Seattle

A squat roadhouse forty five minutes inland. A little cake of a thing, layers of glossy red and white, just over the mountain, as they say, into the Cascadian Range.

ROOT, the local sports station, seems to exclusively play clips of Ken Griffey Jr. at various phases of his career. Right now it’s the 1998 Home Run Derby. Griffey gleams with a 90s Fresh Prince single-earring sort of handsome that enthralled every white person on the planet for a decade or so. At the last minute, he’s victorious—eight homers over four tied with seven including Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro. Palmeiro’s mustache is platonically perfect, as is Chipper Jones’ jawline, although Chipper only nets a single homer. I remember watching this Home Run Derby as a child of twelve.

Cream ale on the handwritten chalk menu. Rainier the dominant beer of the area, the logo drawn with impressive accuracy on the board, but I opt for the cream. It’s as smooth and gloppy as the icing paint on the bar’s exterior. A place of cold grayness, Seattle-area establishments usually offer a grilled cheese and tomato soup combo. The bartender microwaves my tomato soup, tastes like Progresso, and it likely is. I dip a couple times and call it a night. 

The next day, at lunch with the client in a historic coal town called Roslyn, where they shot Northern Exposure, the IPA is a light golden color, aromatic and foxy like a dug out flower. We discuss hard water and soft water. Several ways to soften water, the most common of which is an ionic process using salt brine to capture the magnesium and calcium and then suck it out via side-pipe. But this leaves you with salt all over the place, including in your soil and in your pipes, and thus like most things Big Salt profits while slowly poisoning you. Big Salt changed the definition of hard water to necessitate a test that salt-treatments can always beat, so now any treatment that doesn’t salt your environment technically still produces “hard water.” None of the natural ways pass anymore.

Seattle. Salt air. Indian families and goose shit. A dock in sunshine. God presses the seagull button on the soundboard. Flabby white man and dodgy tech Asians drink bottles of beer on yacht in the blandly named and blandly inhabited South Lake Union neighborhood, the only yacht moored therein, Asian girls in ill-fitting clay-colored bikinis. A tiny grey tab of a beach, flabby people wading. Shaggy white woman in black mask walks shaggy dog. Oppressed by perfect weather, Seattle people don’t smile at me, nor do they look away—they stare, seeking approval, as if to say “am I doing this right? Is this how this is done?”

The sun skids off the silver water like ice slushing off a windshield. Gay flabby white man with Washington state back tattoo sits on towel next to black man with red durag. Tanned chad splays out in cotton Buck Mason hem tee and brown leather Filson briefcase and khaki shorts, no phone, alone, soaking in the sun, probably attempting to tan his balls. White woman in red scrubs with wire-haired dog. Single paddle boarder in grassy inlet. The sun blares like tomato soup and they gulp down every drop they can. Flabby Indian families march by the Bezos Innovation Center’s deeply derivative bright yellow melted-Dali-clock style statuary wordmark. White man wearing metal cross playing black metal out of portable speaker rides by on new breed of e-scooter I’ve never seen, shaved head with wrap around Oakleys. The Chase Bank. The Capital One Cafe. The Jimmy John’s sandwiches. The Tesla store. LOCAL Public Eatery one of twelve LOCAL Public Eatery locations across Washington and Canada. Special edition Marriott boutique hotel with tasteful check in desk art, translucent chips arrayed in a barometric formation, like the balls in the movie Twister, hit by light from the side so they reflect a snake spine of translucent orange onto the white backdrop. Flabby white girls with wire-haired dog. Flabby white man with blonde mustache, the kind that seems to accrete from the lighter scruff on the rest of the face, Cannibal Corpse shirt and death metal trucker hat.

To Ballard in white Tesla with Urbit Star decal. Green hair tranny walks past blue Predator dreadlocks woman at bus stop. Someone on Twitter calls my cream ale tweet cringe. Sun pierces long wooden hallway to hidden oyster restaurant with 1.5 hour wait. White tile floor with mint hexagons. My fingers itch to post. We wait at nearby bar airing ROOT on all televisions. Contemporary Griffey Jr., flabby with white goatee, hosts the HBCU Classic, interrupted by ad for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny x Filson Seattle-area exclusive brand collab. Walking back to oyster restaurant, we pass the C.C. Filson Ballard Flagship store, which says “Since 1897” even though it opened in 2016. Oysters on ice in wire baskets. A standing mountain of whipped butter. I’m flooded with happiness. Scallops in green sauce. Charred halibut collar. A scannable microchip bleeps, flashing a white dot inside the skin of client’s hand. Clams in a soup of white wine garlic. Vodka with ice crystals. Everything bathed in Chablis like sunshine on a salt water dock.

Psilocybin digestif doesn’t hit full on, but enough. Edges wiggle, stomach on a roller coaster. I lament the lack of cream ale to black bartender, he responds by condemning my white privilege. I say I don’t want to hear about it and he grins and says okay. We sit in the basement next to a fin de siècle bar preserved behind mid-century prison bars. The service staff hides behind red velvet curtains. This part of Seattle feels steampunk—cobblestones, iron railings, misty gas lamps, a doctor-turned-serial killer stalking the streets. There aren’t homeless people….there aren’t any people at all.

Pre-flight bliss: a morning alone. The hotel clerk strongly suggests Salty’s, but there’s no time. A nearby brunch place. Crowded. One seat at the bar. Gloppy tomato soup and fresh squeezed mimosa. Stinkier cheese between the bread. Seattle bros, polos in blues and purples, left side parts, nautically-flavored like DC or Boston bros, but with sneakers instead of loafers and not drinking instead of hammered. Macklemore bus boys. The most diverse city that feels the least. There’s something German here, Irish maybe, that won’t rub out. Everyone in Seattle pretends to be white and everyone white pretends to be anything else. Blissed out Ketamine gays crowd me off the bar.

$50 Uber to airport. $50 Ubers to anywhere because big tits Gates loves communism. Smiling Khoisan driver arrives in silver Nissan Rogue with Department of Homeland Security bumper sticker he ordered on Amazon. Indian family piles into Tesla, almost pulling off white, the closest I’ve seen so far, dad mom pretty kids all wearing glasses and suspicious expressions, expensive luggage, but they’ve ruined it with filthy gold ribbons tied to the handles and dragging on the ground. Mom catches me staring. Her eyes dart away. So close. Almost had it.

SeaTac is under construction, as I’m informed by the overwhelmingly green “Upgrade SEA” public awareness campaign wheatpasted on the temporary wall system. Muscular gray beard TSA agent in the outdoor smoking area, now relegated to a tiny chairless patch near drop-off, sucks on bulky metal vape and talks to a passenger. He mouths “I’m tired” to a CLEAR™ employee with bottom lip piercing. Airport employees must wear black shoes, but they can choose the brand and style. And they’re allowed to smoke.

CLEAR™ laser dot between my eyebrows like an orange bindi. It turns green and I’m escorted to the front of PreCheck®. My wife texts me a picture of my two year old daughter at a fire station wearing a red plastic fire hat. I breathe in industrial air conditioning and breathe out gratitude. Thank God I didn’t bring that cocaine burning a hole in glasses case in my bedside table. Thank God I didn’t order any escorts from Eros.com. I count four grilled cheese and tomato soups. Outside the Coach store, a black man plays a live electric guitar version of a recognizable pop song. It’s beautiful. There’s a Salty’s at the airport. Flight is on time. Outside a panoramic window, the unknown Eskimo adorning the tails of the Alaska fleet smiles back at me as if to say “you’re doing this right.”