Smells Like Teen Spirit

So many times I can remember sitting, drugged out of my gourd, on a living room couch in my teen angst trying to decipher to lyrics of Kurt Cobain, thanking God for afflicting this slim fop of a musical genius with a Springsteen- esque constipation problem that made his singing voice sound like church to me.

More times than not, I would roll joints on that same living room couch thanking God for bestowing that same affliction onto the brooding Adonis-like frame of Eddie Vedder, whose trance like bellowing and psychotic blue eyes made my knees weak.

A handful of times, I sat, high on whatever was passed to me, staring at a Soundgarden album cover, swaying to the biblical melodies that emanated from behind that same living room couch, and wondering why God made Chris Cornell so ugly.

Maybe it was the drugs. Maybe it was my toxic and dysfunctional upbringing.

It was probably the drugs, though.

To be lucky enough to be a teenager during the moment in musical history when Seattle sounds inundated MTV’s monopoly on young teen minds was to be a musical maverick- it was to be a self appointed music critic, turning up one’s newly pubescent nose to “poppy” sell out bullshit (fuck you, Snow- nobody knows what the fuck “Informer” was about anyway-you are not Vanilla Ice!) and instead, luxuriating in hard edged, plaid shit clad movement music, whose message was nonconformity, replete with hairy pitted, anarchy loving, high cheerleaders who became the new video vixens for a generation of stoners who were precariously situated between generation X and generation what the fuck ever.

Dock Martins. Chokers. VHS copies of the movies SINGLES and HEATHERS.

It was a good time.

Or maybe it was the drugs.

The friends I had when I was this age were like me, young and naive and hurt, trying to navigate their way through life parentless, or at least, lacking basic parental guidance and love. We were each other’s parents.

Drugs were our love.

The music was our home.

We would follow our ostracized gay friends to the peer by the West Side Highway and sing Morrissey and Odyssey songs and wrap ourselves in our plaid shirts and kick Doc Martin boots together and pretend we were the center of the universe because for a time, we were.
This was the primary reason why I wanted to make Seattle my next stop on my endless arbitrary venture across this crazy country.

Seattle. The evergreen city in the burning state. The final hand in the time zone clock. The last shift.

One thing that took me by surprise when I entered the city is the sun. It was still early enough before it had gone down, and because of the time shift, I was on top of it. Entering a city before the sun goes down has become an obscure blessing to me on this trip and I greatly appreciated it. And Seattle was a real city- replete with Starbucks and traffic and parking meters and real radio stations. Yay!!!

It was like home, only nestled in a bed of evergreen trees and fog.

But this time, the sun was out, I was surprised, I had always heard of Seattle being this sunless haven for gingers, like Ireland with better food.

I drove into the city and was really tired, my stint in Indian country made me tired and stinky and somewhat constipated since I was subsisting on a diet of truck stop beef jerky and Smart water.

When I got into town, I passed a graffiti’d up mural of Scott Weiland. I checked into a hotel on the corner of Oh My God and Holy Shit.
Even though the place was pretty much in Skid Row, it was beautiful. It was right in the middle of Japan town, where most of the urban Asian live. There were people outside doing Tai Chi, and some just sitting on benches meditating. And homeless.

Lots of homeless.

They were really nice though, they said hi, waved, and didn’t show me their penises like the homeless in New York.

I unpacked listening to PLUSH from the pathetic speakers of my laptop. I wondered what ever happened to my Doc Martins from high school, and if I should stop somewhere in Seattle and buy another pair, just for shits and giggles.

I stepped out into the city with a newfound bravado that made me walk like a jock looking for a fight. I found it soothing, even though after about 2 blocks I realized I was scaring old people and the meek homeless.

There was a Starbucks on practically every corner of Seattle. I camped in one, and like the pretentious assholes I always made fun of at home; I ordered a latte and plugged in my computer to write my blog.

I was posted up by the peer- Seattle sits upon a beautiful river that is green and calm, lo lying and provides a beautiful vantage to the city goers who travel around. I looked out the window and saw the Space Needle and a sign for Mt Rainer in the distance.

The smoky sky looked like a movie ending. Seattle was calm and chill, much like its people, and the horizon added to the allure of this sleepy city. The laid back nature of the beautiful homeless made the city seem like a Disney movie at eh end of a bong. And it made me hungry.

I passed a restaurant on my way back to Skid Row that boasted of the best crab in the world. Dungeness crab, apparently one of the things the city is famous for.

I ordered some, as well as 6 oysters on a half shell. This was the first real meal I had since I left home. It was amazing. The crab was served chilled, which is what they do here. The oysters were sweet and sublime. I sat outside and watched the sun tuck itself into a balmy night. The music started slowly and steadily, like hypnosis. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from, it was all around me. All around downtown.

When I left the restaurant I headed towards the water again. There is a park right before the peer, with more homeless, nice, no dick showing homeless.

I came upon a group of teenagers sitting down, smoking weed, drinking, listening to BLACK HOLE SUN on a boom box situated under a sleepy pit-bull with a black bandana around his neck. He belonged to one of them, but was treated like he was loved by all. It was like he was the homeless teen mascot. I sat and watched these children. It was an washed crew of about 11- 5 girls, 6 boys, about half of them looked slightly brown, one of them was fully Black, none of them really looked like me, but that didn’t stop me from feeling like I was looking in a mirror. These children were all teenagers, fiercely in love with each other, deep into an angst that drew them away from their toxic home lives, into the arms of one another. One boy, who liked like an Indian was recounting the story of why he left his home in Indiana. He was arrested for drug possession and did a bid in county for 7 months. When he was released, he couldn’t even get his driver’s license in Indiana (apparently, you really need a driver’s license in Indiana to function) so he left and came west. His girlfriend, whom he met on these streets, was born and raised in Seattle. She made it so he never wanted to leave. He put his arm around her and kissed her like she held the only oxygen he was bred to breathe. Teenage angst love. The kind of love that rules all your decisions, and fuels all your poetry. The benchmark for all your future heartbreak. They reminded of how I would hold onto my friends at that age, and listen to Morrissey’s THERE IS A LIGHT THAT NEVER GOES OUT in the dark, high on that same living room couch. I stood there and listened to Soundgarden play, giving their beautiful little world a soundtrack that sounded so familiar to the one I claimed when I was their age. Seattle had evoked within me a deep and warm sense of nostalgia. I sat with them on that pier and I was 17 again also, fretting the prying flashlights of cops, taking tokes of mystery joints, closing my eyes and swaying to Chris Cornell’s art. Yet there I was staring them down, dissecting them like they were subjects in a fucked up experiment. This was not the spirit of angst. This was just my geriatric ass trying to create a moment. So I backed away. Slowly, I can only imagine because of the strange old Black lady with the camera, the young people got up from the park and moved on. I let them leave without saying a word, just a smile- my way of showing them that some old people do get it. I guess they didn’t want to see it. They were too wrapped up in each other. And the music.

When I walked back to my hotel, a nice homeless woman told me that she liked my sweater, and that I should be careful walking these streets alone.

“A young girl like you shouldn’t be alone out here.”

I thanked her and watched her go back to sleep in the park with the rest of her tribe, who welcomed her with open dirty blankets.

I got back to my room and got into bed, and felt completely alone, until I turned on my computer and listened to IN UTERO and fell asleep, dreaming about being 17 again. I suppose it was seeing the young people. I suppose it was being jetlagged from the time difference. I suppose it was a lot of things. But sleep didn’t come easy that night.