I grew up watching PBS, the RED GREEN SHOW. Those silly Canadians. Living in the woods. Having a lodge. Fixing everything with Duct Tape. Make it quack, make that tape quack. Fix a car with it. Fix a marriage with it. Fix your taxes with it. And then go ice fishin.
I grew up in Seattle, see. That place is an oddity. I call it the city of rain-pain. I call it the city of a thousand suicidal ideations. They float in the wind, like the fog, they descend. They impregnate minds at random. An otherwise ordinary person might get up, leave their desk at work one day, grab their jacket and umbrella, drive to the Aurora Ave / 99 Bridge, or maybe the U District Bridge, and just jump off the side.
Splash, landing into Lake Union. Into the Puget sound. Onto the pavement, brains splattering the side walk. It’s like life in Seattle is black and white, greyscale. And those pink brains, that gray matter, along with chipped pieces of white skull bone like porcelain, they give the bland streets color. That’s the only color you’ll find in Seattle.
Splattered brains on sidewalks.
Also, the bright neon orange of King County Corrections jumpsuits. It’s a bad place to be, black. It’s a bad place to be, full stop.
Even rappers in Seattle talk about being this close to dying, about holding on just a little longer in their songs. Here, look:
“All the drugs I’ve abused and I’m still not amused //
put a bullet in a muse and refused all they views //
got a chip on my shoulder // and something to prove //
life’s a b—ch, I’m a loner // with nothing to lose”
-Nacho Picasso
See? Hanif once told me that no one makes their best work when they feel like dying. Life in Seattle is all about navigating how not to die. Not of natural causes. But of self-inflicted causes. I don’t know how anyone can be happy in that place. Forget happiness. I don’t understand how anyone can be in that place, full stop. That’s period. That’s end of sentence.
Life in Seattle is like being indented.