Tweet

I love this bird, markered onto a pillar somewhere on 5th Avenue in downtown Seattle. Is that his head, or a cartoon bomb? Is he whistling, or about to explode? His unwaveringly shiny eye gives no clue.
*
Last week, when it was so hot, I witnessed an act of true seagull savagery. A fat angry male made a feet-first, three point landing on the head of another gull which was in the middle of packing half a bagel down its gullet. Birds are not known for their avian kindnesses but this guerrilla attack was both alarming and merciless. Incoming gull managed, with his sneak-bounce attack, to dislodge part of the bagel. Diner gull scooped up his crumbs and hopped-flew away, swallowing like crazy.

Beautiful street people

I visit The Sartorialist web site a couple of times a month.
The candid shots of street fashionistas never fail to inspire me.
Or depress the hell out of me--how can 60-year-old Italian men have more style savvy in their sockless loafers than I'll have in two lifetimes of trying?

Scenes from a hot city

The temperature topped 100 degrees in Seattle yesterday. We’re so not used to it. A few pollyannas say they enjoy it, and loudly proclaim their newfound love affair with the sun. The rest of us walk around slowly, blinking and frowning, alternately cranky or bewildered.

The unrelenting heat is prompting questionable sartorial decisions. I saw my supervisor in a miniskirt. For every lithe young campus hottie running around in flip flops and cutoffs, there's the Rubenesque bare-chested old guy with sweat dripping off his wrinkled nipples.

An older manager at work abandoned his computer, rolled up a copy of the campus paper and chased around an errant fly.

29 Seattle-area friends on my facebook page posted about the weather. No more archly clever posts; we're recording triple digit temperatures in our kitchens, posting screen shots of KING5, and passing around beat-the-heat tips (water soaked headbands, running through sprinklers) .

On my bus, no one talks. No one's sleeping. We all have zombie stares, behind our shades. And overhead, the sun continues to shine.

A priority message

Remember I told you to look up when you're walking down the street? (Be safe and all, natch.)
I snapped this series of doodled shipping stickers along a 1/2 mike stretch in Wallingford.

I tried to simply enjoy and not think too hard about what they were or meant -- poetic clues to a scavenger hunt? Coded messages? Or just random, disposable thoughts?

The eyez have it

I happened across this menacing garage door one Saturday when I was wandering around trying to find Essential Bakery.

I liked that it was a burst of exoticism in an otherwise ordinary landscape--a careless half-tone wall, unremarkable metal siding, a bent drainpipe. And yet someone took care to center the eyes and the snake-nose, and to level the painting against the angle of the door.

Because where would you be if the evil eye were off kilter?

Dried to a crisp

Dried flowers were big in the 1980's, and I hated them.
Hated the dessicated rose headbands and clumps of pungent eucalyptus and the dried out baby's breath (don't most babies' breath smell of up chuck?). Everywhere you went people had silk flower or dried flower arrangements bound with satin ribbon and hanging on their walls, gathering dust in windowsill vases, even nestled in women's hairdos. So romantic, ladies sighed. So Victorian and sweet.
It might be why all the dead grass and dried out weeds around town are giving me the creeps. Everywhere you look, the grass is blindingly blond. It looks like crew-cut hay. These are some weeds I saw in an abandoned lot. I did like the sunburst appeal of the bristly dry heads. I imagine if you sat down, you'd be picking sharp little stickers out of your ass for quite awhile.

The smile mafia

A contractor came by the house yesterday to talk about some remodeling projects. Nice guy, youngish, a little fond of monologue but also copacetic with my interjected semi-funny sidebar comments. In other words, it went great, especially given the hot day and my finely honed sales resistance. Until, that is, on his way out, when he handed me his card.
Owner-slash-Smile Maker, his title read.
I looked up, groaning. Smile maker, really?
See, it worked, he said with a grin.
Actually, it was more of a grimace on my part. But I just nodded and shook his hand.
*
Earlier this week, a co-worker said how much she liked someone. So-and-so is so nice, they're always smiling, she said, nodding in approval.
Those kind of people scare me, I said, and her own smile died.
It's true. I trust them the least. The smilers. Either they're up to something devious and trying to allay all suspicion, or they're just not paying attention.