Childhood
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…
42,052.19USD
+288.73(0.69%)⬆️
On Aurora, addicts shoot up at bus stops and piss in corners while immigrants line up for work along the Home Depot labor gauntlet as contractors in trucks drive by.
Across Aurora, Washelli Cemetary is a vast patch of manicured green surrounded by a blighted corridor. Sex workers walk along the avenue, enticing motorists to pull into parking lots and motels. Aurora reminds me of writer Richard Mabey’s idea of the “unofficial countryside,” nature fighting to survive against our anthropocentric whims and desires. We are the arch-enemy of nature -our cape emblazoned with a ©️.
This area is not a walking zone. There are old sidewalks that are thin and crumbling, underused on a stretch where there is nowhere to walk to. Vehicular detritus and convenience store trash accumulate in fencing and drifts of loose gravel—only those with no destination walk Aurora, while those that do drive.
The dead rest in Washelli.
It's a road built for cars and convenience. After revitalization projects and mini-malls failed over the decades, there is a mix of boarded-up motor inns, industrial structures, fast food, car dealers, chain stores, and vast parking lots with vast vacant commercial spaces. It's the shrimp vein of Seattle.
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My oldest, a high school senior, plays “Assassin” with the graduating class. When I was in middle school, we called it “Killer.” Using toy darts or Nerf guns, each player is randomly assigned another player to kill. The last player standing is the winner. “Kills” cannot occur during school hours, increasing the difficulty of finding and eliminating your target.
In the eighties, the game was popular on school and college campuses. Two movies, TAG: The Assassination Game and Gotcha!, were about the game with deadlier results. I was eliminated at an 8th-grade dance in a bathroom near the gymnasium, out of breath and euphorically laughing with the player who got me - a dart under the locked stall.
Games like these are what young people need again - streets filled with neighborhood kids playing until after dark, ring cam alerts driving bourgeoisie Seattleites mad, Tesla alarms going off, Seventh Generation toilet paper strewn from the trees.
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I didn’t venture far from the apartment. Roads and sidewalks are icy, so you look for sure-footing on crunchy snow where dogs defectate. I took the kids to the nearby playground at St. Alphonsus Church. It’s a destination we frequent year-round. To walk familiar routes over and over again may seem monotonous, but there is always the chance to find novelty if you are attuned to it. Xavier de Maistre journeyed around his room feeling that staying put was far more convenient than the hassles of travel. As Alain de Botton said in The Art of Travel, “The sole cause of a man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”
The kids enjoy walking in frozen tire ruts and seeing the water move underneath. Their masterful ability to be present is what we lose as adults. Adults search, spend money, attend retreats, become addictive and clingy in order to experience fleeting presence.
I am in my head a lot these days. I seek action to avoid silence, opinions to comfort uncertainty. Yet these are delusional tactics to avoid my 48-year old self. To find nothing in the silence is terrifying to me. Is there a difference between “nothing” and “nothingness?” The former may be about a deficit, the latter about abundance.
