What I Can Tell You About Seattle by TAO LIN

There is this article in The Stranger right now by some crazy poet about what he thinks of Seattle. You should seriously read the whole thing, but here are some excerpts:

• But it makes me think that Seattle is from the future, because I feel like in the future people will strive for existential despair, for more fulfilling and purer kinds of existential despair, in the same way people in Brooklyn strive for an apartment closer to the L train. This makes sense because existential despair is usually talked about in books and people in Seattle read books more than people in other places.

• People in New York City eat at Taco Bell a lot; people in Seattle are knowledgeable about not mixing food groups.

• When I make myself think concretely about Seattle, I get an image of a 12-year-old Native American boy reading a Sherman Alexie story collection in a Starbucks and it's raining outside, then I seriously think, "The harsh reality of growing up in Seattle. Seems bad. Hard."

• I feel that if I moved to Seattle, I would stop writing completely, not use the internet, and do something "insane" like dedicate my life to looking at barnacles very closely but without microscopes or any other magnifying device.

• I feel like most people in Seattle have "given up on life" due to a comprehensive knowledge about existentialism but in a "good" way that doesn't feel bad at all.

• When I think about Seattle, I think about people who are very professional and clean and intelligent going home to apartments where everything is in Helvetica font. When they take off their pants, they have choads.

Body of War

I've been a little behind in my podcast watching, so it was just this morning that I saw Bill Moyers interview the people who made a documentary called Body of War about a guy named Thomas Young who was shot while fighting in Iraq and is now severely paralyzed. They showed some clips from the movie during the interview and there was this one part that really got to me where mothers who had lost their sons in Iraq were touching Thomas' face and telling him they were so glad he he was alive and Thomas' own mother was crying and talking about how overwhelmed she was and I started crying on the bus. It wasn't the first time I've cried on the bus and it probably won't be the last, but still. I don't think about the war enough.