Everybody to Dolores Park

There’s a quality that places I like have in common, and that is gratitude when the going is good. In Boston, I saw it in the pale, uncovered bodies that would starfish across the grass in the Boston Common and the Public Garden when the sun emerged and the temperature began its first languorous reach toward 60 degrees. It happens in Seattle too – the weather gets juuuuust good enough, and there’s suddenly a preponderance of sunbathers in Cal Anderson and kayakers in Lake Union.

San Francisco has it easier than us in the winter, I think (or it did in the very last days of it last weekend), but even if this day wasn’t remarkable, it was sure as shit seized. Look at that. When we first walked up to Dolores Park, I looked around for the stage, because I’ve never seen a park crowd like this that wasn’t summoned by some kind of music festival. But no: it was sun, and blankets, and picnics, and the joy of being a bit stoned under the sun (overheard: “Could I light my joint off your joint?”), and the very real pleasure of being in a small grassy area with a bunch of people who came there for the same reason as you.

Here’s my park plan for you, which I recommend because it worked for me. Set out into the city, aiming for burritos. Get waylaid when you pass, by happenstance, an HONEST-TO-GOD ZINE STORE. Buy the new Optic Nerve and a copy of Murder Can Be Fun, restricting yourself to that for the sake of next month’s rent. Keep on going; get in a long line for a burrito at Taqueria Pancho Villa. Be very very clear if you don’t want meat – and you probably only need a baby burrito, not a regular one. Take that and your quickly sweaty cup of horchata (or bottle of Jarritos, if you swing that way) and wander to Dolores Park.

Gasp at the crowds, and spend a long moment wondering if maybe you should find some other grassy incline to recline on in some less-popular park. Spot a shady patch under some shedding palm trees; go for it. Smile at the bold woman in the bikini and the fuchsia party hat. (Later, you’ll see her in that same getup in the portapotty line; your amusement will be replaced by concern.) Smile at the guy sitting, clad all in black in the full sun, playing the quietest accordion in the world, like he was transported from 1920s France, but his sound was left behind.* Say no thank you to the well-shod woman in the black-and-white dress who offers you brownies from her basket. (Your companion may chide you for telling the woman selling pot brownies to go away, so don’t answer too fast.) Discuss how curiously European the whole scene is, down to the unconcealed alcohol. It’s all so very civilized.

I hadn’t been to San Francisco in about three-and-a-half years; too long, and I forgot (or never fully discovered) just how much I like it there and why. For me, it has the variety and intensity of New York with the, I don’t know, West Coastiness of the West Coast. Ambition and groundedness. Or so it seemed on the Muni as I spent my time staring at people, as I always do.

That afternoon, we saw men with tiny dogs, and we saw families with children who will grow up to be weird and worthwhile. Young women in full flower having very good days that will warm them in their dotage. A woman in a stellar brown dress selling cookies (“Pot-free,” she quickly assured us) and Rice Krispy treats from a basket.** And this guy:

So far as I’m concerned, this guy is freaking Merlin. He brought his bag… of rainbow ukuleles… to Dolores Park… for all to purchase and enjoy. Canonize this man.

So go to Dolores Park. Or go to Cal Anderson Park, Volunteer Park, Central Park, Forest Park. The beach. Find a warm-enough day and go outside where the people are and remember what it is to be a person, the same way pets only know themselves when they have another animal to play off of. We are made for the sun and grass, and for being next to people we love on a grassy hill on a day with a fine breeze and a faint, persistent smell of high-quality California weed.

And always, always buy something from the woman with the basket.

*Or maybe he traded his accordion’s voice to the sea witch for legs, I dunno.

**It’s a killer business model and a pleasure to behold once, let alone twice.

Spring Break at Age 30.93

I have been looking forward to this fortnight for two months. Through class and projects and presentations and weekends and evenings full of meetings and analyzing data and ALL OF IT.*

So here we are. What am I going to do? Well, here’s what I’ve been fantasizing** about.

Reading
Reading at a tea shop
Working on my novel again
Coming home from work or dance class and just flopping on the floor and staring at the ceiling
Reading
Writing a million blog entries

It’s that last one that leads me to report this here. You’ll notice it’s been quiet lately; I don’t like it either, but I’m about to sort it out. I still have another quarter left, so it’s not likely to be the last quiet time… but I’m going to chase the echoing silence away for a while, at least.

That’s for tomorrow. For today, for you, I have promises. And also this picture of the orange peels left after some fruit experienced the Rapture next to Bobby Morris field.

*In the hours outside of my regular-person job, I mean. To be clear.

**No, seriously, this stuff has been the fodder for flights of fancy for some weeks now. Spring break is different when you’re moving into the middle part of adulthood.

Let’s Talk about This Hotel Art

In Reykjavik, I stayed at the Icelandair Reykjavik Hotel Natura. It is not conveniently located*, but it did the job, and they always had skyr in the hotel lobby fridge.**

On their site, they go on at length about art in the hotel and the room’s unique themes. The hotel art mostly succeeded in making me do double-takes as I walked through the lobby, thinking that some kind of pale angular tourist was staring at me.

My room was sky-themed. This didn’t really extend beyond the sign on the door. Instead, this was the lone piece of art in the room, hanging over the beds.

The first night I was there, I saw an exhibit of the artist’s paintings. Tragically, this was not part of the collection.

Let’s take a closer look.

Well. Get it, girl.

This painting was directly over where I slept. Let’s check that out.

I didn’t deliberately book the celibacy special, and yet. It’s like they knew I was a socially awkward person traveling alone! Good service is when a hotel is able to predict your needs before you can. So… thanks.

One last thing:

“LISA, YOU’RE TEARING ME APART!”

*”Not conveniently located” is what happens when you frantically book a package to Iceland when you’re still mired in post-Paris travel hangover. Eh, it was a 25-minute walk to downtown, and I like walking. Whatevs.

**Skyr is fairly close to Greek yogurt. The R is said in a way close to French – in the back of the mouth, beautiful and nearly impossible for me to say.

Hither and Thither #26

Beautiful, otherworldly, and just a couple of steps from a really interesting metaphor: In the ’60s, Models Floated Through Paris in Bubbles.

I might vote for a politician that ran on a Pike-No-S-Place-Market platform. It could be called the pedant party, and I would be their queen. Seattlish would back us to our heady victory.

I know lots of people who know just what they’d do if they suddenly inherited millions of dollars. I was reminded last night that my answer to this question is kind of unsatisfactory in the way of normal conversation. My go-to answers are that I would send my best friend to medical school, and I would buy my mom a bed and breakfast (or pay off her current mortgage; her choice). “Yeah, but what would you do for yourself?” my friend pressed. I paused and said, “Well, travel, of course. But I’d still want to make life work out here, even with that, same as I’m doing right now.”

Here’s the answer that’s much more fun to hear. If I suddenly became the owner of frankly ludicrous amounts of money, I would buy shit like this abandoned German theme park. I would turn it into a retreat for Instagram addicts, and I would keep it just as it is, a preserve for a weird blink of time.

Here’s a word that I am delighted to have learned recently: psychogeography. It’s a much more elegant word for what I’ve always described as navigating by landmarks (due to a complete lack of any natural sense of the cardinal directions unless there’s at least one fairly large body of water nearby). So yes, I have found my way around for my entire life via psychogeography. I am one of those.

A grand thing about the internet is that these personal ways of seeing and navigating the world start to cohere across people. Enter… the UTBAPH, short for Used to Be a Pizza Hut.

Man, how I love 99% Invisible. Them and their exploration of former Pizza Huts, Pittsburgh-specific ways of giving directions, and the curious beauty of psychogeography.

I’m fascinated lately with places that look like other places – brief blocks or alleys here that look like they could be in Europe, for instance. Or this San Francisco-y house, perfectly and delicately lit within the magic hour, looming quietly over the Ave.

One of those things that, to me, neatly demonstrates how stupid sexist shit affects all genders. Man caves, dude. MAN CAVES. God, I hate it.

My dad moved into my grandma’s house after she died in late 2012. She and my grandpa built it in 1969; they added onto it a couple of times, but largely, the layout and the decor was untouched, leaving plain some questionable choices (such as having only a single window into the main living area of the house). My dad began to look at how he might begin to tailor the place to his own life, which I thought was great. I encouraged him and made my own small suggestions, hoping they’d spark his imagination.

“And I’m thinking of turning the downstairs garage into an office, maybe,” he said. “Some sliding doors in place of the garage door, you know?”

“I think that sounds like a really nice use of the space,” I told him.

“It could be my… man cave,” he said, a surprising amount of glee spreading across his face.

In the way that one does sometimes, particularly with family, I took a breath and measured my words. “Dad,” I said, “you live by yourself. Who are you escaping from?”

The glee faltered, and I felt a fleeting stab of guilt for being, once again, the family’s Debbie Downer.

But there is no man cave in the Standard Deviation Ancestral Home today, and we are all better for it.

And finally, some listening for you. This week, NPR taught me that the slow cooker (praise be unto it) was created so that Jews could have a hot meal on the sabbath. Later, they made a story out of an idea I’ve had but never articulated: that yes, people can be good and skilled and work hard and make connections, but most art’s popularity is determined by timing and circumstances. Think of how many alternate realities you could extrapolate just from pop culture alone! It’s brilliant and marvelously unsettling.

Lost Mates in Reykjavik

Laugavegur, the busiest shopping street of Reykjavik, is full-full-full of public art. Driveways lined with murals, walls splashed with painted patterns, mosaics and painted shop walls and clever knitting and just WOW. Like I said a couple days ago: 891 pictures. Only like a hundred of those are the Northern Lights, and then another couple hundred are of mountains and geysers and Thingvellir and things like that. But a majority of them? Art of Reykjavik, which really should be a sister city to Seattle.

So the delight above was captured about halfway down Laugavegur. I took this picture my first day there, after I took a magical late-morning nap that erased any would-be jet lag. I ate a lot of so-so veggie sandwiches there*, and I was on my way to my first one, which I would eat in a coffee shop atop a gift shop that overlooked the city’s busiest square. I was hungry and still a little sleepy and wondering if I was going to get into this whole traveling by yourself thing, which I’d done almost none of before this trip.

Then I saw this adorable thing, which clearly evolved over time – maybe a single glove on that fence, and then a couple, and then a few, and then that sign, and then even more. And I realized… this was going to work out just fine.

A couple days later, I saw the rural version of this.

This is what happens when you try to find love in less populated places. This is at the edge of the parking lot in front of Sólheimajökull glacier. Your odds are just better when you go to the denser spots, good sir glove.

Or, you know, you could get the internet involved.

*But no hakarl, dammit, due to a badly timed sour belly.

Hither and Thither #25

I’m slowly making my way through all 891 (!) pictures I took in Reykjavik. Here’s an early favorite. Overall, I found the city so much more Seattlely than I expected. One way was the color palette – the houses were often the muted blues, greens, and greys you get in neighborhoods here. But then there was this one, the wasabi house. That is where I would live.

Well, one of the many places. I’ll show you more later.

I think I’m going to New York in April (whee!). Thus, I shall be clipping and saving this.

Did yesterday feel like a bit of a letdown for you? Did you find yourself turning corners and looking into the sky, waiting to see something bigger, brighter, more… apocalyptic? There are reasons for that.

Here is a magical phrase: “the universal shapes of stories, by Kurt Vonnegut.”

Excuse me, I seem to have swooned. One moment.

Ahem.

THE UNIVERSAL SHAPES OF STORIES, BY KURT VONNEGUT.

Eeeeeeee

The dream of the 90s is… aches and pains, physical adaptations to our degrading bodies, time traveling through sets of friends, and being far from the active core of people who make the world run.

It’s easy to spin your wheels. It’s a lot harder to actually DO something. Be Less Crazy explores getting ready to get ready, this strange circling state between intending and doing – and how long it can actually be.

And I’ll leave you with a little exploring. From Messy Nessy Chic, London’s secret underground veg farm and some achingly beautiful hotel luggage labels of decades past. (This last one allllllmost sent me into an eBay k-hole, but I resisted.) And from Untapped Cities, another exploration of a secret club (because New York is lousy with them). In this installment, we explore the Grolier Club, a swank off-limits space dedicated to the book arts.

Culture Lunch and the Joys of Deliberate Interruption

I read a study recently that sea mammals are a natural study aid, aiding the mind in both retention and comprehension,* so I will be liberally seeding this entry with pictures of otters to make my point clearer to you, fair reader.

Teeheehee.

There are a million, billion blog entries and screeds (and at least one zine) that advocate mixing up your life to be more aware and more effective, whatever that might mean to you. This is good advice, but without elaboration, it becomes so broad and so big that it can lose any connection to a normal person’s life. For instance, I liked this list of creative rituals to adopt yourself, but most of us (and I largely mean Americans here) don’t have the money or time to do a quarterly retreat or the flexibility during the day to nap.

I’m a fan of the small disruption. I like it because starting with something small means you’re more likely to succeed at creating a new habit, and I like that because small changes add up to larger changes. For most of us, this is the best and most effective way to point our lives in a new direction.**

Oh, you!

With that in mind, I have adopted the ritual of the Culture Lunch.

In January, I managed to do it twice; I’m aiming to bump it up to weekly. At Christmas, I asked my family for memberships to the Seattle Art Museum and the Seattle Aquarium. My family came through, and now I can go to both as much as I care to for a year. It is the BEST PRESENT.

Usually, 30-odd minutes is far from enough time to take in all the art/otters/jellyfish/OTTERS, but if you do it multiple times over a lot of months, you end up getting a pretty substantial meal in small bites. It’s easy to get into ruts, to spend your lunch in some tiny lunchroom or – god forbid – in front of a computer at your desk. But it’s harder to do that if your lunchtime regularly involves fur seals, cars speared with rods of light, and fish being thrown.

OTTER! This dude was somersaulting and scrubbing his tail as he did. OTTER BATH.

OTTER! This dude was somersaulting and scrubbing its tail as it did. OTTER BATH.

Now, I hear your rebuttal, and your rebuttal is a solid one. “My dear SD,” I hear you saying. “I don’t work in downtown Seattle, or downtown anywhere. I work in an office park from hell, or a shitty little village, or my living room. I can’t walk to artistic institutions OR a waterfront.”

Yes, I’m lucky, but there are things you can do too, I promise. The key is introducing regular change so that your idea of normal shifts.

Napping river otter SUCKLING ITS TAIL.

Just get up and go on a little burst of exploring. Try it once a week. That can mean walking to get a sandwich using a route you usually don’t take or just leaving your desk and using a tablet or a laptop to watch a half-hour of a rad foreign movie from the 50s or something (or Man vs. Wild, or whatever’s out of the ordinary for you). Dine with a friend, a new restaurant, a brown-bag lunch at a park you don’t hang out in. The point is to introduce difference on a regular basis.

Because not all of us can take a week to unplug every three months. But most of us can ditch life for 30-60 minutes once a week and have a little wander. It feeds your heart and your imagination, but it also has the wonderful of leaving you hungrier. And that’s where the larger, more insidious change creeps in.

But we’ll talk about that soon enough.

ITS TAIL. IN ITS MOUTH.

*I did no such thing. But I would happily participate in such a study and skew the results.

**Of course, you can also do the cut and run, the abrupt switch, the wholesale slaying of your old habit/life/position. I’ve done it, and it worked out well enough. But it’s not realistic or attainable for most people, I don’t think, and the nuclear option is something best kept in the pocket for most people.

Valentine’s Day in Two Pictures

Both from Pine, alongside the ballfield.

First, we have this lovely little bit of spontaneous art, created and displayed for us all to enjoy.

Baw. That’s lovely.

Further down the sidewalk, we have this masterpiece of forensic fodder.

At the top: that would be a deserted pair of women’s undies. Below: an empty bottle of Jack.

May whatever deities listen continue to bless Seattle. It is a magnificent, generous place full of wonder.

Maybe you celebrated Valentine’s Day with, as Dan Savage put it at his event at the Neptune that night, cynical jokes, box wine, and defiant masturbation. Or maybe you bought bullshit at CVS, or maybe you did something else entirely. My Valentine’s Day was unexpectedly lovely, and that was even before I went out to see this. With, I should mention, my splendid neighbor, who provided me with these pictures from his post-V-Day walk the next day. But whatever you did, I hope it was good. May your overly expensive dinners be tasty, may your masturbation be as defiant as you want it to be, and may you get what you want roughly when you want it.

Why Do We Live Here, Anyway?

Oh, yeah. That.

Pike Market. September 9, 2013.

Thither Interlude #1

I could have made myself crazy, cramming internet into my brain and pooping out the best bits into a post within a span of about three days.

I could’ve faked like nothing is going on, allowing WordPress scheduling to seamlessly bring you the usual Sunday post, made of my own tears, adrenaline, and sleep deprivation, knit into a fine cloth.

But you know what?

I am in Iceland right now, and when you read this, I may have finally, finally seen the Northern Lights.

I have wanted to see the Northern Lights for more than half my life.

I will be back to you soon, with a million pictures, with brilliant links to all sorts of internet weirdness, and with a sense of awe that’s even greater than what I carry through ordinary days.

In the meantime, I will leave you with this, Lindy West’s astonished explanation of bikini barista shacks, aimed at shocked outsiders.

A Brooklyn Blog that Sometimes Travels

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