Tradition

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.”

$42,114.40USD

-259.96(0.61%)⬇️

Assassin

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.

***

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.

37,798.97 USD

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Sunday at Fred Meyer

A local non-profit asks for money and supplies. I decline in a time of decline. Most carts have a frozen wheel jammed with detritus or a freewheeling wheel spinning in the ether like an ADHD kindergartner. I grab a smaller cart - portion size- to limit the spending.

A song and dance of advertising greets us as we enter the turnstile security gates - cardboard displays of the current holiday. “Good morning,” says a caffeine-saturated employee. I say, “Mornin’” sheepishly like I’m in a Scope commercial.

We get essentials and lunch comestibles for the kids. Workers stock shelves, pushing U-boats through swinging doors. Lots of bedhead and flip-flops on Sunday morning.

REDUCED stickers on expiring poultry. SALE end cap hocks cinnamon swirls with nacreous icing. CMYK glitch on the packaging has me thinking it's a cheap outfit pumping pastries out in an unmarked warehouse. Boxes read ICING, CINNAMON, BUN MIXTURE.

If you look at the ceiling, you realize the vastness of the store: endless industrial lighting and security cameras. When humans can't go outside anymore, I imagine a world of spaces like this with connecting tunnels and skywalks. Perhaps Vegas.

BIPOC Door Dash workers clog checkout lines.

“Sorry, I’m in your personal space,” I say to an older man in front of me as I start loading items behind the checkout divider on the sliver of conveyor belt.

“No problem. I'm a retired fisherman, and I'm used to being in close quarters,” he says.

“Well, I think we need more people in close quarters these days.”

“You’re right.”

The cashier talks to us about a Baywatch reboot sans Hasselhoff. The bagger went to take a shit so I bag. An armed security guard in a bulletproof vest ✔️ receipts with a ballpoint pen.

The digital lottery machine accepts credit cards.

Unabashed America.

Bodies

We walk through the zoo with a full day of sun. Lots of children are on school break. Muslim families enjoyed a day out after Ramadan. Tourists wear gear with the word “Seattle” on everything. Diversity is a wonderful concept, except when people talk to each other. An armed security guard conspicuously wanders through the Sahara.

Many exhibits are devoid of animals; some are cared for by staff, and others are out of sight, sleeping or hiding from noisy humans. I have always found zoos depressing, even with conservation missions and outcomes. We jostle for glimpses of nearly extinct species seemingly bored and deprived of stimulation; a toucan stares at painted greenery on a wall, a monkey hangs on the Truman Show netted limits of their rubber jungle, and birds sit on branches closer to the crosshatched sky.

My kids are engaged, and the exhibits spark curiosity. They are doing something analog, which gives me so much joy. “I have almost 10,000 steps, and it’s still only early afternoon.”

As Jonathan Haidt said in his new book The Anxious Generation, “Screens lead us to forget that our physical bodies matter.”

Today, we feel our bodies.

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Another Kennedy running for president feels like I went into a time machine with no hot tub - Zabruder, Sirhan Sirhan, Cuban missiles, Marilyn Monroe and Chappaquiddick. I was fed images of an American narrative by an apparatus peppered through Saturday morning cartoons, school assemblies, parades and the omnipresent TV.

James Earl Ray assassinated MLK on this day in 1964.

Weather app: A cloud emoji marks every hour of the day. Moisture is granular—gray and slate-colored garages blend into the cloud emojis—the light fools string lights on timers.

I adjust to my growing kids and new relationships with them. I look forward to spring break so the family can spend time together. Often, adults give kids structure, but frequently, my kids provide me with structure.

January Is This

January is over. During “the Monday of months,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald once opined, Seattleites vacation to colonized climes, unlike Si’ahl, where land acknowledgments before Zoom meetings absolve. White supremacy often masquerades as white allyship.

Weather talk perpetuates a first-month narrative rife with doom: seasonal affective disorder, rain, cold, darkness, and post-holiday anti-climax. Our selfish minds do all we can to control nature and, similarly, ourselves. Instead of feeling January, we deny it. And in that denial, we repudiate ourselves.

January is a jaundice-lit municipal tunnel from December to spring. In Zombie Island, Roni Horn says, “Roads lack dedication.” She alludes to the road as a denier of place, expedient, a destroyer of the present moment. January is this.

Heart Monitor

I found this wheat-pasted poster on a metal electrical pole in Greenwood next to an apartment building with ground-level vanancies and a tent encampment blocking a sidewalk. Commercial mixed-use real estate promised activation, foot traffic, business, and convenience.

The shopping district is a lacuna.

The black-and-white image reads HEART MONITOR. The decaying building and glitch esthetic look totalitarian. There is no information, link, or QR code to direct the passing viewer.

The poster is on SDOT metal. It has a short shelf life. There is a war for real estate on poles - the ruins of rusted staples and ripped paper corners preserved with packing tape.

I looked up the name on Spotify. There is a song called “Metaphor”. The copyright for the music says “2022 harvardbookclub.”

I google “harvardbookclub,” and find a website with the same name. The website features a creative named Yung Durr from Koreatown, Los Angeles. The marketing is urban, DIY with slick web design.

Yung Durr also has YouTube and SoundCloud channels featuring many videos and music projects with minimal clicks, sometimes in the single digits.

The democratization of creative tools and the hegemony of the algorithmic mob feed an abusive cycle of digital self-worth, hate, and violence. Today, the violence is present but quiet. The streets offer respite from the internet.

Finding this artist first in the physical world (flyer on a telephone pole) and then digitally (Spotify, Youtube) is called “phygital convergence” -the tactile and digital worlds intersecting in a hybrid reality.

Young saplings dead outside new townhouses. Wooden tree stakes support brittle limbs like stockades

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