Friday, January 4, 2013

Seatac

My credit card expired a few days before, I spent the last of my cash to get some film processed into prints, and I had a few hundred dollars in my bank account, total. I hadn't even taken the bus back from the developer because I didn't have enough change to take two buses that evening and I had to be at Seatac by 8. 

I had been thinking as I walked back to Wallingford that maybe I shouldn't spend so much money during the next month. But what exactly did I spend money on? Mainly rent, groceries, and bus fare. I couldn't really cut that stuff out. So the three remaining items which made the dollars in my wallet flutter hastily away were film, coffee, and books. I got a windfall of books from a roommate, so with a little will power, and a well-used library card should be able to avoid any more literary expenditure till February, maybe even March.

Then there's coffee. I like the good stuff. If I just enjoyed drip I could make it at home, but I like a latte, just one, just a little one, 8 oz, single shot, whole milk, with a well-poured leaf. I won't go just anywhere, either. I've got standards, and there are few places that have met the measure of what I like. I don't just mean flavor, but presentation. Whoever is whipping up that drink, well it doesn't hurt if they've got nice eyes and good skin. I think it's perfectly justifiable to prefer one coffeeshop over another based solely on how ogle-able you find the waitstaff. And I probably spend, over the course of a year, something around 7, 8 hundred dollars on fancy, frou-frou drinks. I could just stay home and have drip, if I liked drip, or just drink more tea. I like tea. I have about a half-gallon of it a day. There's only so much caffeine the brain can take. But this petty luxury, why not keep it? What great adventurous joy can I even afford? Why not keep this modest extravagance, this $4 peep show?

There's the barista at Zoka who has impeccably nice teeth and fastidiously shaped eyebrows. The upside-down peace sign tattoo on the neck is a bit much, but the neck itself is exquisite. Svelte, muscular, slightly translucent. Maybe that's why the tattoo, to draw attention or else uglify that natural bit of beauty and consequently make it more attractive. The way some men feel about legs and mini-skirts, well, that's how I feel about necks and low collars.

Then there's the crew at the Ugly Mug, every one of which could be a model for a shampoo commercial. Long, ebony tresses or sculpted locks and blemishless skin. The baristas at Miro, who also have quite smooth skin, perhaps because Miro is a tea house and they take in less saturated fat. And Trabant, which has a staff which is professional, mature, and hirsute. Trabant is the only coffee place I go to because I like their drinks.

And the atmosphere of ideas, everyone ticking away at their private chunk of rough granite, hoping to make that soaring draft, that shining poem, that transcendent song, that excellent translation of the sutras. This company of toiling artists. That's the good stuff. I would hate to give that up.

But...film. Yes, I could cut back. It costs about $45 to buy film, get it processed, scanned, and printed. I could just not buy any of that stuff, but that seems crass. I can't imagine Michelangelo saying to his admirers, 'sorry fellas, no more painting. It's gotten rather pricey,' or Shakespeare telling his patrons 'the new folios will have to wait. I don't feel like buying any more ink.'

I walked past the friend I have who sells the street papers. I write friend, but she is, of course, a friend of a friend, and even that position may be tenuous, to judge from the response I received when I mentioned to our circle that I had seen her selling the Real Change.

"Oh, her, yes she's been down on her luck. It's a bad situation and that's really all I can say about it."

"Drugs?"

"Yes, but that's nothing new. I don't really know what's happened to her. It's been more than a year since I've seen her anywhere besides outside the QFC."

A friend twice removed, perhaps. I friend to the second degree, or third. A facebook friend. She waved at me and greeted me by name as I came up.

"I haven't read this one," I said. It was a new edition, printed the day before.

"It's got a good story on Ari Shapiro," she said.

"The White House correspondent for NPR, right?"

"Yeah, that's right. It's a really good interview. He's seen some stuff."

I pulled out a dollar for the issue while we bantered. I could barely afford to keep my head above water, and here I was giving money away. But there are limits to thrift.

As I got on the bus for the airport, the city became suddenly, startlingly distant. The skyline just a paper cutout, the windows lit but uninhabited, the cookiecutter, paint-by-number shops all closed. Everything so sweepingly monotonized, so completely shorn of individuality to a conglomerate shopping mall, a rambling Ikea, a colossal Starbucks. I remember Boston looking just that way when I left it, like it had turned its back. Do all cities swiftly turn so mundanely hostile just before you're about to leave?

Stow the bag, line up for security, take off the shoes, adjust the time, turn off the phone, put on the shoes, walk to the gate, get on board....

The flight attendant passes me a packet as I go thru the door. A snooze kit, the lettering says, "everything you need to help you doze off faster." I open it and find a pair of earplugs and a sleeping mask but no suicide pill. I jam the earplugs in and marvel how they dampen the sound of the engines and nearly block the banal familiarity of the flight attendants - enunciate the consonants, smile at the vowels - but in no way diminish the screams of the pouting infant several rows behind me. I check the package again, but no, this is it. Jet Blue does not believe in assisted death even for the comfort and convenience of its passengers.

I looked out the window as we taxied to the runway. It was snowing. Well, technically it would be classed as 'wintry mix' which is about as close as Seattle ever gets to snow. But 'wintry mixing' sounds like what the Romneys do at Aspen. What's the word for that?  Après ski? Well anyway, when i looked onto the wing i didn't see Mitt & Liz shaking cocktails with the Kennedys. So let's say it was snowing.

The screaming baby continues to register its indignation and I go thru my preflight panic, wondering how this origami crane of folded aluminum foil is going to get me to New York, and why the stewardesses always refuse to give me a drink before takeoff, and how this time I will try harder to not feel like a failure when I sleep in my childhood bed - my only New Years resolution.

I suck air hurriedly, shoddily into my lungs with the enthusiasm of a swimmer recovering from a near-drowning, trying to get myself high on something before this hermetically sealed tube foists me onto the sky.

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