Day 14

“Whoa, guess I gotta drain the lizard!” one of the bachelor says. This, from the house of the dead herb garden featured in yesterday’s photos.

“Ken Griffey’s gonna be at Safeco field this weekend buddy, and get this. I gotta be at a freakin’ wedding. Christ!” Swidler says. This, through the bathroom door, said to above bachelor while he pees.

It’s been an educating and endearing tour of duty in Seattle: An afternoon with a friend who’s in the midst of studying for th bar exam, a night with a NC friend who recently moved out here to make it on her own as an artisan jeweler, and two nights in the bachelor pad on Winona Street THEIR BLOG living it up city-style and laughing so hard my teeth could fall out.

This morning, while all my friends went to work, I trapsed around the Green Lake and Fremont neighborhoods and found the highly recommended Herkimer coffeehouse. For $1.75 (the cost of a hot black tea) I could set up camp for upwards of three hours to do homework and have access to free wi-fi. Later, I walked to a co-op, then napped in the rare but pristine Seattle sun in the backyard of the bachelor pad. Appropriately, the grass was tall and un-mowed, an abandoned fooseball table lay disheveled under the car port, and chunks of charred tinfoil settled in concert around the rickety gas grill. I laughed and slept, and smiled at passersby who seemed amused by my lazy-bear attitude on a Tuesday, no less, in the middle of a work day.

Nighttime is easy. Having a visitor is grounds for celebration and the fact that I live in a dry county back in NC is further grounds. We celebrate by having cold beers on tap from various bars in various burroughs throughout the city. Friends meet up with us, we find dinner out, have another beer, find another bar. There is no drunkenness involved, since the whole ordeal takes about five hours. But we talk loudly and laugh hard. We interrupt each other and make politically insensitive jokes, ogle men and women, make obscene comments to one another about various aspects of city life, and in general just have a good time. I forget, sometimes, that this is what millions of single twenty-somethings do on a regular basis. I don’t need it, but right now it’s a blast and an anomaly; almost something to study if it weren’t for the fact that I’m having such a damn good time in the moment.

And finally, at the night’s end and back at the bachelor pad, I find relative quiet. It’s loud as sin compared to the quiet of Fork Mountain but after a night out, there is odd piece in the stained white walls, the shuffled shag carpet, the hiss-blur of headlights panning through the linen curtains. I guess they call this adjustment. Took me long enough!

Tomorrow, onward by train back to Portland, an overnight in Milwaukie with family friends (where there may not be internet access, so forgive), then Thursday the residency begins.

Today’s picture!