Then and Now
After seventeen years after I moved to Washington State with my sister, I’m recovered from a skull based chordoma tumor and cancer treatment, living on a small budget, stuck, surrounded by people who do drugs, hate planet earth and the world and locked up in an apartment with nowhere to visit, no restaurants to eat big meals and a long story about how I got here, now.
Assaulted twice, nearly killed/murdered by a pedophilic man and smashed by a couple African men looking to give pain for relief from this nightmarish city called Seattle.
There’s no longer rain to smile at, girls to flirt with in public and only internet and social groups the size of stadiums to philosophize about on a pandemic day in March, 2020.
People are walking, driving, laughing and taking their animals out for a bathroom break.
And not much on the news these days.
World and earth don’t have stars and planets in the sky anymore. Now there’s climate change, black clothes activists and a daily Battle In Seattle, with homeless people using walkways as toilets and littering booze and drugs on sidewalks.
Children walk around with phones next to their parents, directing city life, food options and deciding how their simulation should look, visually and how it should sound in public places.
I could have stayed in Arizona and been having more fun playing Sim City in a coffee shop by a lake in Chandler, visiting my friend Audrey and getting fat on whipped cream drinks and too many plates of Mexican food.
But unless your wealthy, socially brilliant and a real charmer, Seattle and Washington State keep people like me here, now, locked up with their monkeys and caged next to their rat experiments at the local college.
Margaritas, driving into ditches and sunburns were more exciting then this part of the country, where the USA could get a person beat unconscious and possibly senseless said out loud.
After a while, life elsewhere only appears as pictures and images and videos on a technology device and smells of friends and chow and too much alcohol and beer are no longer available.
People walk by my apartment home all the time — men and women — with loud words and strong voices.
I mostly lie in bed and hear birds, itching and scratching from bed bugs and strange noises next door.
No heat.
Nobody.
And no one.
Who remembers record shops, buffets, endless food, yelling and cheering, clean pavement, intelligence and wit, humor, cooking and cleaning and a beautiful, awesome place called Seattle, WA before politics and big tech took over and hired all the young people from everywhere and decided culture and language mattered more than conversation and mistakes.
A long pause, always keeps me from having too much energy to waste, though, and awareness for all the gosh darn genius in the trees, buildings, roadways, pot shops and takeout ethnic food places.
Slowly, but surely steady I’m learning silence and absolute quiet, to stay safe and not be depressed in this horrid, desolate and scorched dirt filled ocean of beards, women and thirty eight hundred thousand letters for names and faces and bicycles.