A steady rain on Halloween kept many kids away. Parents stood with umbrellas on sidewalks as their kids dragged sodden costumes with poor mask vision and weighted gaits through varied verdure.
Our candy bowl was untouched, drizzle droplets on Double Bubble and Hi-Chews.
Inflatable monsters on the Ridge…
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Rain does Gene Krupa paradiddles on the roof deck, waking me up at 2:45 a.m. Passing rain belts get louder and change from discrete patterns to one whoosh of sound like a freight train through a rusty silo town.
The power went out in the morning. The outage map says the cause was “bird/animal contact.”
Bird poop and nests can damage electrical structures causing outages. When birds fly away, their excrement can sometimes be a conductor between transmitters and the bird. Dead birds are found near the damaged structures.
We drive to a bagel store in Wallingford, where there is power. Residents continue their Sunday morning routines, unaware of the city's outages. Our lives are so fragile when our modern conveniences are interrupted.
Streetlights go out, food spoils, businesses close, the internet is disrupted, and anything on the grid stops. We fumble for flashlights and batteries in junk drawers. The power comes back within two hours, and there is palpable relief.
A 6.1 earthquake hit off the Oregon Coast. It was far enough in the Pacific not to trigger the tsunami alert system. One summer, we vacationed in Manzanita, and tsunami signs directed residents to higher ground if evacuation was necessary. The problem is that, depending on the proximity and strength of the earthquake, you may only have minutes to get to safety.
I imagined an escape route in case a tsunami hit at 3 a.m. Kiteboards float in the surf like dead pterodactyl.
***
A PNW terrorist is setting fire to ballot boxes in Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington. Someone with soldering skills made the explosive devices. When caught, they can teach Metal Shop from prison.
Happy Halloween!
Less than two weeks from Election Day (but who’s counting), so find a poll that meets your expectations. Google your way out of feeling like shit about the state of the world. Search term your way to someone who agrees with you. Content for content’s sake. Data like landfills and hoarded attics.
I suffer from political apathy. I don’t care who wins the election (righteous apathy talking). I voted by mail and will have my popcorn ready on Election Night for a thriller. Half the country will be miserable and angry either way. Then, I go to work the next day, pay bills, and put food on the table for my family. All I can give right now is to my immediate life.
Myopia is a defense mechanism. I nest by buying stuff online to make the house cozier. The holiday season triggers loss and nostalgia. The L.L. Bean catalog has returned to a less trendy experience -duck shoes, flannel PJs, and custom monograms- but with BIPOC models.
Shop therapy keeps things present and selfish for now. Foresight and unselfishness have little payoff in a binary world.
My kids want some Thanksgiving tradition—turkey and all the fixings like grandma did (or Whole Foods). Not some Tofurkey performative semantics clusterfuck. They/I want analog family time like it’s 1979: Scrabble, football, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, tryptophan. In psychology, it's called regression. In the real world, it's tradition.
***
The temps are seasonal—low 40s in the morning. On the walk to work, I pass a young, hirsute, REI-apparelled man using his phone via earbuds. He laughs and says, “It’s chilly time, not Mike’s Chili.”
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Halloween is much less scary than the real world these days, though my costume is quite terrifying. For one day, enjoy the friendly fright. Five days later, the world ends as we know it. Ooh wah ha ha ha ha…OOH WAH HA HA HA HA!
Halloween Costume Rendering
A physician’s assistant from Tulsa put the cuff over my thick denim Levi’s shirt…the lower number is a bit high…the doctor did it 🔟 minutes later, and it’s “much better.”…lab draw to measure statin’s progress…pilgrim’s regress…2 vials of 🩸…DOB label…verbal confirmation…check the app for results…Celine’s ellipses because I am lazy…or I want to ride the crest of freedom…mail order scripts…hospital elevators slow today…the Skybridge…the Chapel…a Chinese man patches a wall between two elevators…I look for EXITS…Reserved For Kaufmann parking…not Andy…MD BMW…Market is vacancy…4 Lease…square footage…Foursquare…Jackpots on LED…pant entrails collect maple oak puddle water…unSWEDISH 💉…SineWAR & piece of shit under 🏧 … Planet Shitness… ALGREEN’S…WeWorked…moving 🎯…S is a safe passage in the Red Sea…vestigial doors post-pandemic ➡️…girl in orange snaps #selfie next to 🎃🎃…plastic flowers in real dirt…Skittle hues…🐓Big Mac…limited ⏳…the Yankees win, thaaa Yankees win….
The Ballard Bridge is closed for construction again this weekend, which quiets down the neighborhood and Brewery District. Today, I passed the same unhoused man three times: once at Fred Meyer, once on the corner of Market and 15th, and once near Gemenskap Park.
El and I go to Obec for a beer and grub from a Salvadoran food truck. She notices a slaw dish, curtido, served with pupusas and wonders if it originates from Europe.
The conversation turned to Adolph Eichmann, a nazi who was responsible for the deportation and death of over 400,000 Hungarian Jews. After the war, he escaped to Argentina, so that is why we thought, perhaps, escaping Jews and nazis may have settled in El Salvador -hence the cabbage.
Curtido’s origins date to the Indigenous Pipil and Lenca tribes, who made curtido to ferment vegetables and preserve foods before refrigeration. Various vegetables are used, some influenced by Spanish colonizers over the centuries. Cabbage is a modern ingredient influenced by European settlers in the last century.
In 1960, Eichmann was captured outside his San Fernando home, a town outside Buenos Aires, and brought to justice, his SS tattoo surgically erased from his body. A Nazi scar remained.
I have a terrifying vision of the future of stadium names:
Musk Stadium
AOC Fieldhouse
Marjorie Taylor-Green Arena.
The grift is mundane.
***
“Sedona is just beautiful,” a man said to an older man. “You should go.”
“Oh, those days are over,” said the older man.
***
We eat breakfast at a Seattle diner. I use the clarifier “Seattle” because it’s a poor substitute for a New York diner, which is simply a diner. In New York, all diners are baseline decent.
Most Chinese food sucks in Seattle too. Panda Express is tastier. Corporations know how to fabricate the genetically modified sweet (and sour) spot.
I ordered California Benedict with bacon on the side. The hollandaise sauce was soupy and a vapid mustard color, not yolky yellow. The salty bacon carried the slop.
I should eat twigs and berries to reduce my carbon footprint and help combat climate change, but I recycle and compost like a lock-step Seattleite, where hungry humans rummage my bins.
With three teens, I see the mental health of young people as more important, even as hurricanes turn Florida into a water world. The choice now is to concede coastal land or build cities on stilts like an upside-down Atlantis.
Nothing is stranger than Anderson Cooper reporting on the hurricane as wind and rain battered his pomade coiffure under a bendy palm tree.
For God’s sake, Cooper, go inside.
Back to you, Wolf.
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A friend parks his vintage Jaguar in an apartment garage around the corner. The management company rents out spaces to maximize profits - sandwich boards and grommet banners advertise vacancies.
This weekend, someone tried to hotwire the car but failed. Still, the steering column is significantly damaged. Metal interior finishings, such as seat belt buckles, handles, and the rearview mirror, were stolen, like Seattle was from the Duwamish.
A new proposed policy would require homeowners to give their homes to the original landowner without a profit from the lake to the sound. 😉
There may be Indigenous bones under your Craftsman.
***
El is visiting her parents this week. She has Sandwich Gen responsibilities in Florida. Her plane, a Boeing 737-9 Max, flew over the destruction left by Helene just days ago and landed in Fort Lauderdale. The aircraft did not lose a door.
She sends a photo of a distant sunset over Boca Raton from the wing window seat. When she lands, she will spend the week saying goodbye to her mom, who seems to have taken a turn for the worse. We sense she is close and talks about going on a trip. Before my father passed, he focused on train tickets and having enough money in his wallet for an upcoming trip. He clutched his travel bag with his life.
***
What can I make with hot dogs and almost spoiled vegetables in the frig? I Google “hot dogs and peas recipe.”
I am seeing a trend of cooking shows moving away from haute cuisine to focus on budget-conscious viewers. Shows are filmed in the chef’s domestic kitchen (not a studio), where they use canned goods, frozen vegetables, plebeian supermarket utensils, and half-bags of pasta from the pantry. Jamie Oliver’s Cooking For Less and Alison Roman’s Home Movies are examples. DIY production value has replaced the Emeril Lagasse tasting table, live studio audiences, and Martha Stewart’s farm-to-table ethos.
***
On 14th Ave NW, a city crew uses gas-powered industrial scythes to weed-wack the matted and prickly brush on the median. Workers wear goggles and face masks and look like lefty rioters, a fashionable fad these days.
The streets are temporarily free of parked cars, and the feeling is palpable. I walked to Ballard Market (Rebranded name: Town & Country) for the basics—butter, milk, cheese, Japanese rice, chilled green tea, bananas, and grain-free cat food to prevent crystals in their bladders. Cat healthcare is more of a priority than human healthcare in this country.
When you go to the vet, they shame you for all that you are not doing for your pet: recommendations for fancy diets, tinctures, mood scents for anxiety, and enriching stimulation like Gweneth Paltrow’s naturopath.
