Dreaming of Seattle...

Not too long ago I would hop on a plane or take a twenty hour drive up the 5 to Seattle and man, do I miss those days.  I would walk around Pike's Market and window shop...I would get a slice of pizza in Pioneer Square...and I would sit and visit with Jimi Hendrix (well his grave).  I walked in the rain and sat in the sun off Lake Washington.  There is really only one word to describe Seattle and that is MAGIC!

My Favorite Magic Store in Pioneer Square on the Right

When I was nine years old I remember laying out on our old worn out gold shag carpet and in a spiral notebook that I had I wrote out my life, well my life the way I hoped it would turn out.  At the age of eighteen I was on my way to Seattle, well according to this plan.  So nine years later you would think that I would have been filling out applications to Seattle University or University of Washington...nope...that didn't exactly happen.  As a matter of fact my first pilgrimage to Seattle did not take place until I was twenty years old.  I remember I was there for about five days and every day I would take a bus into a different part of town.  I went into the U District one day, even got off and went on a campus tour of University of Washington.  I went into Bellevue the next day...even made my way to the outskirts of Everette.  My first time in the city I felt like I belonged there, I had this sense of direction and this feeling of safety - that I wasn't a tourist, it was like I was home.

Every year I made my way up there, even if it were just for a night or five, Seattle seemed to have this hold on me, it is almost like it called out for me.

The last year that I was there that feeling became different.  I was on my annual visit but I noticed that things didn't look as green, that the streets were a little more desolate, and the music scene was not the way I had left it from the year before.  The bar I usually went to in Pioneer Square to see live bands was now a club.  In fact most of the bars there had been converted into clubs.  My pizza place was closed and the people on the streets just seemed so different.  For the first time I really felt out of place.  I thought about it for a while and I thought about what my initial pull was to the city, and I figured out it was Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Singles, Alice in Chains and Soundgarden.  Well, Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley were dead, Soundgarden was broken up and Pearl Jam hadn't put out an album in some time.  Could it be that the "magic" was now gone?

For some time I felt that way.  I stopped making my yearly trip, the last time I was there was back in 2007.  But lately, and I am sure that it has a lot to do with the non-stop rain we have experienced lately, I have felt that pull...that call from Seattle.  It seems to be growing stronger on a daily basis and I am pretty sure that I will be back in my old town within the next six months.  I just hope that some of the magic has returned, whether it needed to be reignited in the city itself or it needed to come from me, I just want to walk in Pioneer Square...have some pizza and just promise that "We will always go out dancing!"

Pioneer Square

What Today Sounds Like:

"Hey, Hey, Hey" - 4 Non Blondes

"Nearly Lost You" - Screaming Trees

"State Love and Trust" - Pearl Jam

"Oh Me" (Unplugged) - Nirvana

"Revenge" - Danger Mouse and Sparkle Horse

"Thorn in My Pride" - The Black Crowes

"Soul One" - Blind Melon