Thursday, October 23, 2014

Seattle Day 2

We sleep until 8:30. The morning is as quiet as can be. I've gotten a solid 6.5 hours of sleep, which is more than I usually get on any of the guy's trips. People are still sleeping in various angles of repose all over the house, the sunlight filtering down into the living room where a friend I've known since kindergarten is still sleeping on the couch.

My friend who I usually share a bed with isn't here, which is probably why we got to sleep until 8. Most trips he has trouble sleeping in, which is mostly true for the rest of us, excluding T who sleeps like a bear hibernating. My friend J though, who is busy feeling miserable in CA wakes up early, surveys the scene for a few moments, generally says, and I know this because we share a bed, "oh shit," which is a fine elocution given the general state of affairs, then he walks, often without donning his clothes. He sleeps in his underwear. And he shouts at the top of his lungs, "Wooo." And then. "Woo. Good morning fellas. I feel like shi-." And the rest of the house is roused from sleep and someone offers someone else a beer and everyone says no, though by nine am you'll usually see someone cracking one open, and we all laugh at their stupidity and then someone else follows suit.

The plus side to only having four of us on the first half of the trip is that I like to have agendas on trips. I'm not type A, so the agenda is a hazy artistic sketch of an afternoon, think pointalist painting, but it still includes plans to see various parts of a city. These plans are usually only half carried out, or derailed by having to get 8 bodies to move instead of four. An object in motion tends to stay in motion and an object at rest generally refuses to shower and always has to drink another beer before doing anything else.

We always talk about getting breakfast on these trips. buying some eggs to fry up, maybe some bacon. However, the fridge is empty, which is somewhat of a plus because it causes us to get out the door faster. My friend T, who sleeps like a bear, has spent most of the night fast asleep on the carpet, face down, so that when he rises he carries parts of it on his face. I am jealous of his penchant for sleeping like a child, though not so jealous of his ability to play video games. King Hippo is not that hard.

The agenda calls for us to walk to Pike's Market and then take a ferry ride to Bainbridge Island. The day is planned as if I was here with S as opposed to my three guy friends, but somehow we're able to make it out the door. And, to my great surprise, I even convince them to walk the 1.5 miles to Pike's. Of course, by this time my feet hurt as well, and I secretly wish one of them would have pushed harder for a cab. On the walk down from Capitol Hill you can see down into the city, the grey of the skyscrapers hovering in the foreground of a landscape of water.

Along the way we're adopted by a middle aged woman who starts telling us about the park we're standing next to. "That's crack park," she says. "They call it that because everyone there does crack. It's sad," she says, shaking her head. And my friend T and I shake our heads as well lamenting the goings on at crack park, which are new to us but equally as troubling. We cross the street and she talks to us more about the ills of crack, and I want to get her breakdown of the epidemic that hit DC in the 90's because I'm a generous person though my friend T, who is also nice, does start to wonder if she didn't spend a week or so in "crack park" herself.

We stop at a street sign to allow her to move on to another group of people, but she starts looking at random signs and working her way back towards us. We've made our first real friend We wish we were invisible. 

1 comment:

  1. I love the scientific approach..a body at rest..a body in motion prefers downhill!!

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