Pioneer Square, I Think I Love You

Rounding the corner to my job near Seattle’s Pioneer Square, I slip on:

A) A pile of poop.
B) A puddle of bum puke.
C) A used condom.

The answer could easily be “A”. In most places you might assume a pile of poop on the sidewalk was created by a dog. Not so, around here. With the high number of homeless in the area, every pile is questionable.

“B” is also a good possibility. One time, while walking to the bank, a wobbly man ahead of me leans over and begins to violently empty the contents of his stomach all over the sidewalk. “Oh nice,” I say out loud, half-disgusted, half-amused. I think he’s done but he staggers a few steps and begins again, this time bracing himself against the building wall next to him. I can’t believe a human being’s stomach can hold so much. The vomit just keeps on coming like some gastrointestinal clown car. As I pass him I notice that the vomit looks just the way I’d imagine a wino’s puke should look: a 90/10 ratio of liquid to solid matter.

If you answered “C” you would be correct. I slipped on a used condom. I was mortified. Partly by the condom and partly by the accompanying image that formed in my mind. That of two pasty-bodied, Seattlites in the throws of passion; their creased, tattooed rolls of fat rippling as they really lay into each another. I tried to shut the picture out of my mind but, by some psychological law, whatever you focus on expands. The idea was only magnified and permanently etched in my memory banks. Typically, in my imagination, it’s only good looking people that have sex. But thanks to this event, my horizons were expanded. I basked in the glow of cultural enrichment.

That’s the beauty of Pioneer Square. In this, Seattle’s oldest and most storied part of town, there’s no telling what surprising delights a day might hold for you. Here, I never tire of seeing things that either astonish or confuse. Such as a few weeks ago, when I saw an otherwise normal looking man punching a tree.

Take a typical lunchtime outing. On the first summer-ish day Seattle had in 6 months, the kind of day that makes you remember you actually choose to live here versus feeling sentenced to it, I wander two blocks over to Occidental Park (also known as Crackhead Park) where, to my joy, a man and a woman are performing live music. I buy a sandwich at a nearby café and grab a table to listen.

The guy on the guitar is ‘singing’ Jimmy Buffet completely out of key. He’s easily fifty and chunky. Hair in a ponytail, the bald on top kind, wearing high, cut-off jeans shorts and an unfortunately snug tie-dye t-shirt. A sort of dispossessed IT guy.

The woman on the mic next to him wears thick glasses and has deep lines in her skin. Her gray hair in pig-tails dangling from under a worn sailor’s cap. She’s singing back-up to ‘Margaritaville’ and rattling a shaker out of time, the wrinkly excess skin under her arms flapping wildly.

The two sound horrible. Really. They’re completely awful. But I’m loving every moment. What the duo lack in talent, they more than make up for with that elusive quality that not everyone appreciates: character. Were it two virtuosos performing, I’d likely soon forget them. I’ve seen enough technically proficient, mechanically precise performances over the years. But these two, singing their hearts out, missed notes and all, I’ll remember these guys.

Perfectionism and cleanliness have their place, don’t get me wrong; viruses aren’t as likely to grow in hospitals because of them, and that’s good thing. But an absence of dirt isn’t always appealing. I’ve worked with 3-D animators over the years who’ve told me about the great pains they take to purposefully create visual imperfections in the characters and scenery they design. The eye, they tell me, sees the smooth, pristine shapes drawn by computers as unpleasing. Cold, anitseptic and off-putting. It takes untold hours and detailed craftsmanship for someone to go over the images, ‘messing things up’, enough to where they feel natural.

In the same way, new cities that don’t have the occasional dumpy bar or hole in the wall café, suffer from a lack of personality. Drive cross-country and you’ll see hundreds of small towns that look like carbon copies of each other. Oh, look, there’s a Chili’s and an Olive Garden. A Home Depot and a Walmart, just where you’d expect them to be. It’s the same when you walk into a middle-tier hotel room and you know exactly where the light switches will be, and all the pictures look familiar. A formula exists that’s been tried, tested, refined and established. In newer towns, unique environments are rejected in favor of mass produced chains because a mediocre but predictable consistency has proven to be profitable. It’s only the rare businessman who wants to gamble on something with individuality.

Nothing grows in a sterile environment and I think that goes for my children as well. While I surely desire a safe neighborhood for my children, I worry that the lifestyle of my three boys on Mercer Island, where they’re among children of Ferrari driving Microsoft elites, comes with a great cost. The small concern is that my children won’t develop an appreciation for character, the larger concern is that they’ll learn to fear it. Like when I overheard my oldest son’s friend say, “David, you’re going to Ballard? I don’t know, man, that place is pretty sketchy.” I’ve heard Ballard described as ‘artsy’, sometimes ‘hip’, but ‘sketchy’? It was just the sort of comment you might expect from a kid who’s grown up cloistered in an affluent, white ghetto.

I don’t want my boys lobotomized by the scalpels of comfort, convenience, and contentment. I worry that if they aren’t exposed to a broader range of life experiences, they’ll grow up aspiring to live in cookie-cutter homes and lead cookie-cutter lives. That they’ll love wearing khakis, listening to classic rock and hanging out with guys named Chad. I fear that they’ll develop a particular brand of white, suburban angst that I find ridiculous – the kind that, while in the car, hastily fumbles for door-locks at the approach of a black man in a business suit.

I take my boys downtown as much as possible in an attempt to counteract the anaesthetizing effects of suburban life. We’ll stroll through Pioneer Square and they’ll nervously hold my hands; pulling closer to me they'll whisper, “Daddy, who is that man yelling at? There’s nobody there.” Maybe we’ll hit Elliot Bay Books, or grab an obscenely large caramel coated apple from The Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory. Once in a while, we’ll make our way up to the Seattle Art Museum, but the cultural experience my boys get inside SAM never compares to the one they got walking there.

So much of our lives has been pasteurized, made to go down smooth and easy. I’m glad to have a place like Pioneer Square nearby. For me, it’s a welcome protest against all that’s non-offensive and uniformly dull. Sure, walking around might give you the occasional uneasy feeling, and rightly so. It’s gritty and not entirely safe. But it’s also alive and real. Available for the asking. A little touch of Venice Beach, minus the tan.