It feels like ages since we’ve seen proper rain in Seattle. While I was waiting for a friend at Ampersand Coffee at Alki, there was a short monsoon like downpour, the kind that makes everyone look up from their laptops and phones. The windows titled open and the air was full of that glorious smell of petrichor — that high score vocabulary word for the smell of rain on dry earth.
The loss in our family has had me in a hole for about a month; the rain seemed like a good marker to switch from letting sadness be everything I am to letting it be one more thing that sands down my sharp edges. I went back to work; here’s what I’ve been reading, writing, and playing.
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The guy had a wife who also liked to ride, a wife who at times would wonder aloud if all that half-finished transportation would be departing the basement soon, honey, so they could finally tackle that remodel.
When my road bike was stolen I was completely devastated. It was so much more than just a bicycle to me. I didn’t have a car, it was how I got around. So I loved loved loved this piece on Seattle’s Bike Batman. This is a superhero I can get behind. The writing is great too; it was a delight to read.
It was an embarrassment. We had band meetings with big arguments. I probably should’ve tried harder to oppose it. I had a family.”—Pete Sears, Starship bassist
While I was eating cake with a friend last week, Ebony and Ivory spilled out of the PA. “The 80s were awful for music,” he said. And I disagreed. The Smiths. The Cure. Prince, for the love of god PRINCE, may he have learned that things are not actually “much harder in the afterlife.” But yeah, there were some crappy, overproduced, awful confections produced during the 80s. The Oral History of “We Built This City,” the Worst Song of All Time amused me greatly with its mix of apologies, rationalizations, and shameless capitalism. Plus, spot the irony. I love irony.
Sidebar: I posted this story to Longreads Community where a handful of smart writers (and me) are sharing reads they’ve enjoyed. There’s a bit there on Stranger Things I liked.
About 30 percent of Chobani’s Twin Falls work force is composed of refugees, a hiring practice that originated with the company’s first factory in upstate New York, where many members of the community had been resettled from places like Vietnam, Burma, and Nepal.
We eat a fair bit of yogurt in our house and some people really like the Chobani mango. We are more committed to it as our yogurt of choice after reading The Disgusting Breitbart Smear Campaign Against the Immigrant Owner of Chobani. No, it’s not as good as the crack that is Elleno’s, but the man’s an American hero.
The Castaways played the last hot August night; we shoehorned ourselves into West Seattle’s tiny Parliament at the Admiral Junction. Before we did what we do, Hobbit and Hare played a swingy, funny, raunchy, magical set on the uke and stand up bass. It was fun to have them bring what they do to what we do and if you missed it, well, you missed it. We should do that again. You might see Hobbit busking at Pike Place Market — he’s a regular there, a ukulele superhero, and I love his style. If you see him, tell him I sent you and throw all your spare change into his uke case, why doncha?
I wrote much of the (heavily edited) spread on Seattle in the latest issue of Sunset Magazine; it’s on PNW news stands right now. I also wrote a bit about memory and Antarctica for G Adventures — I write for them about once a month, my archives are here.
Who are your superheroes this week?
Glad you shared the Chobani article. He is not only an American hero, but a Kurdish hero. Almosr every thing I read about him leaves that out, describes him as ‘Turkish’. But he is not admired or celebrated in most of Turkey, where its Kurds are worse than second-class citizens. I’d like to see more references to this Kurdish, or at the very least Kurdish-Turkish, success story.