A High-Five, Like a Dream, Deferred

Today, coming back to the office with some lunch, a homeless man offers me a friendly high-five; I start to respond with the expected, but then hesitate and lower my hand. No high-five was consummated and he starts chastising me for not wanting to touch his hand.

I protest something feeble about being in a hurry. Like I’m some sort of high-powered executive single mother CEO who’s always just too busy to high-five everyone. But I’m not, and feel bad. Because he was right, right about the touching thing.

Lunch was an uneaten sandwich.

Like Rocky IV

Russian Guy at the gym approaches a most beautiful woman and spends 10 minutes telling a what she’s doing wrong with her curls. It looks pedantic, but I know what’s really going on here. He’s clearly hitting on her.

Then 15 minutes later he taps me on the shoulder and takes 10 minutes telling me what I’m doing wrong with my rows. And he was absolutely right! I misjudged you and your intentions, Helpful Russian Guy. Thank you.

Darn you!

I almost got creamed on my bike this morning. Car from the left completely blows through a red light. Not a yellow, not a just-red, but a full-bodied mature red. One aged at least 5 seconds and served with a bouquet of gape-jawed horror.

KEXP: Radio on the Internet

When it comes to commercial-free radio, I‘m kinda a true believer. I like the media of radio because it can engage you while you go about doing other things. But, for whatever reason, the ads of commercial radio are especially jarring; even more so than web pop-ups or TV commercials with all their animated toenail fungus.

College radio, NPR and others fill the void because it should be noted that most radio, like most media, is crap. And when you find a tolerable life raft floating above it all, you cling to it.

KEXP is certainly not crap. It’s excellent. And the have a live streaming webcast. I’m listening to them right now, as I have most mornings for the past 6 years. I’d listen to the morning show from a tiny cubicle in Cleveland and it was my first aural impression of Seattle: it’s fun; it tries new things; it has better concerts. Mainstream music in Seattle is Pavement and the Pixies. Seattle will put a certified nerd on the morning show and he’s a star. Seattle will put a DJ with a speech impediment on weekends, and he’s a star too! It’s just that kind of town.

When me and G got sick of Cleveland we caught I-90 downtown and drove west several thousand miles until the road ended here in Seattle. And when our crap car had crested the Olympic Mountains at barely 25 mph and we started free rolling down the other side, we could suddenly pick up the KEXP FM radio signal and that’s how I knew we’d arrived in Seattle. Seattle is the place where it’s in your car and not just on your computer.

Years later, the station had some fund-raising telethon and we gave them the old car that brought us here. By then it was even more crap, but it was tax-deductible crap. And it helped the organization do mostly good. Being a believer means you overlook some unfortunate flaws like annoying telethons and creeping commercialism.

These days, a lot of non-commercial operations are running “sponsor acknowledgements” that sound suspiciously like commercials and KEXP in no exception as they got "sponsorship" from people selling condos, Hondas and scooters. Old PBS even runs Chuck. E. Cheese “acknowledgements” during its kid’s shows that pay some lip service to “lifelong learning” but then just shows kids jumping in a ball pit in front of a giant mouse. The educational aspect is suspect.

KEXP has changed, but it's still there. Maybe I don’t love them as much as I use to, but I still believe in them.

Multiple Sushi Sclerosis

You probably didn’t know this, but Seattle has the highest rate of Multiple Sclerosis in America. It’s about 3 times the rate of southern states and the reasons are somewhat of a medical mystery.

Anyway, I’m eating at my favorite sushi restaurant ($1 rolls at lunch, pretty decent quality) and I go into the men’s room. On the wall is a public service poster that reads:

“The Pacific Northwest has the highest incidence of MS in the nation. If you experience symptoms, get diagnosed!”

Then there’s a beautiful montage image of Mount Rainer, a waterfall, and some of Seattle’s lush evergreen forests with text asking intriguing questions:

“Is it in the air?
“In the water?”
“In the trees?”

To which someone scrawled in ballpoint pen: “Is it in the sushi?”

Things I’m digging right now:

Sun Dried Tomatoes
Been a passive tomato hater most my life, but I'm putting these in everything. Maybe I just hated water? It's like the concept with soup. I’d eat a lot more, but the water part keeps slowing down the process. Who has time for that?


Cherry Blossoms
Along with the pitch-perfect sunny days, cherry trees have turned Seattle into a beautiful fairyland paradise where everyone feels like a special princess. Now they’re raining down in a cascade of petals: pink, white and even purple rain.


Sundresses
Just nice. Sunshine nice, cherry blossom nice.


The Pink/Lavender Bulldozer
I see it every morning—and still can't believe it's real.


Riding Fixed Gear
Riding a bike without gears and a brake is like sex without a condom—with someone you love--at 20 MPH. Look at all the cool, awesome street-cred we have! That is until a bunch of nerd-loser lamewads start doing it too. I mean, other nerd-loser lamewads. Last 2 sentences of the article say it all: “[Fixed gear] bikes are fun. And they’re beautiful.”


Graffiti Report Cards
It’s commonly accepted that graffiti can be boldly artistic, probing and thought provoking. But most isn’t, not by a long shot. So that’s why I was so pleased to see that someone created a spray-paint stencil with “grades” for graffiti. They’re all over my part of town. A typical one would read something like this:

Placement: C
Style: D-
Technical Skill: D+
Summary: D (see me after
class)

And the beauty part is the Report Card is graffiti itself! The unknown stenciler spray paints them next to existing graffiti. Nice.

Food Poisioning - Now 50% More Poisony

Food poisoning is maybe the only way that men can experience something akin to the miraculous pains of childbirth.

On Monday, I got to experience the miracle, and it was so horrible I’d never want another child anywhere to be born, ever, including myself, just to make it stop.