Last week, city council candidate, Iraq vet, and homeless advocate Dorsol Plants played Joan Rivers to regular Cola columnist Dan Bertolet’s Johnny Carson. Dan’s on summer vacation for a few more days, so we’ve lined up another guest host: Grant “Folk Rock“ Cogswell.
I’m not really here.
I am – briefly – for this. I said a bunch about what that’s been like here.
But Josh asked me, as part of of his new thing, to sit in Dan Bertolet’s seat for a few days, or perhaps a few more, and hold this thing down. I’m a little out of touch—I live in Mexico City, and I don’t even know who Dorsol Plants is (but he sounds like someone you don’t want to fuck with)—and as I did with that Stranger piece, I’m writing this exhausted, late at night and way past deadline.
There are a lot of things new around here in just the past year since I last left, it seems.
What I find really immediately thrilling and deeply validating is coming across the little Ethiopian kids who were underfoot ten years ago … grown into big adult people: A new kind of Seattleite, or at least a kind that probably hasn’t been seen in half a century, both completely international in their experience and consciousness, and yet completely rooted in this place. I’m not finding the words, but it makes me almost misty-eyed.
There’s a new mayor, too, and he and his people continue to be something really special, I believe. They are true activists, and they are breaking open what was a closed citadel under everybody up through Nickels—especially Nickels—by genuinely seeking input and town-halling and live-streaming all the damn time.
And every now and then McGinn will come out with the truth we are only settling into: That these are and are going to continue to be the hardest times almost anyone alive has ever seen, and some necessary decisions are going to make a lot of people very unhappy (not least the members of the old guard who burrowed in and sinecured themselves into the deepest reaches of city departments in the last hours of the previous administration)
This mayor is hated by the powerful. Through my Hollywood summer, I’ve skirted those suburban dining rooms where the fate of the city was once decided, and I know their habitues mock him: his beard, his weight, his clothing. Their mockery comes from fear.
Fear—principally, fear of one another—is big in this city, and some softening of those boundaries is going to be necessary to make things work in slender times. We are going to be sharing rides with strangers, eating elbow-to-elbow on the street, making all the needed adjustments people make when they are forced to live on less.
Who doesn’t sense that less is possibly with us now forever?
Where I live now the intimacy that comes from scarcity is everywhere you look. I’ll talk some about that—and how it’s a more pleasant way to live—tomorrow.
