Wine tasting in the FEMA zone

The phone rings at 9:00 pm, right on schedule. Rob's getting back into town after teaching another wine-tasting class in Portland. Why he drives down there every Sunday is more than I can fathom, but he says it pays well, and who am I to complain when I have an endless supply of leftover good wine, and a licensed sommelier to boot? I grab an overnight bag and meet him at his apartment. Gabe, the useless moggy, gives me the evil eye. I promise him I'm not here to play vet.

I've spent more nights than I can count crashed on a futon in an apartment that, every time I see it, looks more and more unapologetically like it's been on the wrong end of a tornado. Rob is my last good friend from Seattle who has actually stayed in Seattle. (Alicia and Jen have fled, for reasons of education, housing markets, or both.) He's a useful person to know, especially if you need an escort walking down a dark alley, or a lock picked, or advice on which Cabernet is best suited to the subtle smoky flavors of your god-knows-what. I miss him and count him among my closest friends, but it's not so much an emotional let's-talk-about-our-lives friendship as a let's-go-play-pinball friendship. That makes it a bit harder to maintain over long distances, but so far we've managed.

I pour two glasses of muscat and we fall asleep watching Robot Chicken.

T minus 52 hours and counting

True to form, I start my trip east by heading west. Two and a half days in Seattle isn't enough to see everyone, but it's all I can manage. I try to limit visits to those I'm unlikely to keep up with via phone, those who won't come visit, and those I'm about to lose touch with entirely. Or, in the case of CT, those I'm never quite sure will still be standing the next time I'm in town.

He says he'll meet me at midnight at the Owl. 12:30 he stumbles in, uncharacteristically early. I've been listening to, as he promised, "a cover band that doesn't suck." He's right. They're actually fucking good. If for nothing else, I can still trust him on music. "Hey Darlin'" he slurs in my ear, "I've gotta go get the vocalist stoned." He disappears into the back and this is the last I see of him. When he calls three days later asking where I was on Saturday, I'll tell him I'll be back in a year, and beg him to still be around. [I didn't get a picture of CT on this trip. This is one of my favorites from a few years ago. 5:30 am, his apartment stairway, after a long hard night.]

Next visit is Tom, whom I met a year ago - at the Owl, no less, and listening to CT. He has been a music/beer/dancing friend ever since. Tonight is reggae in Fremont. We are the only ones in the club nuts enough to attempt a two step. It works, for a few bars. As I'm walking to my car afterward, a young guy, inebriated as all get-out, hands me a cold, unopened can of PBR. I have a hard time making out his speech, but he seems to be telling me that I look like a girl in need of a PBR, at 2:15 am on this quiet neighborhood street. Agreeing with him, and accepting the beer, seems to be the wisest course of action. I leave the can in Tom's fridge. (He used to live on a small boat on Lake Union, but has recently gone all domestic in the form of a Ballard condo. This means he now has a fridge in which I can abandon beer. It also means that he lives within stumbling distance of the Tractor Tavern, which could be about seventeen different kinds of useful.)

I am dragged, screaming, into the 21st century

If you’re reading this, it’s because you want to. That’s my only consolation.

Blogging. I hate the idea for multiple reasons. One, I am a paper and ink girl. I have literally dozens of journals that have seen me through the past 23 years. Flipping through them, feeling the paper, deciphering the scrawl, is a warm and tactile experience. I’m afraid this e-journaling will be cold and impersonal in comparison. Worse, I’m afraid it will be terribly convenient, and I’ll like it.

Also, blogging - along with Facebook and MySpace – seems like the worst kind of egotistical self-gratification. Pages devoted to self: thoughts, experiences, angst. All this seems like it should be decently relegated to, say, a shelf’s worth of journals. Or at least a friend who is armed with a good cup of coffee to compensate for the boredom of listening. But now I find myself thousands of miles away, and I was never that good at coffee dates to begin with. The clincher, I suppose, is this: this isn’t forced on any one. If you’re reading this, it’s because you want to.

So, here’s the blog. Stories about travel, which for me, always eventually seems to be about finding home. Granted, the travel may be to the other side of town, or home may turn out to be a small dirt road on a backwater sub-tropical island, but travel and home nonetheless.