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Years ago, when the Society was founded in an apartment above a bar on Polk Street, leaving the city was not an option.
The city was everything, what was not contained there I didn’t need.

It was true, until it wasn’t, and everything I came to require was prone to rot and had a name I didn’t know. Where I needed Beaux-Arts cornices, now it is the wet smell of wood, mushrooms blooming fungal details no less architectural. I still defend cities against less loving neighbors who consider them dangerous and dirty, but my relationship with the city of Seattle compels me to leave it again and again.

What does this mean for reportage of the Tenderloin Geographic Society? The missives will perhaps be more sporadic. I have a few months to determine whether the site stays or goes, and in the meantime, I commit to memory the Latin names of wildflowers and work on spotting birds of prey by the complaints of crows.
That I knew I’d have to learn the language of place was never in doubt, but somehow I forgot the rule of acquiring a new tongue: nothing means what you think it will. 

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After nearly a week in San Francisco, there is much to consider. Strangely enough, I came across the last Urbane Studies column I wrote for SFist.com tonight, while getting together some old files. 

I suppose I would have liked to have rewritten it, the beginning seeming to have come out breathlessly impatient to tell some truth. And so it is, the latter part of it speaks a truth that is as close as I probably ever came to what I wanted to say about how I felt about having loved and lived in that great city, only to learn that I needed to leave it. 

Writing is dissimulation, and even when I said what I meant, I relied on the complicity of a wordy disguise. Few I worked with knew what I did, and still fewer know as time and distance multiply. After my own fashion, I don’t often re-read what I’ve done, but I want to know that it still means what I meant it to mean.
What else can you hope for, if you’re writing your way out of town?

This is, as ever, the Ouroboros: go to the end to find my beginning. 

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I’m honored to be a guest on BFF.fm’s Burrito Justice radio Tuesday, February 24, at noon. 

Possible topics of conversation:

What happened, San Francisco?
Burrito bowls of Seattle.
Tunnel boring machines as sea monsters.
What life’s really like in the former Shingle Capital of the World.
It doesn’t rain all the time and you don’t have to go to Starbucks.

Please, feel free to suggest/or ask questions via twitter.  

The following is a response to a piece published by the Seattle Times.To say that you are shaped by weather is to say that you are rock worn down by rain and salt. To claim your right to a canopy of trees is to deny that this is where gravity loses its hold as Boeing projects us further, faster. To say that no one else has purchase on this place, taken from others, is equivalent to licking your finger and squawking “Mine, mine, mine!” as you ruin a plate of party cookies. You, a native son whose sense of familial gravity was such that you never left, deny anyone could ever know what it is to be a native. And so it is: in my native place, transplants, excited to have moved to the city of their dreams, marveled that such a mythical city could produce children. “You are so lucky,” they declared, unflinching in their love of adopted place. And I was happy for them, and still I left. Now on my third city, I find Seattle not unlike a third bowl of porridge: just right. What you cannot know is the immense pleasure of being an outsider, of smelling the sweetness of this place for the first time, and how that lingering softness of forest floor and ozone from a first rain never leaves one’s blood. How, despite spending years in a far colder place, Seattle is moderate, with actual summers in lieu of chilling fog that sends the trees dripping fat drops. There is no forecast for such rain, and so when you leave the house on a sunny day you wear no fewer than three layers lest someone take you for a tourist who has overestimated the famous west coast sun. This, your screed, does not take into account the asylum that Seattle has provided for refugees from around the world. Forgive my Cambodian friend who cannot make it out to scale Rainier, he works six days of the week and never quite took to the weather despite his 30 or so years here. Speeches about character being built through labor are delivered by those who would have you believe that this is true simply because they say it is so: a sort of syllogistic abracadabra. This founding myth, one that keeps about as well as salmon in hot weather, is one that I know well. My great-grandparents made Seattle their home at the turn of the last century, and I’ve long had run of the Pacific Northwest before settling here. And yet, I am not a native: happily so. I bring something entirely different, and as a city is its people, I am glad that I can bring a scorn for provincialism and a hope that those of us who have seen what went wrong in other cities can see it go right here. So like a rock may you remain, and the weather of which you are so profoundly proud to have withstood will, in time, wear you down. A chip the size of an old-growth conifer on your shoulder, may you bear witness as your city is overrun by change. And so I hope it never ends, because when our city stops changing, we meet our end.   
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The following is a response to a piece published by the Seattle Times.

To say that you are shaped by weather is to say that you are rock worn down by rain and salt. To claim your right to a canopy of trees is to deny that this is where gravity loses its hold as Boeing projects us further, faster. To say that no one else has purchase on this place, taken from others, is equivalent to licking your finger and squawking “Mine, mine, mine!” as you ruin a plate of party cookies.

You, a native son whose sense of familial gravity was such that you never left, deny anyone could ever know what it is to be a native.

And so it is: in my native place, transplants, excited to have moved to the city of their dreams, marveled that such a mythical city could produce children.

“You are so lucky,” they declared, unflinching in their love of adopted place.

And I was happy for them, and still I left. Now on my third city, I find Seattle not unlike a third bowl of porridge: just right.

What you cannot know is the immense pleasure of being an outsider, of smelling the sweetness of this place for the first time, and how that lingering softness of forest floor and ozone from a first rain never leaves one’s blood. How, despite spending years in a far colder place, Seattle is moderate, with actual summers in lieu of chilling fog that sends the trees dripping fat drops. There is no forecast for such rain, and so when you leave the house on a sunny day you wear no fewer than three layers lest someone take you for a tourist who has overestimated the famous west coast sun.

This, your screed, does not take into account the asylum that Seattle has provided for refugees from around the world. Forgive my Cambodian friend who cannot make it out to scale Rainier, he works six days of the week and never quite took to the weather despite his 30 or so years here.

Speeches about character being built through labor are delivered by those who would have you believe that this is true simply because they say it is so: a sort of syllogistic abracadabra.

This founding myth, one that keeps about as well as salmon in hot weather, is one that I know well. My great-grandparents made Seattle their home at the turn of the last century, and I’ve long had run of the Pacific Northwest before settling here. And yet, I am not a native: happily so. I bring something entirely different, and as a city is its people, I am glad that I can bring a scorn for provincialism and a hope that those of us who have seen what went wrong in other cities can see it go right here.

So like a rock may you remain, and the weather of which you are so profoundly proud to have withstood will, in time, wear you down. A chip the size of an old-growth conifer on your shoulder, may you bear witness as your city is overrun by change.

And so I hope it never ends, because when our city stops changing, we meet our end.   

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Our reasons for wanting a time machine ought to be banal enough to make us human, motivated by some memory that we recall imperfectly, stupidly, wrongly.
To go back to that–for what? The smell of wet summer asphalt and feckless, drifting days. It would be a waste of time, space, and whatever else. And so what? 

We ought to remember that to be human is to be banal, such that every so often, rising out of funk and dumbness, we are something else entirely and do not even know what.

As anyone with an inbox can attest, misused language abounds, and misunderstanding follows. Much of this misunderstanding, Pinker says, flows from what he calls “the Curse of Knowledge”—the writer’s difficulty in conceiving what it’s like for readers not to know something she knows. He’s referring mainly to jargon, shorthand, and specialized vocabulary, the use of which he calls the “single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose.” This seemed to me a great oversimplification until I asked someone I’d just met what he did for a living. He said he was “managing director, digital” at a public relations firm.
“I don’t really know what that means.”
“I’m a digital and social-media strategist,” he explained. “I deliver programs, products, and strategies to our corporate clients across the spectrum of communications functions.”
“Sorry to be a doofus, but pretend I’m ten years old. What do you do all day? ”
“I teach big companies how to use Facebook.”
http://thewalrus.ca/why-good-people-write-bad-prose/