I walked off the metro and looked for an exit, detouring to make sure I'd gone out the assigned one. And then I was out on the street without anyone ever checking my ticket. The thing about Seattle is that all the travel is free. Or maybe they check tickets periodically like in Europe. Given my rudimentary understanding of economics I'd say that they probably just offer the service for free.
It's no longer raining in Seattle, and I pick a direction and start walking confidently. Because I lack a good sense of direction I try and walk confidently. I find that by doing that you can usually convince people that you know where you're going even if you walk confidently past them on five separate occasions because you can't figure out what street you're on. They're just standing on the wall thinking, "man, that guy walks confidently."
I pass a bunch of coffee shops who's names I don't remember. Strangely, I never wound up getting coffee in Seattle, and I also didn't listen to anything by Nirvana. I also didn't visit the Space Needle. Basically, I didn't actually go to Seattle. As I walk down 2nd street signs for the water start appearing off to my left, and suddenly there it is: the Pacific, up north it's a dark blue dipped in silver. It's gorgeous. I'd take a picture if I wasn't walking around with an iPad for a camera.
A block later I wander onto Pike Street and turn and there it is as well. Despite my inherently bad sense of direction I've pretty much managed the whole journey without anything going wrong. Feeling intensely good, I decide to take a picture of the market. I take seven pictures of the entrance to Pike's Market. I keep trying to get some flowers from the flower shop in the picture as well. I briefly wonder if the flower girls at the shop are annoyed at me for framing their flowers in pictures without actually trying to buy them, but then I realize that they can go to hell because I'm busy taking a nice picture and there zinnias and daffodils or whatever flowers I'm looking at are making it better.
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I walk through the market with the eyes of a tourist. The flower displays inside are ornate and catch my eye in a way that seems to use every part of my visual field. If you focus on something, anything, for long enough it can become beautiful. The flowers are an aesthetic marvel on their own, and like the sirens in Ulysses they actually call out to you, and it is hard not to look into the panoply of red, orange, purple, yellow and gold and not see that they were crafted for just such an experience. And for one of the first times I understand a story I heard years ago about an old woman saying that she preferred that her son bring her flowers rather than a loaf of bread despite her hunger because she says, "You can't live without beauty." And of course you can live without beauty. We all do it all the time, but perhaps the sentiment is right, or maybe I just like being alone, truly alone. This fact is of course simultaneously untrue as I'm rapidly trying to post these photos to Instagram and then checking to see if anyone has liked them, if anyone is validating my individual experience of Seattle, which undercuts it in a way. Or maybe it doesn't. I suppose it's just one of those human experiences that has been fundamentally changed by technology. I'm here, look with me, rather than trying to remember the details in a journal, or recounting them in bed to someone when you are returned home. Perhaps that's why so many details of the trip are hazy. Because they are unnecessary. I can go on the internet right now and get an exact shot of all the things at Pike's that I considered unique, the chocolate flavored pasta, the fish that would have been flying through the air, except none of us were buying fish; we were all walking around with cameras taking pictures of the dead bass, displayed with their mouths open, their gills exposed, looking out at nothing, their bodies stretched across pebbles of ice, their faces captured in a thousand photos.
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I leave the market and walk out onto the street. The street is lined with shops as well, artisan chocolate makers, cinnamon pastry specialty shops, a wine bar. The street is lined with planters and purple flowers hang down over the awnings that line the street creating a kind of double walkway above us, which is wreathed in flowers. The eye is pleased by such symmetries. I pass a shop with hand made biscuits, the original Starbucks, and keep walking. On my left I spot a park. Like every park in America it's mostly populated by homeless people who are not walking around Seattle with their back packs on and enjoying the brisk breeze, drained of the humidity that still clings to the air back east.
The homeless people go largely unremarked in most cities, either because we don't want to see them or they don't want to be seen. They are, by and large, easy to ignore. Even if they come by and ask you for a dollar, and you say, "Sorry, not right now," and then go buy a four dollar piece of cheesecake the feeling of guilt is only temporary. What am I supposed to do in a moment's time? Save the world. Certainly not.
In the distance the sound is still piercing blue reminiscent of the eyes of a husky and a girl I used to know when I was much younger, on whom I had a crush and who, as far as I can remember, never learned my name. Those memories can't be trusted though. Her eyes, I'm nearly certain now that I think of it, were green, or at least not that blue. They say that even touching a memory changes its composition. She had brown eyes. No she didn't.
The sun is alternatively blazing down in the way of places with clear air, or being hidden by thick blocks of puffy clouds that aren't threatening rain. The guy next me on the bench is smoking a cigar, and I'm scrolling through the nineteen pictures I took of the Ferris Wheel that's out on the cusp of the sound. I took a picture with an open window framing it. I took a picture of it from the edge of a pier. I took a picture of it from the ground, using the railing to hold the iPad steady.
I check the internet, attempt to figure out Instagram and take a picture of my lunch spot. None of the pictures do it the remote bit of justice. I can't figure out how to crop out the street below, and the water and light look more distant than they really are. The overall experience is one of peace and beauty, which I decide I'll just have to experience as it happens.
For some reason the guy next to me strikes up a conversation. We talk about what we're doing. How we both just wandered through Pike's. He's here to meet up with his family, but he's smoking a cigar first, and sitting on this very long bench looking out over the water. I think he probably wants to talk about the opening passage in Melville, how bodies of water soothe the soul, but the girl next to me asks if I have a pen.
If someone asks you for a pen they have to explain why they are asking for it. I tell her I'm from DC, and she says she used to go to school at American University. I've sat down on the world's strangest bench. We find out that we were on campus at the same time that year and talk briefly about the coffee shop. She's working for a tech company in San Francisco now, and she starts to recommend things to me that I should see in Seattle. She gives me three important things to do and after a while I write them down, and she quizzes me on what I write down and seems satisfied. She's a confident person, who feels free to tell me what I should do for a few days in Seattle. We talk for a while about New Orleans where she transferred after leaving American. She says I should visit with my friends that it's the most fun place on earth. I'm not going to New Orleans, and I'm not going to any of the places that she's mentioned in the last few minutes, but I'm feeling good about Seattle because the first two people I sat down next to on a bench became my friends.
I get a call from my friend, I and walk back down the street. He and I have been friends since we were put in the same class in fifth grade, and I used him to get my math homework done. We're old now, but we've got a history and seeing his name on my phone brings a surge of pleasure. "This guy! Really?" Eventually we'll get the chance to reflect back on our childhood, two decades ago, when we used to play baseball out in the street and football in the back yard. Right now we're trying to plan to meet up in this city, which is awash in sunlight right now, and sparklingly clear after the rain.
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