Seattle log.

I am back in Coeur d'Alene after a wonderful weekend in Seattle.

Seattle has much to recommend itself to a visitor. Multifaceted in the characters of its neighborhoods, teeming with a kind of San-Franciscan beauty and culture. Everything is misty and rainy, which gives one the sense of freshness and cleanliness, as if the city were in a state of perpetual self-ablution; I have used this description before, but it reminds me of Thales, who thought the world was composed solely of water. This is a view more easily held in Seattle.

Daniel's neighborhood of North Queen Anne comprises narrow one-way streets wreathed in branches and vines, curving up and down steep hills, each boxed in by attractively unusual houses. Daniel & Josiah's apartment is a fine, well furnished bachelor pad. Certainly far more put together than mine. It boasts an impressive view of hills and peninsulae, traced (i.e., obstructed) by a just recently blossomed jacaranda tree.

I arrived Friday night after my 5-hour drive across the stretch of Washington state, including a blood-curdling stint through the hazy dark of Snoqualmie pass. Daniel and I had tomato soup, grilled cheese, and amber beer.

Saturday was a shopping spree. I bought a table and 4 chairs at Ikea (pictures forthcoming) and gobs of clothes from Urban Outfitters and H&M. Joking with Daniel all the way! True fun. Josiah arrived home from his trip to Japan around lunchtime, roughly just before Daniel and I had skipped back to the homestead, so there was happy story-swapping. Though, truth be told, Josiah was vacillating between a state of long-flight sedation and guitar-playing passion. Later, he and I would play a brief yet thoroughly satisfying piano-guitar duet of Bon Iver's "For Emma". I think it was "For Emma"; Bon Iver songs are hard to tell apart. We played loudly and sang heartily. Saturday evening the three of us went to dinner with Jessica, Erin, and Chelsea. I cannot tell you how nice it is to encounter pleasant girls who can sustain conversation about things beyond their present line of sight. And what's more with creativity and wit! Other Saturday highlights include: spitting contests, an intense Ingmar Bergman film that is better to remember than it was to watch, a city park with old Oil Refinery machinery scattered about.

Sunday I slept in, then took the bus downtown to find Daniel at the hotel the desk of which he mans. Getting horribly lost in a pretty city, I have found, is not something to complain about. I enjoyed walking around downtown and into Belltown, half-heartedly attempting to get my bearings. Ace Hotel, where Daniel works, is "hip" in an intermittently good way. Some of the rooms have atria where you can eat breakfast! Very cool.
After then stalking around town looking for a cool, "local" coffee shop, failing miserably due to equal portions of high standards and bad directions, I settled for a franchise of a coffee shop chain local to Seattle. I flopped down and flipped through Quine's Epistemology Naturalized. Daniel and I went to the Seattle library, throughout which the clocking noise of my dress shoes unabashedly reverberated. We went to The Old Spaghetti Factory where we glutted ourselves and proclaimed our good taste to one another. We went home to rest, exhausted.

Then, the coup de grace: that night we went to see the Ratatat show. I get why one might want to go to a concert now; it's not just about listening to good music that you like (which you can do at your computer, as I do now), it's about feeling that music intrusively vibrate in your chest, it's about dancing without reserve along with a throng of other dancing human beings, it's about smiling while you dance at those surprisingly friendly hipster boys and those super-cute hipster girls with whom you now share the bond of sincerely enjoying something together, it's about bumping and grinding (!). Such concerts in such warehouse-like venues are closed systems in which one may give free reign to a blend of Orphic and Bacchanalian impulses without impugning one's virtue. I maxed out my fun level. Great time.

By way of denouement, we went to a greasy late night burger place afterwards.

The next day I would pound a large red bull and drive home, daydreaming the whole way.