Fifty Coffees Later

I am sitting in an Internet café in Seattle’s ultra-groovy Capitol Hill neighborhood waiting for our puke stained laundry to come clean. Until this week, I have never been able to make it any further north on the west coast than Santa Barbara. Despite knowing that this town is the epicenter of hyper-retarded coolness on a scale that rivals Austin on its best day, I had no idea what I was in store for until I experienced this place for myself. Nothing like a real city to remind you of the toilet you find yourself living in. Sorry to all you Houston lovers, but Houston is a turd with four million roaches hanging on for dear life. And yes, I'm one of them, and am acutely aware of it.

First let me just say that I would gladly drop it all and move here over Houston in a heartbeat. This is a great spot for writing, drinking coffee, catching bands, eating, enjoying the outdoors, and generally being into whatever it is that I enjoy doing besides being a dick and hiding. The last two I can do anywhere, after all. We flew in Friday night and gathered up the precious cargo, and from there, we checked into the Eighth Avenue Inn, which appears to be the hotel of choice for touring death metal bands, so, despite the sleaze, all in all, a fine choice of accommodations.

I recognize that this is a mecca for dispossessed losers just as much as it is one for tech sector dorks, drug addicts, outdoors lovers, and failed musicians. Having said that, being here and seeing the mélange of retards is still a daunting sight. Within minutes of hitting the streets you are treated to a who’s who of cool. Every shade of black, horn rims, stockings, knit caps, overcoats, tattoos, dyed hair, facial jewelry, patchouli, Crocs, Doc Marten’s, and whatever else you can dream up is on full display. It’s like a museum for the trends of the last thirty years, in full living display. I feel like I was plucked from reality and dropped into Cameron Crowe’s wet dream, amped on meth, and hungry for more. And yet, despite that glowing review, I love the fucking place. It’s a damn fine town and I have enjoyed my brief time here.

I won’t get into too many gory (i.e. dull) details about the ins and outs of this trip, but instead I will give you some of the highlights through my admittedly slanted vision.

It really rains a lot if these four days are any indication. And while one day was ultimately sunny and gorgeous, it actually rained every day we were here. And, while not brutally so, it is cold. Personally, I love this weather, so no problems there. It surely beats the sweltering cesspool of Houston’s constant neo-jungle atmosphere. Driving in, though rush hour traffic no less, I was immediately struck with the aesthetic appeal of the town, strictly visually speaking. This is a beautiful city. It’s as if the people who live here actually care about the appearance of their home. Go figure.

So, what was the first thing to strike my musical fancy in Seattle? Are you ready for it? Are you sure? Okay, you asked for it.

Reading in Seattle’s alt-weekly paper, The Stranger, I ran across a little ad in the classified section for drum lessons. Lessons in all sorts of styles from a true and reliable source. The source?

The guy who used to drum for Candlebox.

Sweet. Candlebox.

Bear in mind that I had already at that point made plenty of Candlebox jokes since arriving in their hometown. I know that there is nothing wrong with the idea of this dude, out of work, using his, umm, talents (that hurt) to put food on the table, but still, here is this fucking guy teaching Seattle folks how to rock the “real world” way. Nice.

So are there shrines to Layne Staley on every street corner? Are you issued a flannel as you step off the plane at Sea-Tac Airport? Do you have to get down on your knees upon entering downtown and blow Courtney Love? No, not really. But the next place we went did toot Seattle’s often-dubious musical horn, and fairly enough, I suppose.

So where did we go next? Well, with child in tow we headed out Monday to the Experience Music Project, which for those not in the know is a museum for popular music (mostly Seattle music, really) housed in a really ugly building designed by one of my least favorite architects, Frank Gehry. It is supposedly designed to resemble Jimi Hendrix's crushed guitar, but to me it looks more like a big twisty collection of sheets of metal in different colors, which is exactly what it is. So fucking what. It doesn’t rock, and I am not impressed. As for the museum itself, there was some huge Jimi Hendrix movie that I refused to watch, a Beatles movie I had already seen, a nice collection of guitars throughout history, an exhibit on Latin music that I passed up, and the room in which one is able to play guitars, drums, keys, sing, samplers, try their hand at spinning vinyl, and a few other delicacies. Basically, a guitar shop with free lessons. Snoooze….

Moving on from that money hole we tried the other part of the building in which is housed the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and Museum. Nice. More interesting. Should have skipped the collection of Chris Cornell guitars and beelined it for the sci-fi museum.

In that place they have tons of first editions of classic sci-fi books, lots of movie artifacts like guns from Star Trek, Blade Runner, and Buck Rogers, costumes like the plastic raincoat from one of the best scenes in Blade Runner (genius item), Captain Kirk’s tunic from the TV show, the actual Captain’s chair from the show, and several actual manuscripts including one from Greg Bear, and the entire hand written, several thousand page manuscript from Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. He wrote that entire monster using pens with ink cartridges, all bajillion pages of it. That, speaking from the position of a complete dork, was bad-ass.

We caught some pretty amusing street music at the Pike’s Place Market (the fish throwing spot), including some gospel singers who sang the same song for about twenty minutes by my count, which makes me doubt the veracity of their message. Twenty minutes begins to dip into the territory of desperation, if you ask me. And we also endured some pathetic, lost teens singing along to some dreadlocked asshole strumming chords and dropping brutally awful ballads for Jesus.

Saturday we decided to take a small side trip and head out of town for Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, which is a store I have dreamed of visiting for many years now. Let’s just say first that the drive is beautiful. You can see (on a clear day) Mt. St. Helens, and Mt. Hood during the drive, and Portland itself is a beautiful town. Along the way we passed the exit off of I-5 for Sleater-Kinney Road in Olympia. I had no idea they got their name from a road. That's a little trivia for you. Try to contain your excitement.

And then, on the drive to Portland, Claire had the genius idea to pull off the road and try to get into Fort Lewis. Yes, the Fort Lewis, the gargantuan military compound. Basically this meant we were turned around at a military checkpoint. In fact, the guards took one look at us and our licenses and immediately had us turn the fuck around and leave. No grass grows under their feet. Those military guys are good. Our attempts to overthrow the government thwarted, it was back on the road for more cerebral thrills.

As for Powell’s, I was not disappointed. In fact, for the first half hour I was there, I actually found it hard to keep from welling up, in all honesty, because the store was that good. It was one of those moments in life where it all lines up and you know it will be downhill from there. Especially for me since I work in an incredibly inferior bookstore myself. I know the business, and Powell’s does it right. Powell’s caters to people who love books, my place caters to dollars and bestsellers, and it shows. It was a tad overwhelming for me, so I headed straight for the graphic novels, the sci-fi, the Latin American Studies, and the Rare Book Room, and then drifted through the rest of the place. I could spend years in that store; it is like a holy land to me. They even have a pillar in the sci-fi section signed by several notorious authors who have passed through over the years. Nice. My store would be worried about marring the fucking paint job. The same paint job they won’t pay to redo in order to focus on more dollars in a new location. But I digress.

And then, after Powell’s, the honeymoon was over. It was over because we went to a store well known around here called Fred Myers.

Fred Myers is basically a Target and a Kroger rolled into one. We needed a couple things so we hit the joint. Man, Portland gets a little dicey under closer scrutiny.

Trolling the aisles of this store was a sort of army of the uber-hip. Almost every single person in the entire store was wearing some sort of hipster uniform. Even the Whole Foods in downtown Austin could never dream of holding a candle to this place. Around every corner was another teenaged catastrophe bedecked in nose rings, leather motorcycle jackets, Manic Panic dyed hair, and way too much attitude. I’m 39, and I grew up going to hardcore shows. I am not impressed by costume. And by the looks of the rest of the place, neither is anyone else. In fact, the only people impressed by the outcast costume party were the people in the costumes who clearly were amused by themselves. It was weird. I can already hear the cries of “what the fuck do you care?” And you know what? I do care. I care what people do when they have a choice, and I care what is important to people as they work out what the fuck life means for them, to them, and how they relate to the rest of us, and I care why you think I should see you looking a certain way. I care about those sorts of things because I am _______, or whatever foolish thing you want to attribute to me as a person in order to feel better. Hawthorne Street is a carnival of stupidity, and if you’ve ever been there, you’ll know what I mean.

I have never seen so much crazy in one room. I felt like all the extras from a big budget Hollywood production on the punk scene were on break and buying cheese and underpants while waiting for the next shot.

My favorite bunch in Fred Myers, however, had to be the pied piper dude and his grungy rats. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen My Own Private Idaho, but in it, there is this character that is a sort of drunken pied piper. These lost and goofy street urchins all follow him about as if he is a depository for idiot wisdom. Well, here in Fred Myers was just such a character. We came across the guy in the cheese aisle as he and his gang of merry pranksters were laughing at the clean-up guy who was charged with mopping up the blood which was inexplicable spilled on the floor. The head fool was about 45, and his four followers were probably 19 at the oldest. The head guy was dressed in the garb of a retired hippy, and his goons were all clearly of the crusty punk variety. Whenever the leader would drunkenly say anything, which was always something completely idiotic, the followers would all cackle gleefully as if this guy was the reincarnation of Lenny Bruce. And so it went, he would lead them about the most permissive retail store I have ever been in, cracking stupid insult after insult at the customers, as his doltish retard followers would all laugh knowingly as if the guy actually wasn’t a total and utter waste of humanity. Oh, to be young again. That’s why Conor is so far off the mark with his amazement at seeing college people hand out LaRouche leaflets. Young people are, after all, young PEOPLE, and therefore, totally fucking stupid.

So, that was Portland.

Well, not really, but that was a slice of it.

In fact, as far as you scumbags need to know, that too was Seattle.

So, in the morning it’s back to Houston, and I am hoping that it won’t be another 40 years before I get to this part of the country again. In fact, if I play my cards right, I will end up in a place not unlike this town in the near future, for good. My time in Houston has been a little too long. I am too comfortable there, and I am still not over my longing to return back up north since my parents moved us here in the late 70s and then hightailed it out of here themselves.

In summation, for me and me only, great coffee, great beer, great weather, beautiful city, nice people (mostly), great bookstores, great locale for catching bands (I missed Neurosis, Grails, Om, and a ton of others in this month alone), great food, and there you go. I miss my kids and will be glad to get home to see them, but I will also definitely miss this town having enjoyed getting a chance to see it finally. I know I will be back someday, somehow.

I’m out.

As a postscript, I'd like to add that in Sea-Tac Airport while wrangling our way through security, we were diverted through the express lane since we had an enormous stroller in our possesion. As luck would have it, this led us directly through a suspicious trail of blood spilt upon the floor. This being strangely reminiscent of our experience in the Portland Fred Myers, I nervously looked around for the crusty punks that might have snuck their way past security in order to follow me home and become my new best friends. Luckily, this was not the case. So, bloodletting aside, the trip home went off without a hitch. Better luck next time, crusties!