Seattle as it is, Seattle has it—sleek and subtle, Seattle, like the sweep and rattle of a seagull trapping plastic.
Light blue, fake orange. Rarely bright, rarely dark. Few shadows; everything is basically what it is. Slightly flattened, like digital photography. Seattle the brat, the little boy who can’t grow up.
How to be a person in Seattle: I walk down lightly flowered streets. I notice new cement. The world sometimes feels gleeful. When the weather is perfect, I move through life with no resistance. But even the worst of it isn’t that bad; winter isn’t bitter, the summer can’t kill. You never have to fight too hard. It sort of sucks the fight out of you.
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Someone told me 90% of city bus surfaces have traces of fentanyl. They tested it. There is one stop halfway to work where lots of people get on who smell like fresh fentanyl. They sit in the back, where rows of seats face each other, and talk about their friends. I usually listen to music, but sometimes I just try to pay attention.
Seattle is a good place; the trees like it here. Things grow wild and nobody cares to stop them; even in the suburbs, weeds are thick and forgiven. In spring I catalogue five thousand baby flowers. In summer, colors mature; fruits deepen the swing of branches. Not like Boston—each young tree in its own little grate. Not like Nebraska—all the trees too far away to touch.
Here we live in neon, glass, dirty tape. Here we live as construction signs reclaimed by vines. Mass of biologic life rots on the sidewalk. Who cleans it? — Crows go hopping on the roofs, fanning their tails. Little birds tear up my screen for nests. A man with long hair and a woman with short walk past me holding plants in plastic trays. Every streetsign advertises events that have already happened. Paper stapled over paper.
Sometimes the clouds are plates of gold. Sometimes my heart is made of gold, and I overflow with all this beauty, the soft blue air, the smell of earth, the sound of the hummingbirds zipping by with their fat bug-bodies.
How can anyone be expected to work here? It’s too easy not to. It’s too easy to be gentle, too easy to have fun. It’s too fun to go outside and let your mind glaze over with the joy of living. Is that so bad? Maybe people here know how to live; that’s why they don’t write. Maybe people here know how to live, and being a scholar is a special perversion. Not like Boston, where the harshness of climate and culture sends the scholars running for their desks. Not like Nebraska, where work is material and clear, and pleasure is rationed carefully for fear of famine. What a surplus, Seattle, what riches, what décadence, what feasts. A Bacchanalian dance, increasing, decreasing, increasing.
I like laughing here; I haven’t cried more than necessary. I like sleeping here; soft beds yield vivid dreams. The vacancy has left me; my chest is full of sand. The terror has left me; the blade of life is dulling. The loneliness has left me; the clearness isn’t slicing. My emptiness has left me? I have no need of God?
Wait—a rat rushing the bushes!
It’s like Lispector said: “As long as I love a God just because I don’t want myself, I’ll be a loaded die, and the game of my greater life won’t be played. As long as I invent God, he doesn’t exist.”
But Weil said: “If we love God while thinking he does not exist, he will manifest his existence.”
But Nietzsche said—
Stay focused. Here is jogging and pop music, electric scooters and falafel, dancing, exotic beers, things made out of wood… Here is sensation, embodiment, enjoyment, physical life. If something is missing, that’s because it’s always missing (—I tell myself, but can’t stop scratching—)
An enormously shaggy dog trundles past, mopping up dirt but forging ahead.
Tell yourself: “You’re living more now than you’ve ever lived before.” And try to make it true.
Tell yourself: “You must fulfill your potential here on Earth.” And don’t waste time measuring potentials.
Tell yourself to pay attention.
Something will happen—
I love this. Parts of it sound like the work of an alien, others very human.