head pulled from ass

the poetry of razor wire!

a random wall in ballard.

i was in illustrious thurston county a few days ago. it is a berg of nasty memories i am trying to reclaim as pleasant present-day moments. stomping through melting snow at defunct-olympia-brewery-#2 is one such way.

the original brewery, circa 1898, is far more badass, but there was still about a foot of snow on that drive, and my feeble lower-48 car balked.
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my hood.

fremont. in one of the stores i saw a magnet that had a '50s woman beamingly cradling two cocker spaniel puppies. "they're small and soft, just like my ex!" i laughed loudly in the middle of the quiet shop. and left. without buying anything. to take this picture.

you know what this is.

heavy rainier parking lot.

my issues with life, seattle, etc, have been directly addressed. it isn't seattle. when i was asked "so if you met someone in anchorage and they said, 'let's move to seattle', what would you say?" and i immediately replied "yay! i love seattle! let me show you cool shit!" i realized where my brain was. and today, god DAMN. today was like an abusive lover whispering "i love you, baby. let's never fight again." today was gorgeous and great.
seattle is a fucking temptress. no, let me rephrase that: seattle is a brooding mecurial bitch, but when she smiles at you, you feel like the only lovestruck fool in the room.

blankness

it's been a rough winter.
downtown, raining sideways. more hipstamatic uncropped mishaps. i like this one, though i would have framed it much more effectively if i had control.

i am vehemently anti-photoshop, so what you see is what i took.
tonight, lower queen anne. note the man with the blanket. he yelled halfway down the block if i had any change. i almost yelled back "i had to pay with my drinks with a debit card and i'm using an expired transfer", but instead i said "no, sorry" and smiled politely. he promptly turned away. i was no longer useful.

the route 8.

entropy-pants. i didn't plan the nose-shading to turn out as it did.

i can't see the trees for the forest. that's my problem.

snow in seattle

it's kind of a big deal.
snow in washington is not like snow in anchorage, where i had been 24 hrs previously. snow here falls on obscene hills; it is wet and dense and covered with instant skins of ice; there are no plows or sanders or salt to deal with it; very few people have studs or 4WD or, at least in my case, an ice scraper.
nevertheless, i'm embarassed: by my regional inexpertise despite many years of driving in alaskan winters; by my wimpy lower-48 car; by having to call in to work yesterday because i couldn't move my car out of its parking spot, much less to and from north seattle. i felt like quite the moron.
my lair, yesterday morning.

sledders at 1st and stewart.

broadway, today. note the utter lack of plowing. the snow, by this afternoon, was that mushy exhausting consistency. now it's powdery with a satisfyingly crunchy crust. snow brulee.

my neighborhood this evening.

gruel simmering at the lair. potatoes, basmati rice, 2 boullion cubes, a shit-ton of curry powder, a bunch of garam masala, a bunch of cumin. it needs salt upon devouring but otherwise... it satisfies in a sad way.
when i was ultra-poor, i lived on instant oatmeal topped with dried oregano for months. add salt and cayenne and, if yer feeling extra-saucy, dried minced onion, and DAMN: savory cold-weather victuals. try it!

the street right now.

the filtered lair, just now.

i feel like i'm showing a new toy to a dog. "isn't this FUN?" when it's really not all that interesting. i'm stir-crazy and jangly. my mind is focused on other things.

anchorage, part 2

let us begin with the 'money shot': westchester lagoon, -5F, magical ice fogginess.

point woronzof, around 5pm. i was arrested here once. i was 17 and out past curfew with an open bottle of harvey's bristol cream sherry. that was the first time my mother met my future ex-husband #1 (a classy sentence to type, i might add); the cop called her at 130am and made her pick us up. b sat stupidly in the back seat of her plymouth colt vista. "this isn't a very good first impression, is it?" he said. hooooo boy! good times. every fucking inch of anchorage has an anecdote attached to it.

i used to live two blocks away from this street (W 32nd?). actually, i lived two blocks away from it twice: once in a complete rathole bates-motel-esque apartment with pink bathroom fixtures and no hot water, and once in a fourplex with lavender bathroom fixtures that was across the hall from a convicted sex offender.
the ravens were having an eerie hootenany, which is why i took this. ravens are FUCKING AWESOME.

a typical street in beautiful spenard. note the hulking trucks, alaskan flag a-flap, and beautiful chugach mountains.

turnagain arm through the car window. i like the blur. sunshine that bright gives everything an air of gorgeous brutality.

i never went to gwennie's much when i lived in AK; it has a cheesy mediocrity about it, and the interior lights are unflattering as fuck. and most people know my story about THAT place... but it was near, and i could walk there in subzero temperatures whilst listening to firewater on my headphones, and i got to seat myself next to a beaver.
oh, grow up.

being back in seattle is lonely and sad.

anchorage!

there will be many many more photos to follow.
this morning we chased the light. the mountains are the same. i love this place... keep having the thought "everything's right where i left it." instead of evoking sensations of suffocation and clausterphobia, it just feels good.

me and my oldest bestest friend, both of us grimy and freezing our asses off at elderberry park...

i don't feel like a tourist here.

my seattle

january 6 2012: reverse filter in the lair.

january 8 2012: lottie's.

january 9 2012: the splendors of rainier ave.

the coolest thing about this neighborhood: nearly everyone i pass on the sidewalk makes eye contact and smiles. basic human decency is such a novelty.

yesterday rained like hell.
this is my lair through the windsheild.

cliche of cliches: i go to cemeteries when i need to think extra-hard, or when i'm feeling self-indulgently morose. i like cemeteries; they're usually quite quiet and pretty. i always feel like a fucking interloper when i'm at them, guilty for not yet knowing enough dead people who don't believe in cremation, and therefore not visiting anyone specific- like i'm only at a soiree for the free snacks. i like the one on top of queen anne; it has entire sections devoted to different cultures, and crumbly imposing headstones, and once i was there (i was sitting on a bench by myself doing sudoku, don't fucking judge me) and a westie ran towards me, full-tilt, across the entire grounds, stopped about twenty feet away, and then ran in the opposite direction. no humans were around. it was weird.
cemeteries also have copious crows. ever noticed?
evergreen-washilli (?) on aurora, 4 january 2012.

i like the sodden griminess of the first filter, but sometimes you have to snazz things up a bit.

if my wishes aren't granted and i end up rotting in the dirt somewhere, i hope some sulky dork comes by sometime and takes a picture of my burial grounds and uses a cool filter.
a dignified sedan drove through at that point, and i was drenched with rain, so i sedately left.
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5 january 2012: inside a (long-term vacant) warehouse in ballard. i stood on a chunk of wobbly cement in an alley and leaned against the building to take this. i love the light.

shilshole way.

snazzified!

10 years later, i still feel like a fucking tourist in this town.

january 1-3, 2012

i decided to document my photographs in a more permanent place. i take more pictures than i write, and images seem to provoke more detailed memories....
i take photos every day. lots of photos. often they are of mundane things, because i enjoy mundane things. i enjoy the tweakage and surreality of mundane things caught in time.
enough frippery. talking about what you do and why you do it is insufferable and pretentious as fuck.
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1 january 2012. this is horribly aligned. i'm still trying to figure out the goddamn hipstamatic framing.

side story: years ago, i had an idea of doing a photo project about what people have in their refrigerators and cabinets. it would be a series of spontaneous, unprettied views of how people actually live, and everybody eats, so there'd be something in the images that we could all relate to. and it's interesting to see how labels change, and people's selections of condiments, if they have leftovers or earnestly leafy produce or piles of crap... alongside the photos would be brief synapses of the people who lived there- age, gender, race, profession, income. i thought it would be a sociological revelation, because i was about twenty at the time and thought everything i thought was fucking brilliant and novel. but i never did it, and other people since have produced very similar tomes, but much more attractively and skillfully. ah, youth.
it is that story that i always think of when i take pointless pictures like this.
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2 january 2012: fucking with filters.



3 january 2012: spectacular renton washington.

buildings like this were once new. somebody thought this squat, vile structure would be the absolute best thing to occupy this space. it probably supplanted something else that had been there for years. the asbestos ceiling was bright with promise, the industrial carpet unscathed. now it's vacant, forgotten, useless. fascinating.
i used to know someone who grew up in renton, forty years ago. one day we were driving down rainier. "i was born there" they told me, pointing to their right. "you were born in a parking lot?" i said stupidly. "no. that's where the hospital used to be." it's a mclendon's hardware now.
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thanks for reading. welcome to my new diary.