Fink's Photograph

Take a picture of the most Seattle thing you can, he said. I didn't have my camera, but anyways – a woman in dreads is standing with her pooch companion by her feet. Around her, like budded flowers, are red signs for Kshama Sawant, the popular socialist candidate running for Seattle City Council. Kshama Sawant, Kshama Sawant, Kshama Sawant. The woman plucks from the ground a different red sign, not for Sawant, but one urging voters to strike down prop 522, which demands clear labeling of foods with GMOs. Monsanto is the biggest donator funding the VOTE NO ON 522 campaign, but even their devilish pile of money cannot keep this woman's fingers from tearing their signs into tiny, tiny snowflakes.

On Mercer Island, Before the Interview

The onlookers in Starbucks can only have so many revelations a day, and there I am, wearing a suit and tie and rooting around under a woman's chair for Fleck's dropped copy of Pokémon Gold.

In Montana

In Montana we wake up and Fleck claims to see the face of John Ratzenberger in the folds of the tent.

My Stupid Human Brain

Driving back to my house at night there's a stretch of road with a pond on either side of it and the frogs hop across the asphalt and shine in my headlights like tossed coins catching the sun. I hit one, at least one, and felt bad. Frogs are generally alright. My stupid human brain tried to figure out what lesson or message this incident held for me. The frog must have been traveling from one pond to the other, risking it all in its attempt to get some place new. My stupid human brain started to connect this poor frog to me, the person leaving in several days to buy sandwiches and flannel himself in Seattle. Just as the pieces were falling into place, however, I heard a news blip on the radio about how Grand Theft Auto V made over one billion dollars in three days, and I thought about the idea of a billion, and seeing a billion dollar bills lined up across mattresses in a hotel room, and my stupid human brain had such a hard time imagining a billion, and then imagining a world where, at one second, I was thinking of the portentous frog incident and then, immediately, I was thinking of a billion dollars, that suddenly I was home, at my front door, then my bed, teeth brushed, trying to remember the name of the island in Jurassic Park.

We Wanted to Fight

We wanted to fight, but by the time we rolled up our sleeves and shook the cricks out of our bones we saw that the enemy had no name, no face, no presence at all, so we had no choice but to instead get college degrees.

Dreams

In a dream two nights ago I had an unusually long back hair. When I went to pluck it out, it had the same texture and consistency as a strand of cord. I wanted to spend some time interpreting its meaning, but instead I drew a picture of Carl Gustav Jung playing Ms. Pac-Man. I guess life is a mystery!

Friends

Today I wanted my friends to think I was living a luxurious and enviable life so I called my friend, Bruno. Bruno, I said, a very attractive girl is walking by. I need you to let me pretend I am a very important businessman. Bruno said okay so I started yelling all sorts of things like you see on TV in such situations like Dammit, Jameson, I told them last week that it was a done deal -- whaddya mean they're trying to back out? It's your job to keep them on the line! What do I pay you for? No, it doesn't matter. No. No. Well then you get the man a Fresca and you tell him to batten down the hatches, Jameson! I could tell the girl was very impressed with my obvious eminence and I was happy Bruno was willing to go along with such a charade except TWIST ENDING none of this actually happened and I just stayed at home all day and played video games, ha ha!

Belly Rubs

Do you remember the time Tom Cruise appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show (or maybe it was just called Oprah!) and he made a real heel of himself all jumping up and down on the couch? Today I was sitting on the deck in my backyard drinking coffee and I thought of this very thing and how there must have been an audience for that episode, which means that, out there in the world, there are, like, three hundred people who were all in Oprah's studio watching Tom Cruise jump up and down on a couch and yell crazy things. And the Tom Cruise event got so oddly popular, remember how so many TV channels showed clips of it?, that all those audience members were suddenly part of this monster of a thing they never expected. And I know that out of those audience members, there must still be at least twenty of them that tell people about how you would never believe it but I was there that day, and we all were so shocked to see him like that, he was such a nice-looking young man, you know? At dinner parties, with plates of potato salad and the tots running about grass-staining their knees, talking about being at the Tom Cruise episode of Oprah, like that was a big moment in their lives, maybe even a defining one, and I got so sad thinking about these people telling the story about seeing Tom Cruise jump up and down and say crazy things on Oprah's couch over and over again probably until their dying day, maybe even they tell the story so much that their neighbors have kind of an inside joke, like Hey Doris, Tim doesn't know about the time you went on Oprah, he he, neighbors all exchanging knowing glances as Doris launches into it again, the butt of a joke she doesn't get. What a sad story to tell over and over, I thought, drinking my coffee which was, by now, so infinitely lukewarm I could drink a lot of it really, really quickly, because how inconsequential of an event, this man on the couch. How extraordinarily, just, whatever. Then I took a step outside of myself to realize that I was a just some guy with nothing better to do on a Tuesday afternoon than imagine the sadness of a potentially fictional but likely actual human being forever swept up in a cultural moment that really didn't mean a single thing to anyone, and the whole quasi-post-intellectual-depression of it all made me feel so weirdly lousy and small that I went out into the yard where my seven-year-old beagle, Fiona, was rooting around smelling for rabbits and rolled her over so she was lying on her back and gave her so many belly rubs.