In America, Part 1: Up the Hill

A trans-Pacific flight is not so much a flight as you normally take as it is a vortex. Upon leaving, you are at the mercy of the pilot, the cabin staff, your fellow passengers for half a day. Maybe you try to sleep, with the help of the complementary box wine or with a Vicodin hastily swallowed before hitting airport security. Maybe you watch a string of movies, or episodes of some dumb comedy. You do whatever you can to negate the experience of being somewhere up there, losing all sense of time as your day is severed by the International Date Line.

And yet, after that long flight from Seoul-- muddy palace grounds, warm cups of pine needle tea to beat the pounding, frigid rain-- we come down from the clouds over the Skagit Valley, to a landscape where sun hits the snows of distant mountains, reaching down to an immaculate, blue fjord. And it was then, in a return to the city I called home for three years, that I felt that I was where I should be at the moment.

I was experiencing it, this time, more or less as a tourist. “Where you visiting from?” the market vendors asked. And at least in some areas, I still felt like a tourist. A wine tasting here, a plate of excellent local Virginica oysters there, a long, meandering walk along the waterfront. “Oh, used to live here, but just seeing old friends in town,” I'd tell the lady at the fruit stand or the Quebecois tourist I was sipping wine with.

And I could do the tourist-guide description. I could talk about the beautifully fresh salmon, the great view from Kerry Park, the artfully arranged soaps and artichokes in the Pike Place Market, my favorite dive bars. But, like all tourist guides, that says nothing about the actual experience of being in the city, its shapes and textures, especially when you've lived there.

So I went deeper, and did what I used to do every Saturday-- leaf through old books in the library, grab a cup of coffee, and begin the long, steep, lonely walk up Capitol Hill, through used-car lots and past the old shipping warehouses where countless 30 year-olds with startups imagine themselves as nascent Bezoses and Brins.

Sure, there were a few of my old haunts. The shitty bar where I did my regular trivia night. The pizza place where I read Borges as I tore into two-dollar slices of Mediterranean. The bookshop where, on cold, dark nights I could step in, just for a bit, to read a Raymond Carver story that reminded me to keep on.

But, those bright spots aside, not only had things changed, they had changed radically. Whole blocks were torn out, replaced with cheap trash that reached for “industrial aesthetic” but just reminded me of a school gym in New Jersey. The grotty boutiques staffed by grumpy grunge-era rejects were closed or closing. And saddest of all, the neighborhood has an increasingly short supply of the bars it used to specialize in, places where you could be anyone, a fat transsexual, a college professor reading French philosophy, a streetwalker taking a quick five, a scuzzy lurker with a shitty arm tattoo and a whole litany of lies to tell, places where all the pariahs and weirdos and a few putatively model citizens could share a round of boilermakers.

It is, of course, common to blame the tech industry for these developments. It's both easy and fun to lay the blame on a business world that rewards the sort of fucker who thinks it's OK to act like Don Draper as long as he rides a longboard to work.

Yet while there is a certain truth to that-- or at least, there seems to be, based on the sorts of businesses popping up all over the Hill-- there's also a certain inevitability to this. Any group of freaks, artists, and their attendant sycophants and wannabes knows that the neighborhood dream is fated. As soon as that repulsive label for geographic locales-- “creative”-- is applied, a wealthier clientele will move in, and the previous residents will move to other places, areas further out or more dangerous or in some other way less appealing.

A phrase like “you can't go home again” was probably a cliche even before Thomas Wolfe made that the title of his final novel. Hell, it was probably close to a cliche when Heraclitus said “ever-newer waters flow on those who step in the same rivers” around the turn of the 5th Century BC.

However, regardless of how many times and in what ways the sentiment has been expressed, it was still unsettling to wander around the web of my own memories, see my own particular desires, my own projections onto the built environment, supplanted by those of others.

And then, dejected, I walked down a hill and up another, to the warm place where I knew I could count on a cat, a good book, and a beer, three things that have rarely failed to disappoint me. And when I flew out on the redeye to Detroit not long after, I knew that Seattle and I had had the conversation we'd needed to have.

Goodbye Letter

I've been sorting through stacks of paper over the past couple of days: oddities collected over the years, scribbled short stories, tourist maps, postcards, letters, sheets of blank paper with coffee stains. My life seems to be composed of pieces of paper, and I'm trying, by sorting and cleaning, to get these pieces of my life in order before I fly away.

In a few days I will say my final goodbye to the city I called home for nearly three years. When you're about to move away from someplace, daily actions take on a ritual quality. I'm spending my last week wandering, stopping in at a favorite bakery for a last croissant, a favorite dive bar for a last beer. I go to the Frye Museum to take one last look at a portrait by Franz von Stuck that unfailingly gets under my skin.

You try to compress all these favorite indulgences-- these plates of sushi, these trips to the corner coffee shop-- into a shorter timespan. The normal processes of my day to day life, the long nights spent staying in with a book, the eight hours at the office, the numbing bus and train rides home, dissipate, and I'm delighted to find myself on vacation in my own city.

But all of those indulgences are only bright spots. One's real affection for place comes from the background noise, the momentary twists and vague impressions of ordinary life. I'll certainly miss the coffee at Trabant and the whiskey cocktails at Liberty. But I'll also miss the unnameable and the ineffable: the sudden loveliness of seeing multicolored lights on the far side of the the lake as I sit at my dining room table after midnight; the time when my bus home was rerouted and I had to take a long detour walk through Interlaken Park on a winter afternoon; and above all else, the cold, watery light that pierces the clouds and turns gray, dirty backyards into storybook English gardens.

When I walk through the streets of Capitol Hill and Eastlake and the Central District now, I am traversing the labyrinths of my own memory. When you live somewhere for as long as this, and spend a lot of time walking around to boot, the streets are filled with specific images and memories. Every corner has the story of an acquaintance you waved at in a restaurant window, of a curb you tripped over at 2 AM on your 22nd birthday, of a long kiss goodbye. Were I to live in Seattle for the rest of my life, I would continue to discover an infinite number of new labyrinths, of houses behind other houses, of immaculate gardens behind high fences, of alleys that have mysteriously remain unpaved, of hidden stairs running down hillsides.

But memories unfailingly supersede other memories. As landscape changes, it erases the reference points, the signposts in the remembered city.

Having lived here for a few years, my memories are now at a saturation point. Knowing I'm about to leave, I can't help but be overcome with nostalgia as I walk home late at night. The cherry trees are in full blossom, and the days are getting longer and warmer. On that long walk down the north face of Capitol Hill late at night, I listen to the same song over and over again.

Now that I finally found the one thing I denied, it's now I know do I stay or do I go, and it is finally I decide that I'll be leaving in the fairest of the seasons.

--Nico, 1967

Histoire de la Folie

When I write a nonfiction piece, I tend not to tell stories from my daily life. I'd like to think that I write about daily life. But when I say I'm writing about daily life, it's more likely a quietist meditation on reality and memory, informed by morose continental philosophers.

So I’d like to at least try to write about my world as it is now at this place, at this time. For the past few weeks, I've worked at an outpatient schizophrenia facility, which I regularly refer to as the Cuckoo’s Nest. The proprietors have tried to put the bad old days of the Victorian asylum behind them. They’ve filled the lobby with soft chairs and beige carpeting, and laid out a color scheme of warm oranges and browns. But in an era where every medical institution looks like a Starbucks, this makes the Cuckoo’s Nest look all the more antiseptic. Foucault famously pointed out that in the modern world, our schools look like our hospitals and our prisons and our sanatoria. These institutions were once painted sea-green and clinical white, and now they are done up in tasteful earth tones.

The walls are covered with motivational posters, pointing the path to sanity through antipsychotics and cognitive-behavioral therapy. The faces in these posters are serene, their eyes smiling. They don't have the blotchy skin and broken teeth of the real patients, the track marks and bruises and open wounds, the stained and ill-fitting clothes. They are the faces of an inner peace most of the patients will never attain.

In each encounter I have with a patient, there is a certain regret and pity. There is something so dismal about talking a man 30 years my senior, with a gray beard and a wrinkled forehead, as if he was a small child. I try to approach them with empathy; after all, the odds are stacked against them. They are variously schizophrenic or bipolar, possessed of borderline and histrionic personality disorders, addicted to crack and meth and Five Star vodka. Once they were working poor, now they are just poor.

The patients don't reside in hospitals. They live in grim '60s apartment blocks with faux-Hawaiian names on the fringes of the city. Unconfined, they wander down windswept highways and smoke cigarettes in front of low-slung brick corner stores. People in the neighborhood avoid their gaze, and they are as invisible as they would be in Bedlam.

The Cuckoo's Nest is located in an area developed during and immediately after World War II, when returning servicemen and blue collar workers streamed into the region. They came to build the ships and airplanes that would win the war, to cut timber for Weyerhaeuser, to forge I-beams for Seattle Steel. They built their American dream on the broad boulevards that cross the Southwest corner of the city, on Ambaum and Delridge and Roxbury and Pacific Highway.

Now the streets have rotted. The GI bungalows now moulder with peeling paint under the damp Seattle winter sky. Those streets, Ambaum and Delridge and Roxbury and Pacific Highway, are now lined with boarded up strip malls and cinder-block apartment buildings. This is one of the several unincorporated nowhere zones down in this part of the metropolis. This is where Seattle sticks its unwanted: migrant Hispanic laborers, refugees from the Somalian Civil War and the Laotian Secret War, Native Americans from the tiny reservations that dot the Puget Sound, Samoans and Filipinos whose grandparents experienced American colonization, the poor whites with gray skin whose ancestors came over from Norway to fell the great forests.

The sun sets early here in winter. On my bus ride home, I look out at the dusky streets and glowing gas stations, heading back towards the bohemian neighborhood in which I’ve happily ensconced myself. I go home, and will spend the next 16 hours in the land of the sane.

On Pike & Boren

Four pillars stand on the corner of Pike Street and Boren Avenue, on the Western edge of Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood. In the summer, gutter punk kids hang out there, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, busking for quarters.

Until the '60s, these columns held up the entrance of Plymouth Congregational Church, demolished when I-5 was built  They have been left as remnants of an older, more innocent Seattle, a quiet Victorian seaside town that only exists today in faded photographs. Stripped of their Ionic capitals, they jut out of the Earth. It is a monument without memory, a footnote to a glittering young city.

The skyline has become the symbol of the American city, the Protestant work ethic translated into an image. It is the glossy picture on the cover of every tourist brochure, of every Chamber of Commerce booklet.

Approach closer. At night in downtown Seattle, you see empty office buildings glowing with cold fluorescent light, crackheads muttering to themselves on street corners, the homeless Indians, the secure entrances with triple-sheets of plate glass, rough concrete walls, loading docks. The contradictions of the city are made apparent.

In ancient ruins, the monuments have been cleansed of their contradictions. We only have sphinxes and palladia, the glories of the past. In the 19th Century, the Brits built fake Roman ruins on the manicured grounds of their estates, an attempt to transpose a nostalgia for the halcyon days of Greece and Rome to their own provincial, petty aristocracy.

At Sukhothai, I wandered among crumbling laterite stupas and elegantly carved Buddhas. On the bone-dry plains of Central Thailand, all that was left were pools and palaces, temples and throne halls. Gone were the ordinary rice farmers and laborers, the Lao slaves, the lepers, the broken backs and crushed arms, the purges and burnings. We have only traces of ancient majesty, the serenity of the dharma-king.

So much of the modern skyline is made of glass and steel. With North American weather, it seems likely that they will fold and crumble. All that will remain of Seattle's Washington Mutual Tower, Space Needle, and Columbia Center will be fragments. They will dissolve into silica and ferric oxide.

This isn't a bad thing. Albert Speer famously designed his Nazi halls to decay beautifully, to evoke the romantic sensibility of future poets. There's a sick fatalism in that, a sort of cultural refusal to consider present realities, a privileging of the mythic over the real.

I walk past the pillars again. The sun is setting behind the Olympic Mountains. What is beautiful and valuable about a city isn't the monuments it builds, the narratives it tells itself. It is transient moments like this, when light and color and shadow seem perfectly harmonized. The dark shape of a ship, loaded with cargo bound for Asia, cuts across the still water of the sound. I wait for a moment and stare, breathing in the cold air, before walking back up the hill to go have a slice of pizza and a drink.

Anniversary Issue

Today is a dual anniversary.  First, I've been back in Seattle one year.  In that year, I've become reacquainted with everything I dig about this town: the watery light off the North Pacific, the madrona trees shading the long steps that cascade down Queen Anne Hill, the sunny, dry days that make you feel like you're walking through a Joni Mitchell song, the cold, wet days where you stay inside and drink coffee in your bathrobe.  I've rediscovered the joys of pho on dripping winter evenings, of gin-fueled dance parties in creaking Victorians, of noise shows in dingy bars, of arguing the difference between various Costa Rican coffees, of the hand-painted signs in Ethiopian script on East Cherry Street.

But, in addition to having spent one year back here, that's also one year I haven't been anywhere else.  I have not left Seattle city limits in 365 days, not even to go to a suburb.  I think, sometimes, about hopping on a bus to Shoreline or Tukwila just for the hell of it.  But this seems even more dismal.  My one time leaving the city would be to wind up in some chilly, windswept strip mall on a desolate strip of the Pacific Highway, before turning back.

I pride myself on being a peripatetic bastard.  On having rejected my home and gone to wander the Earth.  I'm slightly worn out and prone to reminisce about Cambodian mountaintops, about the long mosses that hang in the cold weather rainforests, about the steps of Sacré-Coeur on a July evening when Paris looks like an antique stereopticon.

So I have to wonder why it is I've stuck it out here.  I bitch about it a lot.  Everyone does.  Seattleites love to bitch about the rain, about the bad attitude it engenders, about that weird and pathetic desire that Seattle has to be a world city, to be a New York-in-the-Northwest, a Paris-on-the-Puget.

The virtual city threatens to overwhelm the old real.  The digital age has transformed the old town of salmon canneries and creaking viaducts into a shiny chrome post-metropolis.  What I hate about Seattle is exactly this, its icy, venal character.

And what I love most about it is its remnants, the ruins of the old America that poke out through the pacified city.  The half-erased Chinese signs and signs in a vaguely Chinese font-- COLD BEER, CHOW MEIN-- painted in alleys, the red gantry cranes that sway over the harbor, the filthy river that carries the name of a near-extinct tribe in the city named for its chief, the sudden flights of seagulls that swoop down through cobblestone streets filled with fallen sakura blossoms.

To a certain extent, what keeps people in one place is inertia.  Obviously, there are personal connections as well, to work, to family, to friends.  But I think a lot of what keeps people in one place is that they don't know why they would move when there's no suggestion that where they move would be any better for them.  We will be in one place tomorrow because it's where we are today.

Other cities and countries beckon me, and sometimes I imagine my future self there: walking through the streets of Brooklyn on an early fall evening, biking along the seaside in L.A., high atop a Maoist apartment block in Shanghai, staring down the entangled cityscapes of Berlin or San Francisco or Saigon or Seoul.

But Seattle and I have reached something of an understanding.  It's the spot on Earth that I've chosen, at least for now.  And when I walk home late at night, or when I see the sun rising from behind the Cascades, it reveals itself to me, and it's like receiving a valentine.