Beyoncé and Mariah Carey are still making hits, the Seattle Mariners remain mediocre, and you can continue to tune into new episodes of The Simpsons on a regular basis Sunday nights during the school year.
But lots has changed, too: there are way more flavors of Cheetos than back in the “Aughts”; you never saw a radio-controlled flying drone lift off the ground vertically and soar over Elliot Bay in those days; and the Seattle Big Wheel didn’t dominate the downtown shoreline of our fair city, whereas the viaduct, may it rest in peace, did.
Jack Block park was there then and already provided its unsurpassed view of the Seattle skyline, (almost equaled, we’ve learned, however, by the vista provided from the pedestrian bridge over Harbor Island’s main thoroughfare), although its shoreline wasn’t, at that time, accessible to humans (other than those like the legendary Daniel Featherhead, who was able to fly down and up from it—just like a drone!)
Nevertheless, seventeen years later, there’s still nothing like being out on your bike, during a perfect summer evening in Seattle, with pink clouds turning orange and red to the west, drinking beer and smoking weed, telling lies and doubting claims, just as you did verging on two decades ago, before the iPhone even came out and back when people still believed the US Supreme Court was a legitimate component of our government’s famous system of “check and balances.”
I hadn’t even hit the half-century mark that first time I ever stood on the magnificent concrete platform suspended about the Superfund site, and yet now, at closer to seventy than sixty years of age, I still delight at way it vibrates when those mighty cables are shaken.
Quantum physics—or maybe just South Park—tells us that time is an illusion; past and future don’t exist, there’s only the present and my, what a gift it is!
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