Skyline
Before he goes, I hug F; he says, "Good luck to you." We laugh, because what else can you do?
From the Pine Box to Queen Anne, I reckon I have a forty minute walk to process what I'm seeing: a hateful, racist, sexist demagogue is on the verge of claiming the state apparatus. The collateral around this, though, twenty minutes in, is what hits hardest: the nation's legislative body will bow to kiss the ring. The limbs of the judicial corpus will be amputated; replaced with a twisted arm here, a gangrenous leg there. The rot will linger for a decade, and more. I give a cigarette to a man rapping on a skateboard; a twenty to a homeless woman sobbing on the sidewalk. I see a couple locked in an embrace. Five blocks away, I look back and they're still there, shoulders shaking. I flick a dozen cigarette butts into the gutter, because what can you do? It's tempting to assign blame, but what this is, is ancient and hungry and jealous, and names fail it.
You can't see the stars in the city. If you don't know the streets, you navigate by landmarks. I walk by the Amazon biospheres; in year or two, it'll be filled with greens, and tended to with blissful ignorance. The rest of us can look from the outside, at least. I walk by the Tesla dealer, gleaming chrome. Men in suits leave a bar, somehow laughing: they could go to Canada, one says. They could. And then there's the rest. The ones we can quantify, and the ones we can't. The losses that we can never know. The Space Needle is to the west. I follow it to the center of the city, my home.