Scattered notes from the Emerald City on the night of the Seahawk's victory
I wound up in Seattle over the holiday weekend. I needed a cheap desk. My sister needed a cheap dinning room table. Cheap desks and dinning room tables can be obtained at the Ikea in the Seattle suburb of Renton.
Along the way we stopped for gas on Sleater-Kinney, the large boulevard in Olympia that once served as a muse for everyone's favorite (nearly) all-mommy band. Instead of driving off the freeway and into a village like the one in the Wizard of Oz filled with preteen punk rockers and Evergreen students, we discovered a endless concrete strip filled with fast food franchises and furniture outlets. This tanning salon next to the gas station was offering a pretty good deal though:
My faded U of O student ID probably wouldn't have worked and I had no use for a cheap tan. So we continued onwards.
The Renton IKEA hasn't changed much in the last two years. It's still incredibly creepy and on Saturday it was packed to the gills with perfect yuppie families and budding yuppies intent of building perfect yuppie families. But there was at least one slight change. Near the entrance there's now what may as well be a children's holding cell with soundproof walls and windows. Outside, parents were waiting in a long line in front of a row of keyboards prompting them to enter their child's name and a password to prevent them from being stolen by child molesters and/or the Pied Piper. The cell itself was filled with generic McDonald Playland equpiment and a ball-pooll that looked about as fun as a perfectly sterilized Intel cleanroom. Here's a photo:
They still had the perpetually sitting robot going full thorottle. Apaprently, the "poang" I saw the last time finally broke after having a machine plop on it over a hundred-thousand times. The latest poang was only up to thirty thousand sits. Rookie.
I walked out of there with a desk the size of a tank that, for some reason, has a magazine rack and dry erase board I'll never use. I'll sacrifice the couch if it contains a hidden wet bar. Given the size of this thing, that's a definite possibility.
We headed into Seattle proper to get food and watch fish get flung around at the Pike Street Market. Unfortunately, it was after five and no fish were being flung by the workers at the stand near the pig statue. Now experiencing its twenty-seventh straight day of rainfall, Seattle was appropriately rain soaked. With its mashed-together, Bespin skyline, the city looked like something out of a Final Fantasy game as we descended in from I-5.
The streets around the market were clogged with roaming gangs of overweight, middle-aged guys in Seahawks jersey. They all looked like they'd just mugged. Naturally, we assumed the local football franchise's dreams of heading to the Super Bowl had been dashed earlier that afternoon. We headed down into the bowels of the market to get appropriately tipsy for the long drive back to Portland. The pub down there was filled with sulking Seahawks fans.
But then, back upstairs, we encountered a group of Chris Farley-sized slugs in Redskins jerseys. They too looked like they were in search of something to smash. Who had won this damn game? We could have asked but neither of us were in the mood to risk pissing off a roving gang of DC football fans. I didn't find out the score until a full 24 hours later. Go Seahawks! Woooooooooo! I can't name a single player on the team but wooooooooo!
Outside the world's first Starbucks, two female exchange students were taking turns having their photos taken next to the company's old nude siren logo. We were inside for a good five minutes. When we headed outside they were still at it. They must have filled the cards on their cameras to the brim with shots of the store's exterior. Perverts. Here's a photo of the logo:
Heading for the onramp to I-5, we passed Qwest and Safeco Fields. In the middle of an intersection a pair of drunks were staring at disbelief at their car's dead engine. At the crosswalk nearby, two others collapsed on the pavement before pulling themsleves up and trudging onward into the city's industrail district, no doubt heading in the exact opposite direction of the one they wanted to be going. Those two rain soaked Technodromes, side by side against Seattle's neo-skyline was truly a sight to behold. We're living in the future, man!
