Seattle - Meine Liebling

Our trip was blessed from the get go;
our mandala perfect and unspoken.

A fifth of whiskers and a half pack of smokes - Wyatt Riot and I post up at the end of town. I hold the sign and Wyatt, who is a tall Pisces/Aries cusp, looking something like a young Thurston Moore, heart of gold still knows how to talk shit and have a good time and turned out to be the greatest hitch companion I've ever tempted the fates with...well, Wyatt flew the thumb. First ride is the unheard-of beautiful chic picking up two strange hitch-hikers in a creep town. A smiling freckled sunbeam on vacation from Montana rides us out about fifteen miles. Sip some whisk and disreguard some guys admonishion about $250 fine for hitchin in WA and yadda yadda yadda...

Debbie picks us up in a beat old pickup and a twelve year old kid stoned in the passanger seat. We cram in there, all four of us; Debbie fresh outta jail for a week after attacking her boyfriends pickup with a pick-axe for sleeping with "some junkie slut" and now playing a tambarine, theres three on the dashboard, to disco hits on the radio and track marks on her left arm. Man, she was crazy! Shes moving to Port Townsend to "get away from drugs", which haunt her everywhere and always so we got stoned breezin outta Sequim on ole 101, she pops a Zima and we sip some whiskers and warm Bud.

Lights, flashing, at us.

Pulled over, the trooper informs Debbie that her registration is expired, the headlights dont work, we arent wearing seatbelts, and the truck is registered to someone that Debbie has never heard of. Ok. A potentially volatile situation, he lets her off with three warnings and we all sigh and keep drinking the beer half-spilt under the seat. Deb wanted to hook me up with her 20-some year old daughter, size 2, burnette, who is NOT looking for any sort of commitment. If shes anything like her mother...well, forget about it! Things got kinda dreary when she began lamenting her lack of a sex life lately when after all she was probly a true knock-out twenty years ago. Ho ho, the reaper will have us all, and thats a fack.

Some dead time in Discovery Bay where Deb lets us off...Wyatt demonstrates some roadside sorcery as the sunsets beautifully by invoking the "Gas $$" tag on our Seattle cardboard sign and the first car to pass pulls over and rides us right on in to Bremerton half an hour before the last ferry of the night sets sail. We pud around the bar there, scandalous so-cal type girls of Bremerton everywhere looking bored and plastic and desperate for some Navy lovin. We cut out and drink some whiskers on the ferry under summer stars talkin loud and fast and loving loving loving life.

Seattle looms across the sound in a glorious somnolent glow, Fritz Lang vision of the future with Metropolis skyway cutting cross her and us tickled pink at the sight. Wyatt's friend Andy picks us up at the ferry and we hit the Knarr, a sweet little bar in the U-district where we compounded our inebriation and played shuffleboard until close. Zip line at the park for a while then go to do some geocaching but then forget to go geocashing, and back to Andy's pad where we drink and talk and smoke well into a new sunny Seattle summer morning.

The next day is HOT and we are sick as dogs. Trudging up Market with an anvil on our skulls, we grab a bite and spend the better part of the day walking off the hangover. We whispered&wondered over the beautiful girls of Seattle, who breezed on down Broadway in sunny summer skirts & pursed lips & buggy shades, smiling for us & for summer & for their life in the city buzzing by always. In a park on Capitol Hill that sensation hits and I rememeber that everything you will ever experience will be felt in a dream before it happens, of course! Downtown we run into Dana, who is drinking on the patio of a bar with a few strippers...always with a few strippers and in fact met him through a stripper that Mikey and I met somehow at Deja Vu last summer. We exchange a few merry words and cut out, by god! Sonic Youth was playing!

The Moore is an old theatre downtown the looks on the inside exactly like the Wilshire theatre in LA. The opening band is Awesome Poet, the singer convulsing and clawing at the air, really feeling it, with quintessential funny-face drummer and hair blowing in the wind guitarist. All sounding something like Television and Iggy Pop, so fine. Ah, and then the show!
Sonic Youth hits it and, man...
WE WERE THERE!
Like, best seats in the house, there.
Like, zen perfect daydream, there.
Like, Crowley & his True Will, there.
Like, there's not even a word for it because words ain't shit man, THERE!

Deja Vu visions of every life ever lived and every pure undiluted emotion ever felt and the silence of NOISE!
No line drawn between band and audience...we were all the audience and the band and all just experiencing this THING together, all had to be there or it would have been different, something else.

So after the purest thing I've ever experienced, we pull our heads back from the sugar clouds with still a sucrose frosting on our lips and stroll up to Capitol hill a have a few with a friend of Wyatts, then back to Andys to craaaaaash.

Next day catch the ferry out to Bainbridge Island under a sweet summer sun and throw up the thumbs on 305. In no time a few girls that Wyatt was noticing on the ferry pick us up with their mother driving. They're heading to Paulsbo for a peace conference where you sing old union worker songs for a weekend and eat quinoa. Sweet girls on summer from school in New York, they give us wheat germ cookies and all smiles and waves as we get out at the intersection for hiway 3. Soon enough dude on a skate park tour picks us up and drops us out in Discovery Bay at the Port Townsend intersection. Then we get a sweet ride.

Ok, so, one of the best things about hitchhiking, besides the fact that you go wherever you please for free, besides throwing yrself at the fates and coming out on top everytime (knock on wood), besides feeling great in the uncertainty of it all, besides all that...one of the best things about hitchhiking is meeting people who tell you about their sweet fucking lives!
We hop into Coreys old roaring Jaguar; he's in a tank top and camo pants, a single sea shell on a necklace, fifty-some year old grey hair. Well, Corey is the Cous of a small island in Micronesia. Whats a Cous? Well, golly gee, it's some well respected title that you get (everyone has a title there) for being real fuckin swell. Not long ago, Corey was a fishing guide. On a trip to this island for a wealthier client, he gets into a bar room brawl, somehow, knocks out a dude thats trying to smash a barstool over a girls head, and then gets the shit kicked out of him. No big deal. But wait! That girl was the Cheifs daughter, and she was so greatful she fell in love immediately and they got married and had a beautiful daughter which Corey is now showing us in a photograph as we buzz up 101. Fuckin eh, man! So he lives on the island for half the year, and landscapes is Sequim for the other half...summer year round! Ole Corey really instilled some faith in my sense of the best intentions of the universe when you give it a chance and listen to that gut boy and heed those sparks of spontaniety! Rock on man, thanks for that one dude.

Puddin across Port Angeles as the sun sets, we make the end of town around 10 and get a little bit wonderin if we will make it back to the Duc tonight. The longest wait of the trip...we seemed to have lost some inertia somewhere around Frugals where we chilled out for a second to drink rum and eat burgers. So we whoop up a Gas $$ sign and stand under a street light where gun fire rings out from the trailer park next door and waaaait. A truck pulls over and it's a redneck with a dash of frosting on his cheek. Boy, I tell you, that redneck was beautful, what with saving our hydes like he's just done here. He was a sewer worker.
"But the pay is good. Eh, shitty job."
We laughed out loud for that, but the pun was either burnt out or beyond him.

Strolling down Sol Duc road nearing midnight, we drink rum and laugh and talk shit and marvel at what a sweet trip it had all been. Josh scoops us up in his beat old Taurus eventually, like we planned, and takes us home.

Beautiful.