10ccs of Kona, tall and wet, with legs. Stat!
Where has the last week gone, other than into the belly of a machine? Every six months or so, it seems as if I nudge the wrong lever or push the wrong button and the rubber band twangs and the duct tape comes lose from the corner and the blind rolls up with a cadenced flapping and the white stuffing beans come pouring out. And then it depends. Sometimes it's an evening if I'm lucky and can manage to wind the thread back on the spool and recapture the ferret. Other times I'm out for three or four days, doing nothing but installing software, reconfiguring, and cursing.
This time it was a wobbling domino that caused my drive letter to change, bringing the whole flimsy Microsoft stack of cards down onto the flooring. These moments are logged in my brain as, "You know, the time that I deleted my boot magic configuration file" or "You know, the time that the service pack destroyed my registry" or "You know, the first time I installed the .NET Framework Beta" or this time, "You know, the time that I tried to get more space and ended up changing my drive letter". And that's geekier than I ever want or wanted to be about it, but through it all I've had to be able to talk like this just to understand what in the hell happened, let alone try to fix it. There is no help to be found in the market, no phone call possible. You survive by whatever you pick up in the street and along the way. You become the expert because if you don't, you might as well go back to the abacus. Nobody else is going to be able to save you, chief. You are on your own.
It's always stressful on me and it brings about large quantities of thinking. I mean, what else is there to do as you watch installation progress gauges climb to 100 percent while your life is breathed away?. This time, I realized that I'm developing a deeper relationship with the Cinemark film creature than I am likely to with any human female in the near future. You know the film creature, that little entity made from film strips that gallivants across the screen before the previews and the main feature at Cinemark theatres? No? Well, you are missing one of the finest natural comedians of our time, friend, and quite the hottie.
But none of that is the issue here. This is really about living in Seattle. Because that's what I've been thinking about, namely how much I love it. I've only realized just recently how different west coast living is compared to living anywhere else in the country, and how different northwest living is from living anywhere on the west coast. Those levels of difference were things that I think I'd tried to ignore or were just ignorant of in my first two years here, but now that year three is coming to a close and another deep Seattle winter is approaching, I'm really seeing it all clearly.
And it's not something easily articulated, but something that has to be lived in for a while, like an old shirt. Because Seattle settles into you and the people settle into it. They sink into their clothes and their knees get flexible and their shins get lower. The bruise colors emerge from the closet like a stain of ink on linen, beating back the weaker hues. The summers are clear and hot and dry, the winters are dark and wet and enclosed, and in-between is this overcast mist, a mist that no umbrella dents and no sense of planning can affect. The mountains rise in all directions and the smell of salt sea is ever-present, the calls of seagulls, the path of pelicans, and the low tones of barge ships and bridge captains.
It requires something different than Midwestern gee-goshabilly or even Californian granola. This is a city whose pier area was once booming with startup internet businesses. Little wide-eyed programmers played old-style arcade games and foosball in garage studios with wide, tall windows while their stock rose and the money flowed. Gone now in a flash, a ghost town of still-broken windows, shifting into something new. This is a city that endures weeks of non-stop winter rain and darkness before 4pm. This is a city that was built on mud, fell into the swamp, was built again, burned down, and was built again. I don't even know where to start to describe what it requires, but maybe it's a holistic sense of "Feh, nothing to be done for it. Might as well make the best of it. Where is my chicken suit?"
And to me, it explains coffee, which is what I'm really getting at. Forget all that other stuff. Rainy winters = Coffee. Comfortable clothes = Coffee. Trying to work out what you just saw on the street = Coffee. I don't think it's really a cultural thing at all. I think it's so ingrained into the experience, matches the environment and the mood of life here, that it's almost impossible not to drink it. It has become a comfort, a constant stability, a lingering smell around corners that reminds you where your feet are.
As proof of that, a quick story. I was out with a friend of mine when she received a voice message about an emergency at home. Turns out that her daughter had cut her finger, that it looked serious at first, but ended up not requiring emergency care. He response? "Oh my god. Are you okay? Do you want me to get coffee on my way home?"
