The View from a Drawbridge

Category: My Jacksonville to Seattle Do Over

  • Shoe Shock

    Recently I was downtown, and while there, I decided to visit the Nordstrom department store. Not that I needed or wanted to buy anything. It’s just that I’d never been in one before. I figured at the very least, it would have cool Christmas decorations. So, in I went. And I quickly discovered why I’d…

  • Bring Us Some Figgy Pudding

    Have you ever really thought about the lyrics to We Wish You a Merry Christmas? The carolers demand figgy pudding, and say they won’t go until they get some. Granted, it used to be a tradition for carolers to be fed when they performed at rich people’s houses, but still, that’s a little pushy, don’t…

  • The Milk Bar

    Once upon a time in Jacksonville, Florida, the hippest venue in the entire city was a place called the Milk Bar on Adams Street. It’s no longer there. That’s a shame. It’s sort of my white whale. Just so we’re clear: I’m not hip. I never was. And the ship has long since sailed that…

  • Weather Weirdness

    Moving to the Seattle area has been quite the education in more ways than one. For instance, I lived in Florida for so many (too many) decades that I assumed that weather worked the same way everywhere. Not that everyone had the pleasure of the unbearable heat and oppressive humidity that we experienced there 11…

  • The Pansy Connection

    “Is there anything of mine that you’d like when I die? Tell me now, so I can make note of it,” my sister said. (Not that she’s going anywhere anytime soon, I hope, but yeah, it never hurts to have all your funerial ducks in a row.) “Just the pansy picture,” I replied. “As a…

  • Nature’s Personality

    When I lived in Florida, I avoided nature at all costs. For me it was a place of spiders and snakes and mosquitoes and lightning strikes and fire ants and tornadoes and floods and, increasingly, forest fires. You couldn’t even jump into a pile of leaves for the scorpions. (How does one get through childhood…

  • Violence Radius

    A friend just sent me a link to an article about a man who had been stabbed to death in a park in Florida. I was horrified. For 27 years I owned a house not more than 50 yards from the scene of the crime. If I had still been living there, I could very well…

  • Facebook Drops a Bomb

    Recently I got an e-mail from Facebook. “Today is Chuck’s birthday! Let him know you’re thinking about him!” A better question would be, when am I not thinking about him? Since his death my life hasn’t been the same. Were it not for Facebook I might have made it through that day without the occasional…

  • A New Take on the Seattle Freeze

    Moving to Seattle is the best thing I’ve ever done. I love it here. I’m fairly sure I’ll never completely fit in, though. But then, I don’t suppose I did in Florida, either. After being confused by mixed signals for a couple months, I finally learned about the Seattle Freeze. In one blog entry, before…

  • My Own Personal Pleasantville

    For those of you who are unfamiliar with the movie “Pleasantville”, I highly recommend it. A boy from the 1990’s is obsessed with a sitcom from the 1950’s called Pleasantville. It’s your typical show of that era, showing a world that never actually existed, in black and white, where the mother wears pearls and high…