Backtrack

Of course there are worse things than backtracking along a route you’ve travelled earlier— global climate change, child abuse, country rock, getting hit by a bus—and since, as the ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, famously reminds us, you can never step into the same river twice, therefore, there really is no backtracking, (it’s always forward-tracking even if you’re revisiting the same path); it really is silly to complain about instances of the dreaded “out and back” that legendary Point83 wayfarer, the sorely-missed Joeball, himself, usually made it a point to eschew; moreover, when the route is plotted out, more or less, by another legendary wayfarer, you probably should just embrace the direction whatever it is without being grumpy, even in jest.

However.

You can’t deny that once you’ve ridden by or past somewhere that it’s even more delightful to find a different way onward, especially if the way there affords you a spectacular view of the handiwork of the simulation designers, who, once again, here in final throes of summer, are pulling out all the stops to make things so very pleasing to the eye, that you can’t help thinking they’ve gone a bit overboard once more with the lavender mountain, the perfect crescent moon, and all ferry boats on the water just for show.

A perfectly-timed timed flat gives you something to do while drinking beer and chatting at the well-lighted park structure beneath the technological marvel that spans our fair city’s industrial artery and since the time spent and intoxicants ingested mean that your mind is no longer in the same place as it was an hour or so earlier, the way back is no longer the way there after all.

Which just goes to show that no matter how many times you do the same thing, it’s never the same.  Like those indigenous faces projected on the city park leaves, a slight breath of wind, a single fallen leaf, and it’s all brand new.

Sparkle

Shirtsleeve weather all evening on the last Thursday of summer; a pleasant ride featuring a different route to Beacon Hill; a cheery little fire overlooking our fair city’s industrial core; and getting rousted out of a gathering spot for “trespassing” only once.

But, of course, the big story in town wasn’t this, but, rather, the stadium concert of Queen Bey, which filled downtown with silver sparkle aplenty (and which you could hear all the way from Jefferson Park when there wasn’t a plane overhead or an eighteen-wheeler using its compression brakes on I-5).

Wow. Words fail.

Ceaseless

This quote, pulled from the Northern Light, the 16-page in-house Christmas 1934 publication for Northern Light Insurance: “‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new.’ How better exemplified is the law of ceaseless change than in the long road traveled from cave to skyscraper?”

Yep.  

Back in 1929, when the Northern Life Tower opened its doors to the public, the new art-deco skyscraper must have seemed like the perfect exemplification of Seattle’s ceaselessly changing landscape and an ideal illustration of how far our fair city had come from the aspirations embodied in its older, slightly taller, sister, the Smith Tower, whose neoclassical design would have appeared appallingly dated in comparison to the new building’s distinctive, ziggurat exterior, clad in thirty-three shades of brick designed to effect a gradient which lightens from the bottom to the apogee of the building.

Nowadays, you get a similar feeling for the impermanence of all existence when you stand atop the never-before-assayed tight-spiral parking garage as the sun turns a few wispy clouds golden while viewing the nearly hundred year-old building and reflect upon the imminent demise of a not nearly as impressive physical structure soon to be swept aside by our condominium overlords, a rumination that does, at least, provide a plan for where to go next, which is, after all, just what you’re hoping for from the present most of the time.

You’ve got to keep moving if you’re to get anywhere, especially when there are deadlines to be met and, as it turned out, just the right balance between forward and sideways was effected to make the preferred mode of crossing over possible.

Sunset Hill Park, lovely as always, was really more about the moonrise and how the lunar corona expanded like heavenly watercolors across the sky as Earth’s satellite ballooned upwards.

And then it was off to the aforementioned doomed water(wheel)ing hole.  Still there for now, but soon to changeth, yielding place to new.

Yep.