Day Once y doce

Context of previous “Connotate this, bitch!”: As Joe has previously mentioned, many who know him consider him to be...well Joe. So to kind of put in my two cents while he was riding me like a circus pony (no “connotate this, bitch” intended) as I drove around San Francisco, I said, “Why don’t you remove that anal-retentive dildo out of your ass?”

If you’re like us (which I hope to God you’re not, I wouldn’t wish that on even my worst enemies), you’d probably think there’s nothing at all to do in Seattle. You’d probably pick up a little guidebook in a hotel lobby just outside the city limits and conclude from reading it that you’re next 24 hours would be an excruciating waste of time. You’d probably begin to ponder to yourself why you ever even decided that traveling to Seattle was a good idea. That inevitably would lead you to start questioning all your life decisions and lead you to conclude that as a whole, you’ve really made a mess out of your life. Then you’d probably start crying and wishing you were never born and all that stuff. Of course, if you’re like us, you probably would have tried to get sleep in your car at a rest stop after driving for a good portion of the night so these thoughts and actions would be excusable considering the little sleep you got because the truckers were doing weird things outside your car with each other and their semis. I guess what I’m trying to say is, like us, you’d be wrong about Seattle… and you’re life being a total failure. Seattle truly takes it’s place as one of the great cities on the pacific coast and that is something we would realize over and over again as we walked it’s streets and met it’s people. We arrived in Seattle If it wasn’t for the trucker sex or whatever that was going on behind the car, I might have actually gotten some sleep. Joe apparently slept like a baby, lucky bugger. So our first order of business was to check out Doc Maynard’s Underground Tour. This is quite possibly the best thing we could have chosen to do first because it gave us an up close and personal lesson on Seattle’s history. Some things I learned: at around 10am and like I said above we had spent the night in the car at a rest area- prime accommodations.

-The name of the city was a bastardization of the name of an Indian chief one of the early leaders had befriended.

-The first mayor continually stole from the city. (i.e.- During the day when he was the owner of the saw mill he would sue the city and then in the afternoon when he did mayor stuff he would settle with himself for large sums of money.) P.S.- They re-elected him two more times.

-The initial city was built on mud flaps and had major flooding problems whenever it was high tide.

-They had no sewage system in the beginning so they had a really shitty problem in the streets and it was still a shitty problem even after they got the first Crappers because the sewage pipes led straight to the ocean and whenever the tide came in it would push the shit in the pipes back up them and sometimes launch them out of the toilets like some horrible feces geyser. It got to the point where they started publishing the times of the tide in the paper so people could plans their craps around them. In fact, there was a whole generation of kids who were potty-trained based on the movements of the moon.

-The term “skid row” came from Seattle. It referred to the downhill road the loggers used to slide the timber down to the saw mill. In Seattle, this neighborhood was horrible so the term came to be used to describe bad areas in cities.

-After a major fire destroyed most of the downtown area, the city wanted to take the opportunity to raise the streets to combat the tides. It would take 8 to 10 years and the businesses weren’t willing to wait that long to rebuild their building so they went ahead and got to work. The city still went ahead with their plans and so for a couple of years, the streets of Seattle were raised 10 feet above the first floor storefronts. They even put up ladders along the sides of the street so people could climb down them to get to the stores. Men used to wait at the bottom of these ladders so they could “help” women down them.

-UPS was started as a drug running company in Seattle.

-Before Bill Gates donated millions to the school system, the largest contribution for awhile came from Lou Graham. She was the leader of a brothel (or “seamstress circle” as it was known as because that’s the profession the girls checked for the census). There has yet to be a school named after her. Sadness.

I highly recommend this tour to anyone who travels to Seattle because not only was it informative, the tour guides were also freakin hilarious. After the tour we retired to our hotel rooms to drop off our stuff and then trekked out to the Space Needle. This offered an awesome view of the city and the ocean much like Coit Tower in San Fran. We decided that those who lived near the space needle were afforded no real privacy since there were telescopes at the top of it allowing you to peer into all the apartment windows below. I decided that if I ever lived in one of those apartments, I would put on one hell of a show and hopefully become famous for it. It would be a mix between burlesque and the Chippendales. After that we walked along the waterfront finding the fish market along there to be oddly similar to Fisherman’s Wharf in San Fran. We then cut into the city to find a place to pick up some grub and found ourselves inside a pleasant irish pub called “The Owl n’ Thistle.” By pleasant, I mean it was during happy hour that we were there so it was very pleasant indeed. We then walked down a little ways to Safeco Field, home to the Seattle Mariners to watch them play the Anaheim Angels of Los Angeles. I forgot how much fun it was to catch a baseball game every now and then like I did with the Cubs and White Sox in Chicago. The atmosphere, the announcers, the constant fear you are about to get beamed in the head with a baseball. It’s all amazing. It was also cool that the baseball field was such a short walk from the downtown area along the waterfront and right next to it was Qwest Field where the Seattle Seahawks play. Joe (the leading critic on suburban sprawl) thoroughly praised the layout and organization of this city. The next day we went back downtown in the morning to pick up some breakfast, some new jeans (I’ll explain later) and some Seattle’s Best Coffee then it was back on the road. Destination: Bend, OR. Here’s some other Seattle stuff:

You know how when you’re on a road trip and those wonderful green signs zip by on your right indicating how many miles you have to the next city? There’s always that major city on the sign and then all of a sudden all these smaller cities pop up before it on the next sign. I could never live in these “suddenly signed cities” as I’ve come to call them. If they don’t have the common decency to not butt in line on these signs, they’re not a city for me.

My new favorite mountain is Mount Shasta. This mountain is in northern California and the drive up on I-5 gives you awe-inspiring views of this majestic mound of dirt and rock and snow.

I ripped my jeans right down the ass crack while squatting down to take a picture of the space needle. Consequently when I reached the top, I managed to moon the whole city of Seattle. This prompted me to utter, “If only Reggie could see me now!”

The radio stations in Redding, CA are quite weird and somewhat frightening. It’s obvious the city has split personalities when the only radio stations you have to choose from are Christian Music and Metal.

The Mariners lost by the way.

Coversation excerpt:
Joe: I felt all MacGyver-ish in the bathroom. Because the door latch wouldn’t meet up with its slot so I used a pen to keep the door shut.
Me: Oh I thought you were going to say you used a toothpick as toilet paper.
Joe: What, did I just scrape the shit off?

Trivia: In Victorian times, toilet seats were always made of wood: the well to do sat on mahogany or walnut, while the poor put up with untreated white pine.

“Connotate this, bitch!”: “He was riding me like a circus pony.”