to see if there was a picture of it or anything, and while googling around, I found the WSDOT web page and started checking out their cameras, and it made me miss Seattle so much, it was pathetic. It’s hard to explain, but back when I was there, I always spent my Saturdays driving around. When I first moved there, I was always broke, but I still had the almost-new car and it got great mileage, and I’d spent all of my time driving up I-5 to Northgate mall, or down I-5 to Southcenter, our out on I-90 to Bellevue or across the 520 to Kirkland, or wheverever I needed to go. I drove a lot, because everything had a parking lot, and even though traffic pissed me off, I had a tape player and an air conditioner and the new car smell and I didn’t care.

And looking at the pictures… I mean, check them out sometime. Every road in Puget Sound is perfectly carved into the hills, with grassy meadows and evergreen trees wrapping around every terrace. You can’t drive five miles in Seattle without crossing over a lake or passing by a large body of water. Maybe it’s just something familiar to me about looking at these cameras, all of them positioned right at places I remember, that makes me reminisce. But when I look at that and then I look at what I do on most Saturdays here, it’s depressing. I know I took the scorched earth approach when I burned my bridges leaving Seattle, and I think assistant managing a McDonald’s here probably pays more than doing my current job back there, so I’m not in any rush to leave New York, but I just wish I could hop in my car that I don’t have and drive when I’m sick of staring at the same four walls and I want to get out.

 

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Missing Emerald City, sort of

Re new nephew, his name is Wesley Douglas Owens, and all is well. I know that me gloating over a new nephew is very unkonrathian given that I hate kids, but I’ve found that I’ve actually enjoyed having my first nephew Phillip. My younger sister managed to be a good mom and raise a kid that’s smart, funny, and well-behaved, and I’m more than certain that Monica will be a good mother too. And what’s weird is that I remember when I was Phillip’s age, and being around him is almost like a portal into my past, the days when I spent all of my time playing with Legos and the last Star Wars movie was bigger than Jesus. So that’s cool, and I’ll enjoy watching another one grow up.

There’s a new guy at work who came to us from Seattle, and when I first talked to him on Friday, it turns out his wife also worked at WRQ, my last employer in the Emerald city. I always have the same conversation when I meet another Seattleite, similar to the one I have when I meet a fellow Hoosier that is expatriated and living in New York. It’s the conversation that starts with where you lived, where you worked, where you hung out, and goes into how much you miss Safeway or the Upstairs Pub or Garcia’s, and how cool it was to hang out in the Pike Place fish market or the Irish Lion, and how you can’t get good salmon or parking or whatever else. But this conversation was even more detailed, because we talked about the offices on Lake Union and the benefits policies and the Fourth of Julys on the terraces with the fireworks on the lake and the company picnics at Mount Si. And then I thought more about it, and realized it has been FIVE YEARS since I left. FIVE YEARS.

That’s a real sack of bricks in the gut right there. I guess when I talk about Seattle, there are a lot of reasons I’m finally glad I did get out when I did, and try something new. I mean, it’s not hard to create a list of reasons why the place hit the shitter around 2000: the vanishing job market, the WTO riots, the vaporware monorail and the taxes that prop it up, the taxes for the two stadiums (a quarter billion dollars to a football team that was 6 and 10 in 2000, so they can play six home games a year in a non-multi-purpose stadium), the traffic, the Microsoft millionaires driving up the rents, etc. etc. etc.

But I still miss it. Seattle was a far more liveable city if you can overlook the flaws. I mean, New York has way more to offer to most people, but the quality of life issues are so horrible, and you’ve got to spend some cash to avoid them. I have a lot of good memories of Seattle though. I think the real problem is that the Seattle in my mind is Seattle 1997, and I can never go back to that, just like I can’t go back to Bloomington 1992.

Speaking of getting out of New York to improve the quality of life, I’m thinking about vacations in a vague sense. I might try to skip out of town for a week in August, to spend it in cooler climates or at least in air conditioned hotel rooms for the worst part of the heat. I bought some book called 1001 things to see before you die or something, it is a giant flip-through book that you read when you are bored rather than when you want to travel, but it has all sorts of crazy ideas in it. I’d like to do something cool and travel-oriented like drive a dune buggy around or go rally racing or even snowmobiles, but I have no idea what the hell I’m talking about. Maybe I’ll just go to Coney Island and ride the kiddie go-karts.

OK, gotta go write…

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Boston planning, memories

It’s been absolutely fucking unbearable here, heatwise. I spent most of yesterday sitting in bed with a fan pointed at me, reading and passing in and out of sleep. I managed to get out of the house today for a haircut, some shopping at St. Marks (including Toy Tokyo and Kim’s) and a late lunch of breakfast at Kiev. I also went to Barnes and Noble and got a book on Boston, so I won’t be completely lost when I get there on Thursday.

I’ve been to Boston twice already, both times at the end of ’95. Both times were for work, when I was at CompuServe, and both times I was there for a week for a trade show. I had fun both trips, although on the first one, over Halloween, I got really sick and had to fly home with a full-on head cold, which became the absolute worst pain I’ve ever endured in my life. But both times, I saw a good amount of the city, although most of it was spent zipping around in cabs with people who knew more about the general geography, so I have no idea which way is up. But now my new book has a map, and I should be able to get around a bit better.

My memories of that whole era, the first six months of Seattle, are far enough back that I only remember mostly good things. I spent all of my time hacking on my first two books, I didn’t have a TV, I didn’t have any money, and I tried to do a lot to find out more about the new-to-me Emerald City. Most of that involved spending the last few bucks after car payments and rent to go to Elliot Bay books, buy whatever Bukowski I didn’t have, and go to whatever book signing they had. I remember meeting Barry Gifford, Richard Rhodes, and Kay Jamison within a month of each other in the basement of that old bookstore. And when I didn’t walk down to Pioneer Square, I would drive north and south on I-5, going up to see movies at Mountlake Terrace and wandering around the Northgate mall.

I just realized I have a shitload of travel books, both of places I’ve been and places I’ve wanted to visit. I wish I could visit each of the places I have a book for; it would be cool to go to Japan, Amsterdam, New Orleans. I don’t think I am taking any more big trips this year, although I am going to Vegas and probably taking one more long weekend. But next year, I’d like to roll all of my tax money into plane tickets and hit a lot of places.

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Seattle the distant dream

I realized today that after about four months, Seattle is nothing but a distant dream to me. I pulled a book off of the shelf today (Steve Katz – 43 Fictions) and a receipt fluttered out, an ATM slip from a Seafirst bank. The red 1 on the back and dot-matrix printing brought me back to 5/23/98. I guess maybe once a week I have a heavy thought back to various points in the whole Seattle experiment. I’m not saying I hate New York and want to be back there – I mean, sometimes I go on a heavy trip about being back in Elkhart again, but I would never do it again. It’s just I have a bad habit of thinking back a year, or two years, and trying to compare it to now, to see if I’ve improved at all. I guess I usually think that moments of my past are best, but then I’ve probably screwed myself by thinking more like a writer and less like – well, whatever everyone else thinks like.

And I got on a big nostalgia trip about last year because I got on this huge self-reinvention thing last spring and summer, trying to figure out what path to take and what to do next. After breaking up with Karena, I spent a lot of time oscillating between thoughts of doing things to meet more people and extreme hermitdom. The latter brought greater productivity to me, and let me do a great deal of work on Rumored to Exist and Summer Rain. And it made me feel more like a writer. It also freaked me out, and made me more depressed. But I got a lot done.

I guess the reason I’m babbling about this is one of the reasons I haven’t updated in a while, and that’s because I have been lost. I mean, I’m almost always in the apartment, so it’s not that kind of lost. But I don’t know what I should do next. I have so many options open to me, that it’s almost confusing to figure out what I want out of life. And in wandering between different internal dialogues about the whole thing, I haven’t solved many things. Maybe I should give examples.

Sometimes, I want a job. Sometimes, this recruiting firm gets me to put on some nice clothes and go to interviews with big companies who are looking for writers. As of now, none of those have resulted in a job. And I guess that’s a good thing. Maybe I’d like the money and the desk and the people, but it would be counterproductive to my writing. There are times I am so blocked that I think “fuck it, I will take any job, even if it involves 2 hours on the subways to mop floors at a laundromat, as long as I don’t have to face writing again.” I usually get over those phases. But as my bank account dwindles, I feel drawn closer to this option.

A recent kick was grad school. I thought that I wanted to go back and get an MFA in creative writing. I looked into it, and decided that I had too many strikes against me, and it would be better to take the $15,000 that I didn’t have anyway and use it to keep holed up in my apartment and keep writing. I don’t want to go into the pros and cons of the situation, because it is exhausting. But that’s another option.

You may wonder, “why isn’t he listing his writing as an option?” Well, I am and I’m not. I want to finish Rumored to Exist. I want to edit Summer Rain. I want to work on more stuff. But I don’t know what to do aside from the writing. I don’t know what to do to meet people, make connections, and get out of the house. I thought grad school would make instant contacts, but it’s too much bullshit with GREs and application forms and tuition residency and comprehensive exams and foreign language tests. And I thought a job might work, but it’s a step in the wrong direction. And most of the writer’s workshop options in New York seem to be “pay me $1000 and I will teach you how to write in 10 hours” and not useful to a quasi-professional.

Somewhere in the middle of this chaotic argument, I made one universal statement that became like the 0th law of robotics to my entire mission: I need to finish Rumored to Exist. I need to make it a good book, the best I can write. Everything I do, every dollar I spend, every minute of every day needs to be directly related to the completion of this book. There will be no other side projects or diversions until I get the galleys back from the publisher.

I am starting to think a few things that would be considered anti-social but would probably help this process much more. First, I am not going to try to workshop the book. I think if I spent my money on a workshop, all I would get is a bunch of Anne Rice wannabes who would shit their intestines if they read any of Rumored. I don’t need people who don’t know what they are talking about to criticize my work, and I don’t need to waste my time reading theirs. And I don’t need to get tied up in the world of book publishing name-dropping.

So, maybe I do need to be a hermit again. Maybe I need to ignore the world until this book is done, and stop worrying about defining myself with outside shit that’s just there for people who need definitions. Right?

Yesterday, my computer completely died and I lost one of my harddrives. Luckily, it was not the one that holds all of my writing and personal files. Un-luckily, I had to drop $200 on another drive, and after two days, I am only about 90% functional. It has been a nonstop hack-fest trying to get everything running again. For some reason, I can only boot from floppy now. It appears that no known computer hardware can actually work with a harddrive bigger than a few gigs, and everything that Microsoft and hardware manufacturers have led you to believe is wrong. The only way to get large drives to work is by sheer voodoo. This is because They want you to throw your old PC out the window and go buy a brand new one anytime anything goes wrong.

I don’t remember what else. A lot has gone on, but it’s mostly categorizable in the “if it’s not one thing, it’s another” file. All I want is one full day of writing without something asinine happening that consumes 12 hours of my time. I’m hoping by the end of the month, this will happen. In reality, I know it won’t.

[2020 update: I can’t believe I thought an MFA would cost only $15,000.]