Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

From David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas - the narrator has just received jaw-droppingly rude service on a British commuter train:

Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.

You probably think we Seattleites are kidding when we discuss the severity of our weather.  Think again.  It was a stroke of good fortune that this umbrella, stripped from its owner’s hands in the midst of one of our hourly maelstroms, found this fence instead of the chest cavity of some unfortunate pedestrian. 

We have an election here next Tuesday that, despite the fatigue everyone feels from last year’s blowout, has a lot of important races and issues that require thoughtful attention. Since I’m headed to Milwaukee next week, and I didn’t cop to the fact that I’d be missing election day until earlier this week, I needed to head downtown to the King County elections office to get an absentee ballot.  There wouldn’t have been time to get one in the mail, and I don’t believe I’ve missed an election since I’ve lived here.

And since I’m travelling all day Sunday, I didn’t think playing a little hooky this afternoon was such a great crime (thanks, M, for deferring your upgrade).  My plan was to catch a bus downtown and walk around a bit to see what had changed, since I don’t get down there as much as I’d like.  At the last minute, Mrs. Perils offered to join me, and off we went.  I didn’t think a midday bus ride would be all that eventful, but it ended up being pretty full, mostly of high school kids just off of school and shouting clever rejoinders at each other.  Their loquaciousness dimmed, but did not mask entirely, that other segment of midday bus riders, represented today by an extemely twitchy mullet-head and a ski-cap guy who kept telling himself he was going to the library to get some peace and quiet (glaring at the school kids), then bitterly chiding himself because “now everyone knows I’m going there.”

We exited the bus as it reached midtown, since I can almost always walk faster than a bus in downtown traffic.  I obtained my ballot, and we decided to head toward the Pike Place Market to find lunch.  Despite the rain and bluster, the walk promised a lot of fun things to see and photograph.  Click the photos to enlarge - the Lusty Lady below will thank you!

This (above) is the below-ground entrance to an Italian restaurant at First and Cherry. We’ve eaten there many years ago, when it was a really nice place. I’m not sure what’s there now, but my appetite might not survive the trip through the door.

The marquee of the venerea venerable Lusty Lady strip club on First is always good for a laugh.

Back in the mid-80s the Pike Place Market raised $1.6million by selling around 46,000 tiles imprinted with personal messages. Since the Market wasn’t very crowded today, we were able to locate ours.

Here you can see the tiles surrounding a musician, who is playing bluegrass music on what I believe is a Saw Duang It seemed to fit right in on a rainy, slightly off-kilter day.

After wandering the Market for awhile, we sought out lunch, and Mrs. Perils recalled a place we’d tried to go for dinner once, Matt’s In the Market.  Since it was a little before 2, we were able to get a table for a late lunch without any trouble.  It’s just as narrow as it looks above, with a counter that wraps around a cramped kitchen and not all that many tables in the back.  The window looks out over the top of the market, with a peekaboo view of Elliott Bay.

Our simple fare: cups of borscht for both of us, a pulled pork sandwich in a tangy barbeque sauce for Mrs. Perils, and Mama Lil’s honkin’ hot albacore tuna sandwich for me, wasabi crusted and seared rare.  Although 5pm is usually our boundary line for alcohol, almost everyone else in the place was sipping wine with their lunches, so here we see Mrs. Perils is drinking a Rioja rose, and I a really tasty Barbera called Il Dufo from a California winery which I will endeavor to find more of. 

We each saved half a sandwich for later, but still felt a little stuffed.  Just about simultaneously, we decided it would be fun & healthful if we walked home instead of bussing.  Our route took us over Queen Anne hill, back down to Fremont to cross the ship canal, then back up the hill to our place in what?  I guess they’re calling it Tangletown these days, wedged between the Wallingford and Greenlake neighborhoods.

It looks like my umbrella is blowing away, but that’s actually an on-point street sculpture mounted on a pole, that swivels with the wind.  It’s on Western Avenue just north of the Market.

Looking west on the ship canal from the Fremont Bridge.  The poplars at the right are the same ones I photographed from the ground here.

Almost home - crossing Aurora Avenue on a footbridge, we look back to downtown, where we started our trek.  It was a great way to spend an afternoon in Seattle, and it’ll take a little of the sting out of having to spend next week away.

Well, Halloween is almost upon us, and I don’t have a costume, mostly because my duties tomorrow night - operating the trap door on our front porch, pulling the lever just as the 3rd “t” in “Trick or Treat!” trips off of young tongues - won’t require one.  So, I’m providing a sampling of prior costumes I’ve donned, usually at the last second, during the years before I was put on the Liquor Control Board’s no-fly list, when we’d actually go out.

This first one was really impromptu.  I learned we were going somewhere just as I got home from work.  Brainstorming, I removed the sheepskin seatcover from my car, pulled it over my head through the hole where the headrest goes, and pondered.  I ended up wadding up newspapers and tape to form a pair of huge breasts, draped yellow ribbon over my head to represent blond hair, and went as the Dolly (as in Parton) Llama.  OK, the guy on the left is our neighbor, married to our dear friend, but the look on his face still creeps me out.  I have a ways to go before I apprehend that ”coquetry” doesn’t involve wickets and mallets. (Click each photo to enlarge).

This costume was actually planned - I purchased bits of it between the U District and Fremont, and wore it to a musical event, Ghoulbooty, that used to be held at the Elysian on Capitol Hill.

This next one was semi-planned. I had purchased the leather miniskirt at the Fremont street market with a vague idea of using it for a costume. Then, as we planned to go out, again, to Ghoulbooty, Mrs. Perils presented me with an array of accoutrement from her personal wardrobe. Sorry about the belly - I can see liposuction and bikini wax in my future. Sometime around this Halloween, a story broke about the availability, for mucho dinero, of eggs from supermodels for in vitro fertilization (one presumes they wouldn’t make much of an omelette). On our way into the Elysian, we encountered a statuesque young woman with a sorta Easter basket on her arm labeled “Supermodel Eggs”. Later that evening, as I was standing in line to order a drink, a woman behind me bit me on the shoulder. I was flattered, and a little tingly. That’s never happened to me when I wasn’t cross-dressing.

Halloween is approaching. I’ve always felt that Halloween helped a little bit to salve the sting of giving up summer. We took a walk down to Fremont yesterday and caught some of the early festivity. Click to enlarge.

Ghost Fish

This is part of a gang of zombies that was roaming around Fremont. While we were in Fremont Place Books, they started banging on the window in front and drew the vociferous ire of the woman tending the store. Those are real rats on the guy’s shoulder - we couldn’t figure out why they stayed there.

Away from the mayhem, it was an awfully pretty day.

I was going to say I hadn’t posted recently because I’ve been pouring all my energy into my new s$x blog, but then you’d offer bribes and camp out on my parking strip trying to get the link.  Then you’d remember I turned 56 last Friday.

Yes, I indeed renewed my driver’s license on time, in the nick thereof, around 10 am Friday.  And we had a nice little celebration with a couple friends at Portalis wine bar in Ballard, followed by a terrific cake made by Mrs. Perils. (click to enlarge. an HTML trick I learned working on my s$x blog.)

The truth is, work’s been consuming me the last couple of weeks, and my sense of time’s gotten really skewed.  It’s meant weird sleeping, and some days where I barely leave the house, or my desk.  I’ve resisted, so far, hooking up the catheter in order to free up a few more extra minutes.  But it’s in the drawer.

I’ll come up for air this weekend, and get back to posting.

Anyone else get a little thrill out of seeing the Yahoo! Reuters links juxtapose “Texas Court Issues Warrant for Delay” with “Saddam Pleads Innocent, Gets Into Scuffle”?  A cheap thrill, fersure, but a thrill nonetheless.

I got home from my week on the road Sunday night.  At almost every waystation on the trail last week that wound from Seattle to Minneapolis to Milwaukee to Detroit to Toledo and back, I was admonished by gate agents, airport club receptionists, car rental clerks and bank employees that my driver’s license was soon to expire.  Which it does, on Friday.  If you’re a betting person, you’ll run to your bookie and bet against my getting to the DMV and renewing on time.

The irony in this is that about this time last year, someone misread my license and warned me that it was due to expire.  I took them at their word. After a week of foot-dragging and brinksmanship, I headed to the DMV, took a number and waited fitfully in their germ-laden confines.  When my number was finally called, the woman at the window gave me a puzzled look and, though not very good with English, managed to convey that I was a year early and, no, they couldn’t issue a new license anyway.

Although I could play hard-to-get, let them know that they had a shot and blew it, it’s probably wiser to get dressed and head over there again.  Sometime in the next 48 hours.

For some reason, blogging really suffers when I’m working in Milwaukee.  Work is pretty intense while I’m there, but I still have evenings in the hotel.  I usually work until 6:30 or 7, then go running and hunt down dinner to bring back to the room, or drag my laptop down to the hotel lounge and order from the cafe menu.  So I have a stretch of uninterrupted time each night, which I might not always get at home.  I guess the biggest reason for fallow blogging there is that not much interesting, besides work, happens to me there.  Interactions are cordial but not of any depth or pith.  I may try paying closer attention to my fascinating internal monologue, and try not to be too disappointed at the result.

So now I’m here in Perrysburg to visit my mom for the weekend before flying home on Sunday.  I’ll assay some “job-jar” tasks around the house, watch the Buckeyes’ noon kickoff against Michigan State at noon, and not in the middle of the fricking night as I would in Seattle, and, if discipline completely slips, nip at the USC-Notre Dame game at 3:30.  Something should stir up blogging material here.

Well, I promised Dick and Kathy that I would expand on Joyce Carol Oates’ review of Cormac McCarthy’s latest book but, really, I’ve read so little McCarthy that I have nothing worthwhile to add.  I sort of feel like this one time I signed up to sing Frankie Avalon’s “Venus” for some grade school pageant.  Then, a few days before the performance, I cued up the 45, stood in front of a mirror and realized there was no way in hell I was going to sing that song in front of anyone.  I ended up playing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star on my ocarina/tonette, and badly.  Mrs. McGuffin, the music teacher, was not amused, but then she never was.

Anyway, here’s the skinny on the review.  First of all, I didn’t realize McCarthy had a 4-novel Tennessee period after attending, then dropping out of, University of Tennessee:

the dreamlike opacity of Faulkner’s prose pervades The Orchard Keeper (1965)and Outer Dark (1968).  These are slow-moving novels in which backcountry natives drift like somnambulists in tragic/farcical dramas

Blood Meridian (1985) was his fifth novel, and

marks the author’s reinvention of himself as a writer of the West: a visionary of vast, inhuman distances … (and) is the author’s most challenging work of fiction.

…Admirers of Blood Meridian invariably dislike and disparage McCarthy’s “accessible” best-selling Border Trilogy as if these novels were a betrayal of the solemn rites of macho sadism and impacted fury of Blood Meridian, for which the ideal cover art would be a Hieronymus Bosch rendering of some scenes of Zane Grey.

So, that’s the crux of the “fault line” I described in the previous post.  Looks like I’m committed, now, to finishing the Trilogy and Blood Meridian to satisfy the solemn rites of macho faux-literary blogging.

Toward the end of the article, Oates gets around to commenting on the book she’s reviewing, No Country For Old Men.  It’s set in contemporary Texas instead of the dying frontier of the Border Trilogy, and “reads like a prose film by Quentin Tarantino.”

Shorn of the brooding lyricism and poetic descriptive passages that have become McCarthy’s signature style, No Country For Old Men is a variant of one of the oldest of formula suspense tales: a man discovers a treasure and unwisely decides to take it and run, bringing upon himself and others a string of calamities…

So, there you have it.  This proves nothing about my literary self except that I can type while reclined on a Hilton hotel bed.  I mean, they put 5 pillows and an upholstered bolster on this sucker for purposes that are lost on me.  I’m supposed to be the West Coaster visiting flyover country.  Wonder if I could get them to take two of them back and install a trapeze.  Just so they’d put it on the secret part of my HHonors profile for other hoteliers to ponder when I make a reservation.