the Urban Archivist

True to the MO of winter thaw, winter has returned to the Northwest. Moreover, the winter of this week has been reminiscent of the Chicago winters I left behind when I moved here. Temperatures have delved past the 30s and 20s and even dipped into the teens at night. I having been hoping that the the newly-sprouted daffodil shoots wouldn’t freeze. Somehow, I think they’ll be fine; they are hardy plants.

Combining with the cold this week has been an always unwelcomed winter guest, wind. I’ve never been adverse to the Midwestern cold and snow. In fact, I love those aspects of the season. Cold air is crisp and clears the mind of the cobwebs that accumulate during pleasant weather. Wind, however, is a different story. It is malicious. It gets through all of your layers, which Northwesterners know all about, of course, and chills your very core.

Furthermore, cities do strange things to wind. Out in the rural open, the wind is a constant assault from one general direction. You can take precautions. In the city, though, buildings and structures bend and channel the wind. It swirls and dances and whistles eerily through the physical urban structure as if to announce the Grim Reaper’s presence and his disregard for our modern infrastructural comforts. You may be walking down the street and, as you turn the corner, you get hit square on by a vicious gust. Alternatively, you are waiting at a bus stop and the winter wind comes screaming around the corner, gets in between your layers, and molests you with its icy fingers. At the very least, the rain usually cuts from one side; you can prepare for that. The unruly urban wind, on the other hand, pays no mind to niceties and manners.

The other week, I had caught a little case of the Bird Flu as I was taking pictures of ghost signs around the UW-Tacoma campus. The wind chilled my ears and I spent the following three days fortifying and doping my immune system with sleep and vitamin C as it fought off the ailment. Not wanting a repeat of the situation, I put on a knit headband to keep my ears warm the other day.

Perhaps bullied by the wind, normal humidity has evaporated this week. I recently plugged in and programmed my NOAA weather radio, so in addition to looking out at my outdoor thermometer every morning I have been listening to the latest weather while getting dressed. Additionally, I have installed a METAR parser script on this site’s sidebar to automatically retrieve and post current weather conditions. Thus, I have watched with amazement as the relative humidity hovered around 26% earlier in the week before it plummeted to 12% one evening.

My skin has always been sensitive to humidity, so this week’s weather had been particularly intriguing. During the Midwestern summers, the 200% humidity irritated my skin while the wintertime drought caused me to singlehandedly support the lotion industry. Moreso than the wind, I was quite happy to leave behind this moisture regime when I moved here and even happier that the situation was reversed. Thus, this week’s welcome cold was tempered by the accompanying, unwelcome dryness.

Capping off the appearance of Midwestern winter conditions has been the clear sky. I have talked about this week’s light with two friends on two separate occasions while running into them on the Ave. Interestingly, both conversations involved photography. The first conversation occurred as I ran into J. while I was shooting 35mm on the Ave. She was off to run errands and glowed about the fine light that we’ve been having. A few days later, I ran into Mr. Jarson, who shared with me his realization that this week’s soft light, which cast lovely pinkish hues on the buildings, was perfect for talking promotional photographs of campus buildings. To paraphrase: “what people don’t realize when they are looking at the beautiful pictures of campus architecture,” he pontificated, “is that it’s fucking cold outside” and that the photographer likely froze his/her fingers off.

We ducked into Chipotle so that he could pick up dinner. On the subsequent walk toward our respective homes, I held his ice-cold Coke because he wasn’t wearing any gloves.

This afternoon, the temperature broke and we were up into the 40s. On the other hand, my sidebar tells me that the humidity is still an alarmingly low 23%. I ought to issue a Chapstick and Lotion Advisory for the greater Seattle area.

Found this yesterday on the sidewalk outside the University District Safeway (4700 block of Brooklyn Ave NE).

I would humbly suggest to the shopper that the following items be left out of the stew: milk, “yougurt”, soda, juice, and especially the kitty litter. I would encourage the shopper the definitely purchase kitty litter. Cat owners can never have enough of the stuff.

Funny, just this weekend I took this picture on Broadway in Cap. Hill

LaRouchies, were singing and holding this mysterious map on the street corner. A few blocks down, a girl handed me a small bill that had a message about the Seattle City Council trying to “suppress the right of ordinary people to address the public - free speech..” by making political tabling on planting strips more prohibitive through fees (proposed permit fee would be $315 per year) and fines ($250-$500).

There was a major case in 1940s(Marsh v. Alabama) of free speech in public/private places that involved Jehovah’s Witnesses. It was a case where a town was owned by a corporation that tried to prevent Jehovah’s Witnesses from bothering people, but the Supreme Court ruled in favor of speech…we must protect our right to be annoying in public.

The flyer that the girl handed to me argues that the proposed ordinance makes prohibitive rules, like fees and fines, to actually get around the whole legal issue of free speech in public places. Through a brief online search, I haven’t found any more info. on the the ordinance. LaRouchies…as odd as they are…there is something comforting about seeing freaks populate my world.

The LaRouche cult were out on the street today. The kids had their DIY-postered table set up on the busy NE corner of 45th and the Ave, right under my bank. As it turns out, I had to do some banking today. When I was walking into the bank, one LaRouchie was following a middle-aged man, trying to make him stop and engage by proposing undoubtedly thought-provoking insights. The man demonstrated iron resolve, refusing to have his forward motion impeded by empassioned LaFacts.

As I was banking, it struck me that today might be a good day to perhaps engage the kids a bit instead of brushing them off completely. “You’ll be sorry,” I thought, figuring that I’d be followed all the way to campus. But, what the hell; I was bit cranky: I had been having a hard time leaving the haus today and, one aborted go later, finally made it off my porch. Thus, I prepared a slightly aloof demeanor and mustered a few glib criticisms of Old Lyndon.

Sure enough, the light caught me and there I was in a gauntlet of LaRouche followers. After what seemed like a few seconds, they finally latched onto me. I was a bit disappointed; they were less aggressive than normal. Finally, though, they latched onto a conversational entry point… something about my (short) skirt. Two of them seemed to have a brief conversation around me. Did my entirely black outfit make me seem inaccessible? The Shivering One finally said, to me, that she felt cold just looking at me. A few seconds later: “But on a more serious note, have you been paying attention to the economy lately?”

“Yup”

(The light at 45th is long.)

“Are you concerned about the future la dah dah blah la la?”

“Yes, yes I am.”

She reached for a prepared packet of literature from the card table.

“Oh, I’m not interested.”

She just gave up. Gave up! I was expecting the standard in-your-face style. Instead, I got no lip about my commitment to something or my concern about something else or about being a sheep or a goat or a llama or some other placid animal.

At the very moment — yes, the light was still red — a young woman across the way started to look very worked up as she look in the direction of our corner. She had a blonde, asymetric bowl cut and wore a short skirt, black suspender-stockings with runs in them, and knee-high black boots. She yelled “you asshole” a number of times in our general direction while looking as if she were going to burst a few blood vessels.

Everybody was very confused, looking around to see whether anyone had acknowledged the greeting.

“That’s not for you, is it?” asked the LaRouche girl.

“No.”

Well played, Shivering One!

As the light finally changed, Ms. Anthropy wound up like a cat winds up its hind legs before pouncing and marched determinedly in a straight line across the street. She made no eye contact nor any further ejaculations. She continued past the LaGauntlet and disappeared into the sidewalk crowd.

Was this her strategy to avoid First Contact with the forces of Lyndon? Was she mad at the bank perhaps? Maybe it was for me after all; she was perhaps angry at having her outfit bested? One thing’s for certain, though: Ms. Anthropy was certainly no docile mammal of the New World Order.

Last Wednesday, I walked out of my haus in the morningnoon. The first thing that struck me as I stepped out onto the porch, other than the maddeningly bright and disturbingly cloudless state of the sky, was the smell. It was fleeting moment, of course, like they always are; they occur in the first split-second of stepping into a new environment. Then they are gone. You are then left to speculate and analyse for the next few minutes whether what it was that you had just experienced was true or just a figment of your imagination.

I suspect this is what the Big Bang was like: one brief moment of innocent and full realization followed by an eternity of analysis and speculation characterised by the tenacious pursuit of the answers that have vaporized into the aether long long ago.

So it was last Wednesday. I caught the very first whiff of La Primavera as I locked my door and drifted across my porch. By the time I reached the stairs, not ten feet away, the innocence of that big bang was gone. It happened sometime in that fluid procession of micro-scale events marking those two endpoints as my gaze flowed from the door lock to the porch floor to the porch stairs to the grass in the front yard to the view out onto the street. My nose, following closely behind my eyes, caught it long before my eyes did. Spring already??? As I reached the edge of my property, I decided to cross the street. By the time I got to the sidewalk on the other side, I had determined that, yes, what I smelled was most assuredly Spring.

It felt a little surreal. After all, we just barely got into February. Although this will be my fourth spring in the PNW, the early end of winter down here at sea level always catches me by surprise. Of course, the End of Rains is still far off and the wet season certainly not over, but February always seems to bring a little preview of things to come. Other northern places have the January Thaw, a short period of unseasonably pleasant havoc to throw people into momentary climatological confusion. We seem to have the February Preview: this is what forgotten-July will be like.

The following day, Thursday, was a bit uneventful, much the same as Wednesday. Friday, however, brought sight of emerging daffodils down the block. Sunday brought even more confirmed sightings of Spring flora. I’m waiting for our daffodils to break through.

For now, however, we are back to glorious, misty, wet weather after a week’s reprieve. I had to pull my hood on this morningnoon as I walked to campus. Though still a polite Northwestern rain, a copious and rather assertive amount of water sprayed the city today in between a few sunbreaks. With temperatures hovering in the mid-40s, I enjoyed zipping up my jacket to keep the water out.

An old meme, the visited state map. Mine would suggest that I am extremely well-traveled as far as the continental United States goes:

But a closer look reveals otherwise:

Note especially Montana, North Carolina, and Georgia. On the other hand, I did make a special effort to drive through the two inches of northern Idaho and into the first small town in Montana — in blinding rain no less — in order to have a beer at a local bar. This fares much better than Georgia and NC, which I drove through on the way out of the Smoky Mountains. I got out of the car, at the very least, and stepped onto the sweet sweet soil of both states. But that hardly counts.

I rather like the “Drink Rule” (airports don’t count, of course) as the litmus test of counting whether you have been to some given place. Since I created the maps above, I have visited Charlotte, North Carolina. This has created the oddity of making Charlotte a lone island in my U.S. Places Visited map. Some day I may have to connect it by driving there. On the other hand, I’m tempted to leave it an island with no terrestrial connection to the other places I’ve visited. It can be my personal Point Roberts.