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Thursday
September 20, 2007

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today was pretty ridiculous. at times it seems the whole world is scrabbling for pennies dropping out of some rich dick's asshole and that's how i felt trying to reconcile my ebay and paypal accounts with defunct emails killed by spam all so i could process a payment for $5.24 (plus 9 s&h) from Yossi in israel who won the dutch pressing of an american expatriate's jackoff noodling from 1984 i picked up at an amsterdam fleamarket last year. fuck it, i wanted to say, but ebay is about honor and i've got a 100% positive rating to preserve.

eventually i got myself out of that (payment still lost in limbo but fuck it) and got down to business. made 50 posters for carfree day. though we're not living it large as we did in 2001 and 2002, i still felt compelled to do something, so i made a new design and emailed it down the street to ups. when i got there, the workers were laughing until they saw me walk in. then they got all serious and realized someone hadn't done their job. alan passed the buck like the pro he is: "steve told me he'd print it..." so i said, "i'll be back in 15 minutes" and went across the street to asteroid cafe where a little piece of paper was taped to the moretti pilsner tap handle, temporarily replaced by mac-n-jack's and i wonder if they'll clean the pipes thoroughly before changing it back. i had a beer and listened to the waitress bitch to the cook's help. after my glass stood empty for some minutes i had enough of that shit and split.

it really seems that the usa has gotten to that who-gives-a-fuck? stage--collapsing bridges, fascist regime, half-assing everything is the new way. maybe it has to do with the canadian dollar and us dollar being equal for the first time since 1976.

but whatever, i'm not one to complain.

actually, i had a great day (once i exchanged my existential angst and nausea for some simple action).

i picked up my copies and got on the 28 bus. changed at 3rd and pike to the 10, where a woman across the aisle from me made eye contact so i closed my eyes and kept repeating a few new lines: "sons and daughters of privilege / brainwashed at the best colleges / rise up the ranks and have some kids / just as their parents did"

got off between 14th and 15th, buzzed at a new condo's keypad, it was pre-arranged. bald and gray with a boxload of  freecycle homerecorded vhs tapes met me at the door, he rooted through looking for the inning of a mariners' game he called, "[so-and-so] hit a grand slam!" "how'd you get that opportunity?" i asked, but he just went on, lost in a reverie: "[blank] and [blank] both [did something]..." it was as if he hadn't heard my question. i stuffed the tapes in my bag and went on my way, leaving him with the empty box and a sense of loss for the lost tape.

but really, after that things started looking up. the second poster i put up a guy across the way said it was nice and apologized for being in his car. he was going to some bikeworks thing on saturday and wondered if they were connected. "probably just a coincidence," i replied, standing in the road near the double yellow line.

i walked on and on, meeting a guy who was pissed off because it wasn't as early as he thought it should be. "7 already?!?" it was by the hospital, he was dressed in doctor's scrubs. well, it was nice of him to be taking the bus, although i wondered if he'd just sneaked out, a patient in disguise. how many doctors are impostors, after all?

the walk was long and concrete is hard--it's the worst thing to walk on, which is why that's what sidewalks are made of.

anyway, i pressed on. postering was put temporaliy on hold because downtown is all steel poles. there was a huge line of people holding white plastic bags where some sort of food giveaway was going on. a parking lot attendant across the street looked on them with contempt, a good patriot.

the area near the sports stadia was a wasteland, of course, huge parking garage and naming rights writ large red in the night--SAFECO. i passed the metro bus barn, where the fleet gets cleaned and tightened for another day of running half-empty.

i popped into a thrift store in the hopes of finding 45s. a man was making everyone nervous, well-dressed but acting completely crazy, he was fawning and gushing over a table strewn with monster masks and other halloween tchochkes. "i love purple thing-ma-jigs," he said, "this monster mask makes me glad..." was it basic schizophrenia or an audacious parody of consumer behavior? i'll never know; i left as soon as i found they didn't have any 7-inches.

my destination was western bridge, a private non-commercial art gallery owned by the scion of an oil family. my financial advice is this: make your money the old-fashioned way--inherit it. lots of money with a little creativity can go a long way, especially when most lots-of-money is guarded in the most banal ways. too bad the area around the building looked like a used car lot, as if there were no other way of getting there (it only took 90 minutes of pounding brutal pavement for me to get there from capitol hill--why should i have been the only one to suffer for their art?).

but the long haul was worth it--western bridge has the best food and booze deal of any art in town. the building is neat and there are always some ringers, in this case Dan Webb's amazing photo-and-sawdust document.

i chanced into eric there. we hovered around the buffet, then it was time to go because he was dj'ing at re-bar, davey schmitt's Harsh, a combination of techno and noise flavors. one guy was dressed as a bee and made screechy sound with a laptop, but eric and i both agreed to really get texture you need to work an analog source.

a young redhead in a meth-fest t-shirt kept misplacing his cd wallet and kept looking through other people's stuff after he'd found and then re-lost it. after annoying everyone in the place (which didn't take long, really), he finally found it again, donned some black gloves and a terrorist mask, and then bumped eric off the decks, which was almost enough to set me swinging except his set was so pathetic we just felt bad for him and left.

eric dropped me off at 46th and fremont where i went to gas station for a nightcap can of foster's and a little more postering. on the way i saw Science through her window trying to master lionel richie's hello on acoustic guitar so i asked to be let in cz i had to piss. we got to talking about the inquest i juried on in december--it was remarkable how little i could remember except this: the whole thing was rigged.