drip tag

So it seems this is a tag, it's the 2nd set of carefully articulated drips I've noticed in LQA (see last week's post).

groovradio

Here's a super sweet summer jam from Port Angeles-based dj ShmeeJay:

drips

Post-Kansas and I'm still feeling a little lost. It's been a busy summer and yet a lonely one (and I guess there's no rule that says those two adjectives are mutually exclusive). This past week in particular started real-ly and metaphorically awful and continued down an implosive spiral. If ever I needed my friends, this was the week. And mostly they were absent--traveling, busy, gone.
There was a memorial service for a lady I knew once; a few minutes in, I remembered with a pang like a sucker punch the poisonously pitying stares of church people, the knowing, prying eyes, the behind-the-hand whispered updates from the choir. I popped a pill (thanks Sid) but I can still feel those eyes, like a thousand little stabs. A day later I was out for an early jog before work, dazedly putting one foot in front of the other; near Seattle Center I tripped and ate pavement, ripping big patches from my knee and elbow. I ran home, hot and shaken, blood streaming down my leg. The week passed in a hot, tired haze. I tried to socialize, I did try. I drank beer and ate nachos and attempted to sparkle. By Friday I was on the phone with my shrink. Hearing her say you are in a dark place was less of a relief than a relative assuaging of pressure, like unkinking a hose and then whipping it against the side of the house. 
It got better, slowly; I enjoyed a Friday night with an allied soul, drinking and confiding and ending our night at Pony with booze, beautiful boys, beats. Yesterday, backyard margaritas with dear friends, navigating their own hellish few weeks. We found solace in trading painful stories, finding laughs, and jointly supporting a fragile soul just out of Harborview and trying for a place of peace and health.

The photos are paint drips on the backside of a parking garage on Roy Street.

pnw jellifish

At Crescent Beach on a silvery foggy morning, watching a jellyfish make its way towards the sea. Video by busysmartypants, beats by Nutritious Intention.
(*note: we've been tinkering with things, updated!)

ugly on the inside

Twice this week I've had to deal with ugliness from strangers. A good friend had to also. A diabetic panhandler called me a "fucking prostitute" for not giving her any money. A creepy old guy stared at me on the bus and followed me around the Burien Transit Center until I told him to step off. He whined he hadn't done anything and then proceeded to sit in the front of the bus we both boarded and stare at me.
My friend was happily walking near GreenLake sporting a newly-shaven head and a cool dress when a db of a guy screamed bravely from his car, "nice haircut faggot." I want to believe in good, in humanity, in selam ana fikir, but sometimes I struggle. I know people are dealing with rage and miswired brains and plain old badness.
A friend studying criminology said she was taught there are 3 reasons for crime: bad, mad or sad.
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This picture is from Crescent Beach, on a very not-bad day spent beachcombing with my man. He was only in town for a few days but we saw friends and family, drank and danced and had homemade tater tots and my pizza and grilled zucchini and sausages and beans over a roaring fire and later tried to crack each other up with the best rip.

the farm

After a week with the fam in the 785 I feel more connected and less sure of myself.
I hang out with my cousins and aunts and uncles and little cuz's and my nearly-92-year-old gramma and I recognize kinship, in their eyes--the dark ones especially--in the backs of their hands, their laughs, a particular way of pronouncing t's.
Then I see how much like my sister my little niece is, how that even though they aren't blood-kin they most certainly share chromosomal attitude.
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This picture is from my gramma's farm, somewhere off Highway 40, near Fairport, nearly 100 acres of mostly wheat fields. On a 90+ degree day my sis and cousin and I wandered around, looking at bits of decayed limestone foundation and surveying the endless sky.