Seattle on the way to a ferry

I am in seattle

A photo posted by Andrew (@bertainaapb) on Sep 9, 2014 at 2:04pm PDT

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. Eventually, as in the way of most people who are a few nickels short of a sixpence, she leaves us alone to walk in peace, the sun in our face and the wind at our backs, a veritable Irish blessing of a morning.

We walk past coffee shops, awnings still wet with morning dew. People live in this city; but they are not us. In town, after numerous complaints from my friends about the distance between places, (I try to point out how far it is to Mars but no one is listening) we arrive back at the hustle and bustle of flowers and fish and chocolate flavored pasta that is Pike’s. We’re splitting up to get a lunch of our choosing before wandering back to the park that I’d sat in the previous day. I wish I had a picnic blanket for us, but I don’t.

The salmon laid out, eyes as wide open as death as you could ever imagine, are still laid out on long pebbles of white ice--the dry pasta that tastes like chocolate still crunches in a way that is quite strange. I’m not quite tired of Pike’s, but I am overwhelmed. What should I buy? It’s the question that any capitalist consumer has to ask themselves when faced with a deluge of available information.

Do I want a piece of cheesecake? If yes? Which one? If no? Why not? Am I on a diet? Am I trying to save money? Am I wondering if the piece of cheesecake is going to add up to the Platonic ideal of cheesecake that I have in my mind? Should I be eating dessert in the afternoon? And so on…
..

In case you couldn’t tell, I bought some cheesecake for lunch. It was a cappuccino chocolate piece of cheesecake that retailed for 4.50 cents. A bit expensive, but dark, rich, moist, and heavenly. Before I chose what to get I did that strange thing that my father, and everyone’s father has once embarrassingly done in a restaurant where you ask the server which item they like best, temporarily passing over my will in a way that I wouldn’t if I was driving, or kissing, or doing just about anything under the sun, but here I say, tell me what I want to eat. She says the cappuccino cheesecake is her favorite, and I trust that it will be my favorite as well.

When I get to the park, no one is there. I stand next to the trash can and exchange texts with S so that the rest of the people in the park, who are also enjoying the view, or smoking cigarettes, or marijuana, do not judge me. As if those people do not have anything better to do with their time than to look at me and say, “Why is that man eating cheesecake alone?” The universe, of which this park is just a microcosm, probably doesn’t care much about me, and it certainly doesn’t care about the sandwich that I’m eating at a beautiful park in Seattle on this fine September day. In the distance, I see a ferriss wheel that I should be taking pictures of. My friends arrive, and we watch a person using the selfie extension that allows you to take authentic type selfies from a distance, thus giving the allusion that perhaps you had a friend along with you, riding on a horse, or sitting atop a statue, taking a picture of you from a place just above you in the sky.

Everyone else gets various kinds of sea food soup, which looks amazing. My sandwich is passable, which is always the case. Life is basically a retelling over and over again of Alexander and The Terrible Horrible No good very bad day.

After lunch, we walk down by the harbor towards the ferry station. My friend T, who I’ve known since fifth grade, mentions that he needs to take some Dramamine or he might be in trouble. Do I know any of these people at all? Perhaps I just think I know them because so many years are gathering behind us like sheaths of corn on a husking floor. Now would be a good time to meditate on friendship. What exactly is friendship? Is it a series of years that pile up behind you? Is it the things you have in common or the things you once held in common? The people I'm friends with now I'd like to believe are my friends due to something that can't be quantified in words exactly, like complexity of the human brain. And yet, the chief factor in any of the friendships that I've ever had in my life is the relatively mundane fact of proximity. Human beings, which includes me, are social animals who desire connections and meaningful relations with people. And so I often befriend people who I spend time with. Years ago, these people that I'm on this trip with spent a series of mornings in dull classrooms, afternoons on basketball courts, and early evenings playing video games, basketball, or talking about people we'd like to be sleeping with, though this wasn't in the realm of possibility for me. But then, I suppose friendship works a bit like looking out from the summit of a mountain. From the summit, it suddenly becomes clear that you have a come a very long way, a fact which is partially or completely obscured on the climb.

I am actually worried for my friend. In part because it now makes me worried that I might feel sick as well, and I don’t enjoy feeling sick. I don’t imagine other people do either, but I especially do not enjoy feeling sick, which separates me from other people who probably only mostly enjoy not being sick. If other people felt like I did when I felt motion sick they probably would never ride the metro, or get on a boat, or off the couch, though I only occasionally feel sick and do all of those things, which is probably a credit to my fortitude more than anything else, though I’m probably wrong about all that because I am often wrong about things like the weather, the viability of a socialist regime, and belief in the American populace's idea to vote after their own interests.