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.