When the world was flat

We spend our mornings sipping coffee and yelling at the children to mind themselves because the world is flat. "If you fall off that edge," we say, before trailing off ominously. We do not know what lies on the other side of the edge of the world. Some among us speculate that the fall isn't the same for everyone. Essentially, some people fall off the edge of the world and head straight down to the bowels of hell where they burn and roast and continue doing the work of Satan, while others fall straight into the burning heart of God.

I, being a mother, do not think it is possible for a child to fall off the edge of the earth into the burning heart of God because in order to fall off the edge of the world that child would have not been minding his mother, who, in this earthly realm, is about as close to a divine representative as he or she is going to get.

Mind you, this is long before the people arrived in ships with long white sails, disembarked, gave us some shiny jewels in return for all of our food before departing and telling us that the world was not flat. Then we stopped warning the children about where they should play and society, as you can probably guess, started to go to hell in a hand basket. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.

The last day in Seattle

 

I bought tickets for a football game for our last day in Seattle. We'd been to a baseball game the prior year, a Royals game, which I described as an event, mainly involving Scott Shields tossing rosin bags that seemed designed to bore you. I've been to college football games and the experience is roughly the opposite. Yes haters. Football does have a lot of time between plays, but the plays, somewhere between 50-60 a game are magnified, the crowd, at least when Stanford was on offense, was approaching deafening. If you've ever wondered just how Romans could have possibly staged epic spectacles with men fighting tigers then you should probably go to a football game. In particular, a college one. The regional flavors, at UW, a line of large boats lined up in the harbor where people can get off the boat and walk 200 yards to the stadiums, are reminiscent of old city states in Sparta and Athens. We like to belong to something. And for 3.5 hours my friends and I belonged to the Washington Huskies, and it felt good.

We'd talked about going to the underground Seattle tour in the morning before the game if we could get up in time. However, ideas that seem perfectly reasonable at noon on a Friday tend to seem quite crazy when you are going to bed at 2 AM that same night. Needless to say, the underground tour in Seattle awaits my next visit, which might be never, a fact which should cause no mourning in me as the cities of Naples, Brussels, Berlin and Provence have also never felt my footfall nor been beheld by my gaze. In fact, almost every city in the world will always have been absent my presence, absent my gaze, perhaps I should be sad?

Sadly, we did not get to play any more Nintendo. It brings me great pleasure to play Nintendo with my friends, recreating a childhood now decades in the past. In fact, the mere thought of that fact, coupled with the wine I've had this afternoon, brings a dull ache to my chest. Once, when traveling in Rome, we stopped by a small crypt where hundreds of dead monk's bones have been artistically flung about the confines of a few dark rooms, in the last room, where stacks of bones are strung from the ceiling, seated in chairs, and hiding in the corners of old walls, lies a saying, "As we are now, you too shall be." It pleases me more to play games with my friends without the specter of death hanging over us and to reinvent the saying, "As we were then, so we are now."

On our cab ride home the night before the most intoxicated one amongst us had spotted a breakfast place called the Skillet Diner, though at the time he kept asking if we could go to the Skillet Dinner, which seemed like it would be a distinctly different place. The walk downhill was through brisk winds, past a pair of fluffy white dogs who's fur looked like nothing so much as two very comfortable coats, and a myriad of houses with long stone steps coated in various shades of green moss. Eventually, we walked miles and miles on this trip, probably because no one else was there to dissuade us, and reached the Diner. Outside, we sat around, made conversation with a woman about her dog and her broken foot and generally behaved like normal people out for breakfast on a Saturday. It's almost as though everyone's wife was secretly there, encouraging us to act a bit more like adults.

At breakfast, we drank coffee and talked with our waiter, a bright eyed guy from Seattle, about the Sounders soccer game he was convinced that we were going too. None of us had the heart to explain to him that we were going to a college football game once he'd gotten his mind set on the fact that we were going to a soccer game. The service was a bit slow at first, but I appreciated how our waiter nearly ran every time he left our table. I find people who move quickly, in general, annoying. Primarily because the implication of their locomotion is that they are somehow more important than I am, which they may be, but I'd appreciate it if they didn't feel the need to show it off so much. I didn't mind it in this case because he was getting me food: Specifically, a sandwich with american and brie cheese, bacon, jalapeno aioli, greens, and bacon jam on brioche. It's the sort of thing that I'll forgive someone for being a bit late on and part of why I don't forgive dogs. They bring me old sticks and ropes. If they brought me things with bacon jam on them perhaps things would be different.

The game was miles across town, so we took an Uber ride to a few blocks away and got out at a local gas station to acquire some beverages. Out back, the parking lot is full of people drinking and grilling because it is a football game, which brings people together. We thought about joining, or buying a hat to fit in, but they were retailing at 15 dollars per, which seemed to steep a price to pay for allegiance to an unknown team. Inside the stadium, which is nestled on a hill right above the harbor, is a tailgate where you can buy booze, beer, and walk around less than 100 yards from where you're sitting. As ideas go, it's rather brilliant. And though I don't buy any drinks because I don't like beer, especially when it retails at 7 dollars, it still was pretty obviously a great idea. My friend M decided that since we were on the practice field for the team that we should throw around a football, which again, in its own way, provides a beautiful kind of symmetry from years ago when we'd run the house in someone's back yard and play a game of mud football, or drive out to a field and smash on each other for hours, resulting, in one case, in M's nose getting broken. The patterns aren't quite as tight now, nor the throws as contested, but it still has the feel of something we've been doing nearly forever. We should throw a football around every year, even if it's in the streets of New Orleans.

The game itself was quite good if you don't mind defensive football. The punter put on the best display of punting I've ever seen. He rugby punted, turned them over, didn't turn them over, rolled them for 30 yards etc. His first four punts were all of a different variety and all pretty damn good. However, if you know anything about football it probably wasn't all that exciting though I'm sure the Washington faithful appreciated our chants for him and cries of, "You can't take the ball out of your best player's hands," when UW chose to go for it rather than punt. We screamed and shouted and barked like dogs, which is apparently a thing at Huskies games. The only drawback to the game was a loud fan behind me who had a #Hottake after every play, which was generally negative, though occasionally positive, but never original. By the ninth time he said, "We couldn't play any worse, but we're still in this game," in a voice that I assume you could hear from the heavens, I asked one of my friends if we could exchange seats by claiming that I wanted a chance to talk to Tommy. I didn't want a chance to talk to Tommy. I wanted the guy behind me to shut the hell up, which my friend M quickly figured out, smiling back at me with the long suffering look of a man who has much more patience than I.

They lost, which meant we were all sad. Okay, some of the people seemed sad. We were not sad because it was our first time seeing Washington play football, which means that our expectations were firmly rooted in the moment rather than past experience or future expectations. We were Huskies for a moment and then the moment passed. Our experience had deep and rich metaphorical veins like bits of iron running through a mountain. Or maybe it was just a game that we finished watching and then tossed around the football ourselves, emulating the game, and finding joy.

We walked a few blocks into the University neighborhood, or what we thought was the university neighborhood. The streets were labeled things like, University, but there weren't a ton of students around. We got cheap pizza at a place that allowed unlimited toppings for seven dollars, or roughly 1/3 to 1/2 of the price that you pay at similar places in DC, (I'm looking at you 2 Amy's), before scrolling through our cell phones, (not me since I still had a now dispatched flip phone, sail on into the blue yonder my friend) trying to find out what to do next. Our friend J, who had arrived a day late after trying to skip out because he had a cough or something, was kind enough to have listened to me the night before as I harangued against doing the same thing time and time again. As such. besides worrying about getting everyone a good cell phone charge, one of the themes of the trip, we picked out a few places that sounded interesting. By the time we'd finished dinner and wandered the streets, it was time for our last night in Seattle. I'd seen enough beer commercials in my life to know that it was going to be great.

Seattle

On the way back the sun was starting to set and the water was getting darker as the veil of night began to fold itself gently down over our day. We went below decks to grab a beer and stare out across that water that rippled glass. My friend and I sat around and talked about our lives for a while. The things we have, the things we want, that lonely space between them that too is like an island. We talked of children and love and waited for our ship to dock. The best conversations take place in these liminal zones, where all the bodies are buried.

Stepping back onto land we kissed the ground and made our way back into the heart of the city. The ground was dirty, so we didn’t kiss it. And we weren’t technically in the heart of the city. I could have said something about saving money, but instead we took a cab. It turns out that cars get you places faster, a fact for which we were all thankful.

At home, we drank beer and wine and marveled over the jingoistic nature of Mike Tyson’s Punch Out. Every character was a caricature of someone from a foreign country. We were nominally offended by the past. After some drinks we headed back out into the city. The night was brisk and cool. We fended off the cold with smoke and the warmth of wine.

We were five strong the second evening and largely repeated the events of the first. We skipped The Pony and Sam’s and headed straight for the bar with pool tables and games. We tried to play a game of skee ball but were blocked by a fairly drunk couple who insisted that they had placed their quarters on the machine before we did. I stood in the middle of the room and drank. It was like I was a character in  a Hemingway novel.

Later, we played a game of Jenga. I don’t know if you’ve ever played a game of Jenga for fun, but I would suggest that it’s not the sort of thing you should try. It’s a strange game, probably best played under the influence of much stiffer stuff than I was having. I might just be saying this because I lost. I like winning. In fact, I suspect that I like winning much more than other people who only seem to be mildly attached to the idea of winning. I like to win ­­­­­­­like the Gods like to turn mortals into cows or objects of ridicule. It’s not just a thing like, but something that is central to who I am. We play a game of shuffle board on the world’s smallest shuffle board table and lose. We do not lose, if I’m being honest, because of my poor play. My teammate cannot hold up his end of the bargain, and I wouldn’t blame him because he’s as annoyed as anyone at his piss poor ability to throw a small disk across a table full of sawdust to rest in a particular spot where someone has painted lines. Actually, when I start to describe it, maybe I shouldn’t care about winning a game of shuffleboard. Lost in the festivities of the night before is the fact that we eventually wandered down to a bowling alley and bowled for a couple of games. Again, I did fine, but my partner was held below 100 and spent the rest of the evening visibly upset and telling us that he hadn’t bowled under 100 since he was in grade school. What I’m saying of course is that even though I lost, I didn’t really lose. I was handicapped.

Somehow or other we left the table and when we returned two of my friends ended playing a match with a couple of girls to see who got to keep possession of the table. I’d like to tell you a tale that was like a Homeric epic, but if I’m honest these two girls just handed their asses to them. The score was something like 21-5, may God have mercy on their souls. Maybe we played our game after we lost the table. Maybe the Jenga happened in between those things. Maybe we all got up and danced on a table for an hour. I don’t remember. I don’t remember anything.

The evening played out much like the last. We searched out places for food, large German hot dogs, Mexican restaurants for fish tacos, small hole in the wall restaurants with Cuban sandwiches that had clear walls on the walk to the bathroom through which you could see the handsome boys with swept back hair and girls in little black dresses waiting in line to get into a club, who’s music is reverberating out on the street, and there you are, peering back at them, on your way to take a piss at a hole in the wall restaurant. I believe the term is juxtaposition.

I believe that someone once said that variety is the spice of life. I have a firm belief that our regular work a day lives are too rote and mundane. I realize that this makes me like 99.9 percent of other human beings, but I’d like to be granted the possibility that I am a beautiful and unique snowflake. Of course, in this respect I do appear to be a beautiful and unique snow flake because my friends keep saying how happy they are to just be together doing the same thing while I feel that though it is good to be together it would be even better to be together if we were in a club playing some music and listening to it bounce off the walls. I am selfish in this and many other ways, a fact of which I'm not particularly proud nor particularly repentant. I am a go with the flow kind of person some of the time. Other times I would like to direct the flow like a human Hoover Dam.

We wandered over to a club called the Starlight Room where we were told there would be dancing. Once inside this multi-level monstrosity it became clear that while many things were happening in the Star Light Room, none of them were dancing. We retreated back to another bar and wandered the streets until we came across a Mexican place where people ordered food and one of my friends who was a touch inebriated slammed his fist down on the table right when the waitress was taking our order. When asked the next day about the event in question he said, very innocently and believably, "I did that?"

After a night spent cajoling we finally made our way down the street to a club with actual dancing. Within seconds I was out on the dance floor looking for my friends and finding them off at the bar. The bar was packed, but I could feel someone dancing close enough to me that I feared we had lost room for the Holy Spirit and when I turned around to find a fine looking male specimen I realized that I was probably dancing, not for the first time, in a gay bar. This would have been fine except that the bar was packed in the kind of way that makes you feel like you're in a mosh pit, only you don't have any volition. Someone needs to get a drink. Shoulder to the face. Someone is leaving the dance floor, hello elbows. Someone is entering the dance floor, pushed in the back. After a while this feeling of being a pinball is less charming than it could be, so I wandered around with J looking for my other three friends who had taken the opportunity of me dancing to slip back out onto the streets in search of more street food.

The second night we took a cab home, up from the bright lights of the bars into the quiet and leafy streets of Capitol Hill. I was in bed by 2. A sure sign that we are all getting too old for this. Next year I think we should go to Athens, Georgia or New Orleans, but maybe in five years we'll go to Montana and look outside the window at a bear digging through a trash can and be happy we are inside. Maybe someday we'll all get old. But my God, I will chase the nights to fend it off.