So it’s Sunday night, June 10th, and I’m sitting on the veranda outside my brother Ken’s apartment in Seattle. The rain is falling steadily outside, and the trees beyond the veranda are wet and heavy.
I’ve been visiting the city for 22 days now, and I’ve had an absolutely incredible time. I’ve chilled out a ton with my brother, and we’ve taken incredible day trips to the foothills of the Cascade Mountains in beautiful Washington State.
We’ve also had a lot of great meals, from conveyor belt sushi, which is a thrilling culinary experience, to gourmet hipster Chinese food, to awesome Vietnamese. I also made my firstr homemade pizza in twelve years last night, with an assist from my brother, and it came out great. So it’s been a bonanza of sensory pleasures for the palate.
Seattle really is a food mecca. It’s also a music mecca. And an art mecca. And an activism mecca. An easier way of saying it is that it’s just a really great city.
I’ve also gotten a good amount of work done for my website, genxchronicle.com. I’ve published the first two parts of a three-part series about Ken and my trips to the Cascades, and the third installment will be out soon.
I’m really psyched about that. So much of my writing is set in New York City, where I live, which is great. But it’s got all the hallmarks of Northeast stories, from the tight living spaces to the public transportation travails to the vast inequality and wealth of the major East Coast cities.
Seattle has all of that too, don’t get me wrong. But it’s also got wide-open spaces, vast mountains surrounding it, a beautiful bay in Puget sound, and some of the greenest urban spaces I’ve ever seen in America.
The public parks here in Seattle are absolutely beautiful. Capitol Hill, the neighborhood where I’m staying, and where my brother lives, is overflowing with tall trees and a wide array of flowers on every street. For this Queens boy, it’s like the Garden of Eden.
Seattle is also an epicenter of gay culture in America. A lot of the activism and energy emanates from Capitol Hill, so that’s cool too.
Because where I live in Astoria, Queens, it’s rare to see two men or two women holding hands as they walk down the street. It’s a working-class, hard-edged, immigrant neighborhood that’s slowly starting to gentrify.
But in Capitol Hill, you see all genders and persuasions locking arms and walking hand in hand through the streets, and it really warms your heart.
It also scares me, because I grew up in NYC in the 80’s, which was a rough and tumble time for the city. As kids we would regularly call each other “fag” or “faggot” as a pejorative.
To be gay was to be weird, to be a loser, and to be an outcast.
But times have changed. As much as my upbringing taught me to fear the unknown, as I’ve gotten older I’ve come to accept and embrace difference more. So good for you on the LGBTQ movement, Seattle. Progress is slow, but it does advance, and you’re a great example of that.
The last really cool thing about my trip is that I got to hang out with a lot of cats. My brother Ken has an awesome cat named Phoebe, and she and I have had a bunch of petting love fests. And at the condo where I was house sitting for two weeks, there were two cats that I took care of, Doodle, a male, and Lola, a female. They were totally awesome.
Doodle was the more social cat, but just before I moved over to my brother’s place, Lola let me pet her too, and that was great.
Now I’m heading back to New York in two days, and I’ll get to see my own beautiful cat Copper, who I miss dearly. So that will be cool.
All in all, it’s just been a terrific trip. It was a wonderful break from the buzz and the noise and the stress of New York City.
So thank you Seattle, you’ve been good to me.
You’re welcome in my city anytime.
