Obey Your Thirst

I walked down the hill and towards the freeway this morning as the light was still a rumbling and pale blue in the East. The city was still draped in shadows, but they were growing softer, seemingly lit from within by a jittering of energy, the shaking of a new day unfolding itself.

I walked by an old brick building being torn down. The building had once had an age faded advertisement for Sprite painted right onto its bricks. Something about that just defines the Seattle that I knew from my youth, brick buildings with ads applied directly to the building materials. That Sprite advertisement always made me grin in a wistful sort of way when I walked past it, it sort of hurt seeing it so violently ripped away. It was as if a bandage were being pulled away complete with the skin beneath.

But as the demolition continued, and you could see actual rooms of the building, old apartments, torn in half and exposed to the morning sky, it actually made my head hurt a little bit. I was seeing rooms that were once filled with people and lives in a way that I should not be seeing them; naked and dying. I imagined some condo developer masturbating furiously over the rubble.

But as I averted my eyes to pass the demolition site, and walked across the northbound lanes of I5, I happened to glance up at the courthouse that sits squarely, that sits like a lesson in geometry, right by the side of the freeway. What had caught my eye, where my eye would tend to skirt past this monument to gray squares, was a high intensity flashlight beam shining in one of the darkened upper windows. The beam swung around a couple of times and then went dark.

I thought of Nixon. Well, honestly I thought of a sniper going for targets on the freeway, because apparently that’s where my mind goes first. When logic jumped in and pointed out that a courthouse would be a tough place for a sniper to set up shop, I moved on to Nixon and Watergate. And for just a moment I got a taste of seventies paranoia.

And it tasted like grainy and oversaturated film stock. It tasted like the works of early Scorsese, of Friedkin and Lumet.

I started to think that I had heard a lot about the ol’ seventies paranoia, and while it was probably justified what with the well documented actions of those in power, it was probably most certainly fueled by the drug of choice at the time. Coke can apparently turn your world all shades of grainy and oversaturated.

Then I started to think about how the drugs in fashion shape the age, about how all the Jerry Springer bullshit out there can probably be traced back to meth in some way. Then I got to thinking about how sad this train of thought was, how those rails weren’t gonna lead anywhere good.

I tried harder to focus on the somewhat dark Puget Sound coming awake, tried to imagine the mystery person with the flashlight making shadow animals.


Song Stuck Inside My Head Right Now: “Non Alignment Pact” by Pere Ubu.