Steep heartless streets of Seattle. I can feel them pitch and roll beneath my feet like geographic waves. Yellowed, decomposing newspapers become a squishy, brown mess and beer bottles shattered, cans flattened all near the grecian palisades, those greek life billboards of excess and shame, the rear-ended parked cars and unused basketball hoops, except by neighborhood childhood dreaming of growing 30 more inches. The streets are steep enough that some sidewalks are stairs or have little divots for the walking passengers to avoid a black ice slip and cracked skull indent, how nice of the city planners, those elusive purple robbed humming beings that constantly hover over restoration projects. Ghosts, like us, help to replant and grow the Kincaid ravine where the burke-gilman trail passes under the 45th street viaduct. Someone has outlined all the places where tree roots have buckled up under the sidewalk with white paint. I don’t know if this is signifier or signed, or if they are marked like those sad orange ribbons tied around great big old trees to mark their destruction. I doubt we will pulverize tree roots to make a smoother path. If we do they will lose hold on the hill and eventually come crashing down into 25th street traffic, rec center cardio center pool area, or the infinite bicyclists in skirts or headphones that keep their eyes averted to all bipedal pedestrians, though give a little flash of intellect, a secret code, to those with similar helmets or rolled up pant legs.
Network of streets through neighborhoods. Seems like every direction from home base is uphill. I also feel like an invasive species in this home I’ve robbed from a potential happy, calm, and centered couple to live and to nourish their love. I am alone in this without knowing what I nourish. My indoor streets are tan carpet and faux-tile. Outside, right outside, are budding wildflowers like roses and hyacinths, and unknowns, cats come at an expectant clip to be pet, I’d get a little orange cat if I could, some facetious creature to call a happy home. Streets. Pastel houses with personalities and vegetable gardens, chickens all cooped up in the back. College kids intermingle with old growth families who resent the loud youth for their boisterous attitudes and incessant drinking (found in the form of endless recycled beer cans). I am north east of campus and must walk a mile or so to get to the heart of it. This habit is enhanced by nice music fed directly into my ears, though the endless options were limited to just a few new downloads because of headphone jack technical error and another unfixable, lopsided issue to add to the decaying list of technological strife, the empty headed forgetful mechanic, creates loopholes that lead no where. Sand point? What does that mean. There are paths to take that I haven’t had the opportunity to take quite yet. When I still enjoyed pot, I would smoke and wander the streets, imagining the lives led in the sleepiest neighborhoods, admiring their landscape architecture and vines growing over door frames, iced over ponds that are now beginning to thaw, a bridge over the void into another endless sprawl of neighborhood. Walk, walk, walk. For hours. Find a rhythm with the music and the scenery, cancel out negative thoughts. Observe everything that is one color or acts against (or for) a common thread or theme. Figure this life out. You are a scared writer. Write powerfully what you observe. Take these long, endless walks. On nice mornings, wake up early and drive to a state park for coffee and contemplation over some fresh blank pages.