October 2014 was like a terrible blind date.

Fremont. 

I took this surreptitiously and from afar. but perhaps you can see the accompanying Bob Ross painting with face-cutout. 

seattle's being a tempestuous strumpet again. 

I finally found my old 12g barbell and lo! my tongue piercing is still viable. 

years ago, I was with a friend and neither of us were sober and she started rhapsodizing about how weird tongues are. "they're like, the only muscle you can GRAB, like, DIRECTLY" she said. I still think about that, obviously. I should make tshirts that say "have you grabbed your tongue muscle today?" actually, no. I shouldn't. 

Capitol Hill. this far surpasses the dulcet tags of "shitbarf" and "sissies rule."

"the substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction." Iris Murdoch 

helplessly hopeful, hopelessly helpless

my neighborhood.

this is a west-facing wall. why the fuck would you do this? are you a goddamn vampire, or just an asshole? 

Jesus fuck, but at least they're preserving it, right...? the details under the eaves alone, my god. 

feigning existentialism amidst the insultingly late buses at the northgate transit center. 

my little sun-slut and her shadow.  

detritus in Queen Anne. 

my newest baby, a bombastic and sexy Calathea. 

I own a fucking parasol. I have two, actually. 

yeah, Aberdeen would make me try meth. 

it was kinda cool, though: I used the vile hair-studded loo at some gas station there, and the dude behind the counter was blaring, and singing along with, "war pigs." he was very nice. I had to push aside a leak-catching bucket to open the refrigerator case and grab a 7Up. the rain outside was horizontal. no one seemed fazed in the least. 

Ocean Shores, site of many self-indulgent mental spirals over the years. this was my go-to decompression destination when I lived in Fucking Yelm. it was a much more tolerable jaunt in those days because I smoked relentlessly. do you realize how fucking boring it is to drive long distances when you don't smoke cigarettes? may you never know of this privileged ennui. 

today: hydroplaning, listening to the White Stripes, thinking about shit, allowing myself to feel pissed off and sad and frustrated. fuck it. I got to see the Pacific Ocean today. things aren't that bad. 

this guy hung out for a while on top of the car, looking elated. at one point he skidded sideways in the wind but didn't fall off. today seemed like a sucky day to be a bird. I picture animals in such hostile elements thinking "FUUUUUUCCCK WHYYYY", just like humans do. 

"and to make a long, dull story even duller... I come from a time when a guy like me would drop into a joint like this, to pick up a young chick like you. in those days we'd call her a bimbo."

-Last Tango in Paris, Robert Alley 

schlocktober

Denny Way... right across the street from the building in which I once lived. that was the basement studio that my first husband and I trashed. trashed. he spilt an entire bottle of bright red cinnamon shit-schnapps on the beige carpet one night whilst falling back drunkenly to better appreciate the bombast of Genesis' "Musical Box." this was the place with no bathroom doorknob. this was the place we lived when we first got married, the place where we cooked and fought and slept and laughed and where I made curtains for the windows. 

if only this was there then? 

this is the only SR99 sign I know of with such hand-painted macabre. 

entropy photobomb. I am somewhat less creepy than this. 

Ballard. 

Greenwood. 

butter in coffee is the fucking bomb. 

trust me. 

THESE FEATHERS DON'T MOLT. 

Belltown. 

Pike Place. 

Convention Place (part 2 or 3 in a series). 

if you stare uneasily at yourself in a mirror, shouldn't that be a circumflection? 

stickaz in F-mont. 

what has become of Capitol Hill. 

properly smitey rain. 

"you bring Listen to the Warm, I'll bring the Zinfandel!"

choose your own adventure! 

there are so many sad things about this picture. 

and I cut all my hair off and bantered with the missus. 

"if a violin string can ache, then I was that string." -Nabokov 

resolution number 9

"if there's a perception that things are getting better, we have a better response to stress."

*

Two Bells Tavern. face off. 

Pike Street fogbow.

a shack on Queen Anne. there are two types of people in the world: those who have their own fucking towers, and those who do not. 

I'm going to chop it all off. 

nutterfly: when a nut is liberated from its shell. I just came up with that! you are welcome! 

Lakeview Cemetery. when people read tombstones, they cannot help but posture like zombies. 

my favorite sculpture in Seattle. 2nd place: that goddamn ampersand. 

this looks like a 70s album cover for something terrible like, I dunno, "Electro-Ambient Autumn." 

the CBS building, one of my favorite structures in Seattle. it's rather endearingly ugly as fuck, innit? it was designed by Fred Bassetti and finished in 1968.

...it's kind of a dissonant amalgam of styles. you got yer Googie Space Needle-y angles and your brutalist fuck-offery and your exposed beams and that ghastly waffle-punch undercarriage, and it all ends up resembling the Hawaii state capitol's younger, clumsier sibling. who doesn't love a good tragedy? 

but yet! I really do love this building. I love it because it riffs off a bunch of questionable shit but ends up looking like nothing else. it's just like, "rawr." this is a building that hunkers down.

sunshine on my fucking shoulders. 

a chorus line of cranes! 

you can probably sea that this a-piers to be over-filtered.

my first thought when I saw this was "awwww"... the symbol of some foolish and idealistic love!

my second thought harkened back to a grim layover in the Dallas airport, several years ago. I ended up reading one of Tucker Max's annals of fine literature in the terminal bookstore. he wrote how "if a key can open many locks, it's a master key. but if a lock can be open by many keys, it's a shitty lock."