dulling the brightest colors

current mood: wary, hyper happiness. lately I feel like I just found twenty dollars on an empty street and get to look around giddily like really? may I, then?  

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herewith, in erratic non-chronological order:

Orient Express, though I still call it Andy's Diner. fuck, everything about this place:  the dark labyrinthine sin-pittery, the smells of damp carpet and old cigarettes and off-brand disinfectants and bad decisions, the bartender who laughed over how strong she made my drink. "I have a heavy hand" she said. 

two of the four stalls in the women's loo had Out Of Order signs on the doors. 

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but under different guises, the rooms become almost classy. 

before:

and after:

and post-hedonistically stumbling back into the hot high sunshine. 

Andy's Orient Diner Express reminds me of Timothy Leary's description of the Acid  Room that was purposely tucked away within the rambling mansion he and a few other researchers rented for a summer in the 1960s. they made the room accessible only via trapdoors and ladders and otherwise disorienting means, and the interior was decorated with tapestries and pillows and other contrasts to the exterior austerity. it was meant to be a mindfuckable space. 

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Seattle is so fucking attractive that I keep having to turn away and look down, lest I stare too clumsily. 

views like this, I take first and contemplate later. my first impression when I take a photo is always one of pure, banal aesthetics, shapes and colors and shadows. for this one, I love the lazy snakiness of the freeway. I love how the Group Health building hunkers down over Beacon Hill like a sinister castle. usually Mt Rainier is visible from this angle, but not yesterday. it's a less-common vantage point, looking away from the skyline, the prologue to the city. 

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later impressions: each of those vehicles contained stories and music and arguments and destinations, hands on laps and empty wrappers and singing along and ignoring each other and falling in love and almost home and finally leaving and possibly seeing downtown Seattle for the first time ever. yet everyone remained politely within their lanes, somehow still paying attention. how unnervingly civilized we are on a macrocosmic level. 

Washington plates notwithstanding, this vehicle belongs in a Spenard alley, not on Yesler Way. it's always strangely comforting to encounter a balls-out Alaskan truck, down to the fucked-up taillight and bed full of crap. 

my new favorite building. 

and more dissonant attempts at parallelity. 

geoducks will always be rather embarrassing. don't pretend it's not true. 

monochromatic tyvekian splendor. perhaps it should be called skyvek. 

another graveyard of bad decisions. 

her tail looks like an apostrophe, so does this make it a catasstrophe? 

what! on the light rail. I was walking off as I took this, hence the blur. 

"there comes a stage when the touch of reality becomes so sharp that one is no longer an individual harassed by circumstances, but a living being cut into slices... in such moments all things are made clear- the meaning of dreams, the wisdom that precedes birth, the survival of faith, the stupidity of being a god, etc., etc." Henry Miller