Eric and I climbing something
The closet in the basement was the only thing left untouched. Eric’s sister saw the institutionalization of her mother following her dad’s suicide as an opportunity and turned the house in Billings, Mont. into a 2,000-square-foot meth den. That’s not to say that Eric was stable either, but he at least hadn’t given into drugs. Just his anger and frustration and unwillingness to engage in life.
Photo by Josh Potter
The line of people pouring away from the Edelweiss Chair on the upper slopes of Alpental Ski Resort in western Washington was unprecedented. At least for me. I’d never seen anything like it at Montana Snowbowl. Even on the best powder days, the Lavelle Chair may have a ten-minute wait. But, the Cascades had been waiting for this storm all winter and in a few days, Alpental received almost 48 inches.
That Sunday in late February, everyone in the Seattle area with a pair of skis or a snowboard came out of hiding. At least a hundred people were funneling slowly into one amalgam of Gore-tex for their turn on the two-chair Edelweiss lift, servicing “expert only” terrain. Judging by all the Arcteryx and this-year’s ski and snowboard fashions, most of them probably enjoyed a Microsoft or Amazon salary.
Then there was me. It was already difficult for me to feel comfortable among the monied masses in Seattle that entire year after graduating from UM. Now, with my used board, duct-taped jacket and blasé attitude for backcountry boundaries, I felt even more foreign at the base of Edelweiss than amid the condos and H&M stores of the city. (more…)
Photo by Josh Potter
It’s Tuesday night in Pioneer Square. Most of the bars and restaurants are defunct. The open ones blow steam and stink from their service entrances into the fish-smelling emptiness under the doomed viaduct. It’s been like this for years. A victim to inter-urban migrations, gentrification, the Oklahoma City Thunder. For years, the music was here: from the jazz clubs starting in the 30s, to the funk clubs closing out the 70s. Then disco happened. Then grunge really happened. But, like the estranged father of a prodigal son, there’s one bar in Pioneer Square that’s never left. (more…)
Trendsetting and trailblazing — this die-hard Seattleite puts Seattle on the map.
Dynamic Seattleites: Creative Force, Chase Jarvis | SEATTLEITE from SEATTLEITE on Vimeo.
Although Chase Jarvis the business man is in a state of flux right now, Chase Jarvis the photographer and artist has never been more solid.
For the fourth winter in a row, I flew home to Detroit to visit my family over the holidays. I have to stop hoping that coming home will be climactic somehow. What, after all, would happen? It’s the image of getting off a plane, ragged from travel, dragging my shitty luggage behind me. That overused, one-dimensional image of a prodigal son that sparks a false sense of purpose.
Anyway, it doesn’t take much to squelch that idea. My brother leaning up against my dad’s 100,000 mile Ford Explorer, cigarette lit, with the neighbor’s dog’s big golden retriever head sticking out of the back window should’ve been an indication of what my week home would look like. Continue Reading
Huge, cataclysmic tragedies cannot give life any perspective – they are too anomalous, too absurd to comment on where, exactly, your life is. More often than not, they just change the whole trajectory. The only things, then, that can accurately pinpoint and represent just what is going on with you physically and emotionally are the tiny tragedies. In my case, as tiny as the imperceptible and ignored joint in my big toe. Metatarsals so small they are only known as a number to a handful of orthopedic surgeons. These weak, yet overused bones snapped like a twig in a moment of their highest need: trying to stop a ten year old from scoring a touch-down in a backyard game of one-on-one football.
Forget, for a moment, the absurdity of one-on-one football, the absolutely implausibility and veritable lack of footballness needed to complete a one-on-one football game and focus more on the fact that I was trying to win. I needed to win. I was not letting this kid win or faking an injury to let him win and feel like a champion against what he must have perceived was an adult. I was trying to beat this kid at nerf football because, at least compared to him, I had accomplished some things: a drivers’ license, high school diploma, french kissing. Here was the only time I could exude this weak power I had.
Compared to most people (and all living beings) my life experiences, despite hard work and dedication, don’t really amount to much. No one, besides maybe a parent and a middle-manager in human resources cares that you went to college. The barista doesn’t care that you’re writing a novel every time you go in for coffee and NOT tip her. But, to a ten year old, my life experience was less a constantly evolving and shifting paradigm of success and more a diagram with a Y axis of time and an X axis of shit I’ve done. And my line was almost straight up.
He double pump-fakes, leans right, spins left, bob, weaves and I’m tangled in my own legs. Somewhere in there, I slip on wet grass and my big toe decides to run away from me at a 90-degree angle.
At first it’s just a numb pain, a sprain, that’s just intense enough for me to want to swear but manageable enough for me to replace it with words like Fudge and Cheeze-its Fudging Rice.
After all, I’m this kid’s role model. Which, if you think about it, isn’t as scary as it sounds. Sure, I actually do try to kick his ass in football and every time I show up in the morning to get him and his brother to school, I think about what would happen if I, just this once, let them walk their damn selves to the bus stop.
But, for the most part, I’m a good nanny. They like me. I let them get away with just enough stuff to think of me as a cool person to respect, but buckle down the right times to make sure they don’t run amuck when their parents get home.
It’s the perfect job, really. And yet, since it’s not what I went to school for, I can’t admit to myself that I should just do this for as long as I can. It’s a sign of failure to me that I’m taking care of someone else’s kids, that I’m eating someone else’s food, doing someone else’s crossword puzzle. But I don’t know what’s sicker: that I’m taking it out on a ten year old by trying to beat him at football, or that I still don’t beat him.
Turns out, my toe’s broken as hell. It swells up later to the size of my ankle and is the color of wet concrete. There’s not much you can do for a broken toe. Try to take it easy. Ice it. Just wait and hope that you didn’t screw it up so much that it grows back crooked.
I suggest instead that next time we play with the boys’ nerf guns. I think it’s the perfect ploy – while they’re out there, fake killing each other, I’m hiding in a corner of the basement doing the crossword puzzle.
I’m trying to figure out 18-across, “Former surgeon general C. Everett,” when the younger one, 8-years-old, hits me right between the eyes with a foam dart.
“You’re dead,” he says.
“I know,” I say.
We try so hard not to fall in with the wrong crowd. Or rather, we try our damndest to fall into the right crowd. But alone, in a big city, all we can do is fall in with any crowd. So a few weeks after moving to Seattle – a city not known for its sociability and outgoingness, especially in the rainy months – I’ve fallen hard for a group I had no business falling into.
Just find the vaguely hipster folks – maybe they work at a bookstore. Bum a smoke off someone you hear talking about Sonic Youth’s “earlier work” and run with it. You might have to sacrifice some of your pet peeves: maybe your new friends laugh at their own jokes or smoke too much weed. Maybe they never grab one drink but only go out if the goal is to close the bar down. They probably only read contemporary fiction by white guys who look like them and put “edgy” masturbation scenes into every chapter.
These are your new friends. For better or for worse. Mine live in a real clean townhouse complex: a succession of maybe ten single-story units wrapped around a glaringly pretend Greek courtyard with a cheap water fountain and some pebbles. As usual we start the night on a stoop where the residents complain about the loud groundskeeper. I imagine some poor immigrant with a late 90s Toyota truck and enough gas to fill either his mower or the truck.
Then I picture myself. The girl who, after a first date, introduced me to this group, is packing a bowl. Another bowl. She’s talking about politics, which should’ve been filed in the previous pet-peeve paragraph. (Smoking weed and talking about politics is exactly why the Republicans might win).
But, I am excruciatingly physically attracted to this woman and I’m trying to find nuggets of truth in her words.
“I mean, they downgraded our credit because of our dysfunction. Not because of our debt,” she says.
I can get on board with that. But, then she starts to giggle. I didn’t realize it was a joke.
“But as Turgenev once said: ‘revolutions just change the name on the top’,” I say.
She’s told me she thinks it’s sexy when I quote russian philosophers. But it could’ve been Tolstoy or Dostoevsky for all I know. Or Dr. Seuss.
I wonder if this is what adult life is like. I moved to Seattle to start that adult life. Immediately after graduating, I was convinced the right thing to do was to stop skiing so much, try to slow the drinking down a bit, move to the city and be an adult. But, even in the boondocks of Montana (though Missoula’s quite refined for its physical location) we didn’t quite waste our time so profoundly.
I wonder if that respect for time was a direct function of school. Or, specifically, a direct function of journalism school – a pursuit that encourages speed, dead-on accuracy and skepticism of everyone around you. But I’m not a journalist. At least not yet: freelance gigs are few and far between and damned if any editor actually in Seattle knows I’m here.
As she packs another bowl, I realize my skepticism, speed and accuracy was never really honed. I am no journalist. I am not an adult.
I found them. I always had a sneaking suspicion that the original hipster was a bike messenger. I guess it wasn’t that sneaking – it makes perfect sense: messenger bags, tight pants pulled away from drive trains, commodified dirt baggery. But, let me back up. The original hipsters were the beatniks. But, to understand the evolution of any cultural movement is to accept that it’s not always NECESSARILY linear. That these things come in giant waves and swells that burst and break down. The hippies destroyed the beatniks and left a trail of methamphetamine destruction behind them. Completely independently, the hipster grew out of grunge and bike messengers sharing, if anything, a loosely analogous ideology to the beatniks. But our 21st century hipster didn’t come from nothing, and that missing link is on a bike polo team that plays most weeknights on a repurposed tennis court and his name is Matt Messenger. Anyway, I’m writing a story on these polo players and I find this guy Matt who’s a hardcore, old-school player. It all started with hyped up messengers not wanting to get off their bikes. Now, thanks to Matt and a group of late-30s post-grunge carpenters and freelance contractors it’s a legit thing in Seattle. So naturally, magazine-minded, intrepid, freelance city reporter me wants to write a story on this phenomenon. And I might just be throwing around the word “phenomenon.” But every night, up in the hippest neighborhood of Seattle – Capitol Hill – where the DIY-look of your bike and the sleeveless Detroit Tigers shirt are a badge of authority, these guys who balked at Kurt Cobain’s lack of Irony reign supreme. On a hillside court from which Olive, Westlake and Pike all drop into the puget sound, these guys have rightfully staked their claim as kings. Here comes me: little miss “I-have-a-modest-DSLR-camera-and-a-voice-recorder.” I’ll tell your story. I promise. I’ll wrap all its cultural implications into a neat little narrative. Finally, I meet up with Matt after a game. He and I walk his bike up to a local brew pub.
“So, who’re you writing this for?”
“Well, I don’t actually have an editor,” I say.
“Sounds ideal.”
“Well, I’m freelance.” I’m floundering.
“What magazine is this going into then?”
He’s waiting for me to say the Seattle Weekly. Or City Arts. Or the Stranger. And although the signature on my emails says Seattle Stranger, Contributor, as their unpaid intern all I’ve contributed is my general alphabetizing skills and willingness to learn basic java-script for a letter of recommendation. I. Am. A. Whore.
“Well, I don’t know yet.”
He eyes me suspiciously. Now he’s noticing I didn’t ride my bike here. My shoes are new. I shaved (or at least trimmed) this morning.
“We’ll have to sit by a window. I don’t have a lock,” he says.
We have a haulting conversation since he’s taking advantage of my offer to buy him a beer for a chat and I’m trying to forget how much I really can’t afford this. Everything just seems punctuated. Even our waitress, a beautiful neo-hippy with flowing locks and a sundress seems to pick up on the awkwardness and darts in and out as quickly as possible while Matt wants to hold her for another drink order. I want to talk about what he feels about the bogarting of his style by privileged white kids. I want to talk about the institutionalization of rebellion, the commodification of a now-gentrified dirt bag movement. He wants to talk about where he gets fucked up and works on his bike, how he was too stoned to finish college. There’s a good angle there, a profile, I know. But I’m left with a $37 bill and a waitress who expects a big tip. All tipsy, I wander back to my car and as I listen to NPR waiting to sober up, I think “I should’ve rode my bike.”
Illustration by: Hannah Spry
Seattle used to be a thistle patch. One big thorn bush that tore up steep foothills that made it so impossible to develop from inland, they had to go at it from the sea one layer of trees at a time. They built roads parallel to the Puget Sound then, brick by brick, perpendicular, up the mountains. Huge, hulking roads to accommodate for the massive logging equipment that probably looked like 19th century Transformers with clubbed feet and cleft pallets.
