Scripting News: Seattle Kicks My Ass. Dave Winer is driving around Seattle after having motored across Canada to here. We've changed seasons since Dave's last visit (during a seductive break from the Washington State Annual Rain Festival, January 1 - December 31 according to a T-shirt that I gave away to a homesick Puget Sounder a few years ago).
Last night I went to bed early and naturally woke up at 4am thinking about things. One of those things was Dave's struggle driving in the rain and how nothing about the local highways, road markings, or anything else is designed for people who don't already know where they are going. My theory is that it is a progression of student projects in the University of Washington school of Traffic Engineering, led by some demented Robert Moses disciple. (Two blocks from my house, there is one of two surviving scramble walks in the city. Do you know what it is like to be a pedestrian at a scramble walk where neither the motorists nor the pedestrians have a clue what is going on?) Seattle is some sort of intergalactic museum of different things that have been tried at least once, which is as good an explanation for the motley of architectural styles as any.
By 5am I am thinking of more profound ways in which Dave and I are related. We both are of an age where we know a lot of people with quadruple bypasses, emphysemia, and (as John Wayne put it) the big C. Dave is in fact one of those people in the bypass category while I keep taking my Lipitor, kvetching about weight gain, and knocking wood. I am also touched by Dave's reaction to President Clinton's recent surgery.
But the most profound way that Dave and I are related is how we behave when lost. I keep maps and I am always planning routes with Microsoft Streets (from the days when it was bundled with everything) and, these days, the local transit maps. It would never occur to me to call someone on my cellular phone and be talked into my destination. Yet that is how people keep appointments these days. I rarely carry my cellular phone, and I don't make calls while driving. For example, I was on foot (carrying my Nokia 9001 too) searching for Chez Scobleizer and I could not find that half-block-long suburban street where the address was hidden. It was one of those it has to be here, but where does it connect with a street that I can find by circumnavigating from the bus stop? Whatever the sins of the Seattle/King-County grid system (it is, I think, um, 5 grids notched and butted together), suburban development and metropolitan sprawl, along with the struggle for identity of neighboring communities plunked on the King County grid, have made a hash of it. And any street with "Place" in its name seems to be an alley or subdivision that introduces a street where the grid doesn't allow for one. You know, "Hey it's easy, (North East) Flotsam Place is that short street half way up the block on Jetsam Terrace (North East)." Right.
But hey, Dave is going to be among us for a while. Neat-O. Welcome to the center of the Universe, Dave. Yes, you should change your datelines to Pacific Daylight Time. It goes with the place, you know? And it honors us that you're here.
What else? Well, there's a great Barnes & Noble in the University Village, but then you might as well go to the University District and all of the used bookstores plus the University Bookstore itself, a college community and fascinating restaurants. Scott is right, people in the know can get everywhere without hardly ever stepping onto the Interstates which is where the other people park and use their cell phones to lobby for more, wider, smoother roads from the taxes they vote to cut. You thought Boston politics was interesting? Be prepared for a gentle introduction to paralysis by initiative. (The monorail project somehow snuck past folks who expected it to fail and now they can't figure out how to sabotage it.) You're staying inside the free-fare zone and the within-Seattle transit system works quite well, no matter what Alex Steffen says. Have fun. It's a funky place and many people refuse to be anywhere else.
"Rain City" was the imaginative name given to Seattle as an alternate-universe location for a weirdly-interesting flick with Kris Kristofferson, Keith Carradine, and a wonderful French actress whose name I never remember.
posted by orcmid
at 9/13/2004 09:32:40 AM
