Sunday Marrow

The late August temps are surprisingly mild compared to recent summers of heat domes and wildfires. This summer, I’ve noticed “We Have AC” signs on businesses that solicit schvitzy passersby.

Back-to-school time always brings excitement and renewal for me at any age. It’s an instinctive refocusing on hearth and home, ancestrally, vestigially preparing for the harvest and long cold winter.

My parents provided safety and comfort for my sister and me. My fondest memories are walking through the front door from a day of untethered play to a steamy kitchen with warm food bubbling, the purpling dusk silhouetting the bare November trees. My mother chopped, and my dad sipped a cold beer after a New York City commute to the suburbs every day for 20 years. I noticed his quiet satisfaction, not desperation, in being home. He told me to put on socks because it was getting colder.

I lounge supine on the roof deck under a sun sail, reading John William’s Stoner. It’s a novel I picked up randomly at Barnes & Noble because the cover was intriguing: an introspective man looking down, “STONER,” beguilingly minimalist across the cover. The title reminded me of the Grateful Dead and a childhood friend named John, a “stoner” with a collection of live Dead concerts he flipped onto his tape deck and smoked a bowl. He lived in the present.

Sometimes, judge a book by its cover. It is a riveting novel about an existential man, William Stoner, who plays the long game unwittingly in a search for elusive happiness. As I’ve aged, happiness has always been elusive, with ebbs and flows. Happiness is accepting that there are vicissitudes.

In John Williams's novel Butcher’s Crossing, a young Harvard student named William Andrews takes some time off from his urbane East Coast surroundings to explore the wilderness. He ends up in Butcher’s Crossing, Kansas, to meet an acquaintance of his father’s, J.D. McDonald, who runs a buffalo hide business.

An excerpt:

Young people," McDonald said contemptuously. "You always think there's something to find out."

"Yes, sir," Andrews said.

"Well, there's nothing," McDonald said. "You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you're ready to die, it comes to you — that there's nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain't done it, because the lies told you there was something else. Then you know you could of had the world, because you're the only one that knows the secret; only then it's too late. You're too old."

"No," Andrews said. A vague terror crept from the darkness that surrounded them, and tightened his voice. "That's not the way it is."

"You ain't learned, then," McDonald said. "You ain't learned yet. . . .

Today’s lesson: How to suck the marrow out of Sunday?

41,335.05USD

+243.63(0.59%) ⬆️

Xclusion Zones

Our youngest wanted to spend her birthday money at UNIQLO. She turned 13, and clothing is now her purchase of choice. Baggy muted colors are in; think the nineties acid wash GAP with chunky chains.

Downtown Seattle post-pandemic is not a pleasurable visit, but we drive down and park in a garage on 2nd and Union. UNIQLO is on 4th and Pine.

We walk to 4th up Union. A man uses a buzzer to cut another man's hair. It's plugged into an electrical outlet in a parking garage, and the man getting the buzz sits on a milk crate. Curly hair falls around his worn sneakers, and a light breeze off Elliot Bay blows a gray coil down Union.

#RetailScars

Drug behavior is open and disturbing. People slouch, arms hanging, precariously standing, bent into painful and uncanny contortions. Tranq, a mix of fentanyl and the animal tranquilizer Xylazine, is killing swiftly through the country. The zombified countenances cluster along the walls of empty storefronts as tourists holding children's hands scurry toward Pike Market with Mariner’s gear on.

The Public Market sign appears over the street horizon line, the only destination that seems to defy the blight surrounding it. Even when we entered the tinted doors of UNIQLO and passed security guards, the dichotomy of the consumer sheen was striking: bright lights, aisles of merch, tourists looking to buy anything that will make their trip worthwhile even though they can buy the same item in any city.

Rummaged clothing is refolded by hovering sales associates, then rummaged by new customers and refolded. A nostalgic, heavily-researched music mix of late seventies punk rock hits jingles from speakers in the industrial heights of the store. That revolution hits shoppers like Buddy Holly hit me in the early eighties.

I respect Warhol 🥫 and Basquiat 💀and their contributions to art, but today, their estates license their works as bubblegum. Any discourse of their work has been subsumed by time and ™️, and their images connote safe cool, like a millennial wearing a Motorhead tee. It's accessorizing, not authentic fandom.

The City Council has proposed exclusion zones to curb dangerous drug and prostitution activity in high-prevalence areas. This plan would push people to other places without addressing the root causes, and law enforcement is already understaffed. But I understand that without a concerted multi-pronged plan, downtown Seattle will continue to suffer civically and economically.

There are opportunities to rethink downtown to be more resilient like more mixed-income housing, multi-use real estate, and urban redesign to improve safety and foster human connections.

We leave UNIQLO and walk directly to our car to get outta Dodge, but first, we stop at a bubble tea shop called Tiger Sugar. It’s a railroad-style space on 2nd Avenue with floors of unused vertical commercial space. To me, it symbolizes the hollowed-out feeling of Downtown Seattle - empty buildings with shiny glass facades.

Moscow, Idaho

The drive from Pullman to Moscow, Idaho, is 8 miles. When you first cross the border into Idaho, the Appaloosa Museum and Heritage Center is next to Walmart and La Quinta. The museum documents the history of the Appaloosa horse breed in the region.

The Nimíipuu (Nez Perce), an Indigenous people, bred horses on the Columbia River Plateau. European settlers called them “Nez Perce,” which means “pierced nose,” but they were mistaken for the Chinook tribe. Today, the Nez Pierce has a population of 3,500, and many live on the reservation in Idaho, a tiny fraction of their land systematically taken treaty by treaty from the United States. As valuable resources like gold and timber were discovered on their land, the United States reneged.

There is little, if any, proof “Moscow” was named after the Russian Capital, but Russian comedian Yakov Smirnoff, nonetheless, opened his Moscow-to-Moscow world tour in Idaho in 1991.

The Palouse Mall and the University of Idaho, another land grant University, are on West Pullman Road, across from each other. It is “Anywhere, USA,” with box and chain stores. We eat at Jack Jack’s Diner because it reminds us of an East Coast diner with neon and a mirrored stainless steel facade. The friendly waiter directed us to “the next street over” for tourist shopping.

South Main is in historic Downtown Moscow. It has coffee shops, bookstores, vintage clothing boutiques, restaurants, bars, ice cream, antique and kitsch stores, and feels like a college town.

Photo: University of Idaho

A giant grain elevator is a reminder of the agricultural history of Latah County and the Palouse. Hummel Architects conceptualized the structure for modern use to draw visitors.

I pick up a rusty license plate, a book on “cool” from the late seventies at Hello Everything, and a rugby shirt on a sale rack outside Revolver. I am intrigued by a recipe stand, so I flip through someone's antique recipes and find “Mayonaise Cake.” It's a Depression-era recipe without milk, butter, or eggs.

There are two movie theaters: the Nuart and Kenworthy. The Kenworthy shows classic movies, and the Nuart, a former first-run theater, is now a Christian Ministry like the Cordova Theater in Pullman.

A lone RFK Jr. sign is on the side of the four-lane road. I noticed his book The Wuhan Cover-Up in a local bookstore.

1956

The district is quiet and clean. I don't see unhoused shelters against buildings or down alleys. Drug use behavior is unseen. Bike riders are asked to walk their wheels on sidewalks.

We plan to go to the McConnell Mansion Museum, but its website hours and a sign on the old house contradict each other, so it's closed. We get snacks and drinks at the Moscow Food Co-Op, an upscale grocery with a deli and coffee shop. Fake revolution is in the air.