…but here high atop MISC World HQ we’re sitting high-N-dry, watching the rain and flooding footage on cable, avoiding anything to do with the World Series, and pondering what kind of age we live in that finds both Rush Limbaugh and Courtney Love popping the same drugs.

A new Jack in the Box commercial begins with the guy in a plastic clown head (allegedly voiced by Matt Frewer) in a damp, dark forest setting, in front of a crew of dingy, ponytailed hackey-sack players. As the rain beads up on his plastic face, he announces the fast food chain’s new “Northwest chicken salad.” Halfway through the ad copy, the clown realizes a mistake. Cut to a cue-card holder who says “Sorry dude.” Cut to a hastily revised cue card now reading “Southwest chicken salad.” Instantly the scene changes to a bright, sunny playa. Instead of the hackey-sackers, there’s an energetic marimba band.

This is no way for the San Diego, CA-based chain to treat our region. First they kill some of us, then they insult us.

…ever-so-slightly longer, but it still feels like early winter around here, socio-psychologically. Everywhere you look around these parts, there’s bad news.

Chubby & Tubby finally closes this week.

Fallout Records, the feisty indie music and zine store that supported the print MISC since its relaunch three years ago, is shutting down next month.

The Paradox Theater, which mounted underage rock gigs for the past three and a half years (at the old University Theater, where yr. web editor once promoted some silly little B-movie matinees), is shutting down this weekend; though its operators promise to promote all-ages shows at other sites.

The gorgeous streamlined ferry boat Kalakala is in danger of being sold out-of-state without a quick massive arrival of restoration funds.

Dozens more of Seattle’s most talented creative people are splitting town, including two of the print MISC’s most valued past contributors.

Boeing, now essentially a branch-plant operation of McDonnell-Douglas, continues to churn out massive layoffs while starting up a job-blackmail scheme in which its three or four production cities will surely be asked to pay subsidies for the right to have the company’s next passenger-plane assembly operation.

Even mind-numbing shit jobs are being lost in vast numbers across the local economy. Nearly 2,000 telemarketers have been canned in Washington, as various companies consolidate their “call centers” into low-wage states (or countries). And word has it that computer programming, seen only eight years ago as THE profession of the century, risks becoming a dead-end career, as big corporations ship whole information-tech departments off to India and Singapore.

The politicians around here are playing a game of one-downsmanship, each striving to combine the most brutal cuts against programs to aid the poor with the most pious public apologies for same.

Personally, I’ve gone from underemployed to unemployed. I only get sleep one night out of every three (no I don’t know why). I’ve felt like giving up the daily grind of submitting resumes to everybody in town, for jobs I don’t even want. But I don’t know what to give it up for.

And, of course, the national political/economic situation is as sorry as it’s been since at least the early Watergate era.

Maybe the Erotic Art Festival tomorrow at Town Hall can bring at least a little bit of life/hope back to the memescape.

THIS, MY FRIENDS, is an unretouched, un-Photoshopped snapshot of the south entrance to Northgate from behind a car windshield during today’s torrential downpour, which helped cause a half-dozen or more crashes along an I-5 that got backed up for about seven miles. But unlike most of our rainstorms, this one did its thang then went away, leaving sunny skies and 54-degree temps (warm enough to melt snow in the mountains, leading to big flood potentialities in the lowlands.)

…the real start of autumn in the GreatNW. Before long, there’ll be as little as eight and a half hours of daylight—and even when there is daylight, there won’t be much of it.

I luuvv what other folks think of as Seasonal Affective Disorder season. The air is crisp. The light is diffuse. An overriding blanket of gray hovers over everything like a half-comforting, half-smothering blanket. It’s the closest you can come in the Lower 48 to Alaska’s wintertime “midday moon.”

It’s time to break out the sweaters, scarves, boots, and long coats.

Time to spend long nights and short mornings cuddling for warmth, or to spend short afternoons and long evenings in cozy gathering places in search of a co-cuddler.

Time for cocoa, mochas, hot buttered rums, and red wine.

Time for thick oatmeal, toasted foccacia sandwiches, stew, chili, lasagne, teriyaki bowls, and roasted veggies.

Time for bright interior colors and dimmer switches turned up to 11.

Time for video-viewing marathons, group dinners, and house parties.

Time for basketball, ice skating, bowling, skiing, and pool. Time for home beer-brewing, bookshelf-building, book-writing, and political organizing.

Time to reconnect with what makes each of us truly human.

…was celebrated all over town on Sunday. Hundreds of bibliophiles prepared for the long indoor season ahead at the semiannual Friends of the Seattle Public Library book sale, held at a former Sand Point naval-air hangar. (This is also where Northwest Bookfest is moving next month.)

Nearby in Magnuson Park’s no-leash beach, local dog owners gave their pets one last vigorous round of wet exercise.

Also nearby, Magnuson’s public-art collection of military submarine diving-plane tails, arranged to resemble orca fins, might just help one remember the sacrifices incurred in past wars, and thus help one resolve to try to prevent future carnages.

But let’s return, for now, to celebrating the equinox. A fairly large crowd gathered at Gas Works Park to do so, under the auspices of Seattle Peace Concerts. Hundreds paid varying degrees of attention to an all-day lineup of “blooze” music (you know, that music that’s sorta like blues, only all-white and all-aggressive).

Hundreds of others sipped, chatted, and danced at the second Fremont Oktoberfest. Some of my favorite current local acts (Peter Parker, the Beehives) performed, along with an all-polka afternoon slate.

But serious autumnal responsibilities waited just outside the beer garden, with a street-poster reminder of the monumental tasks ahead of us.

(Thanx and a hat tip to loyal reader Stephen Cook for research help on this piece.)

AFTER TWO DAYS official threats/promises, the ultra-rare March snow came to Seattle Thursday night. It was bee-yoo-tee-ful. I was out in it on my regular First Thursday gallery crawl, and saw the city itself become a temporary art installation, an arrangement of pointillist streaks and abstracted white textures. Of course it didn’t last; it never does. But during the mini-storm’s eight-hour life, it was a mini-vacation from dreary late-winter reality.

EARLIER THAT EVENING, I attended the release party for the Spring issue of Arcade, the Northwest’s regional architecture-design journal.

I knew some of my Signifying Nothing images would be in it, in de-colorized form. I was pleasantly surprised that one of them made the cover! The thing’s available for $6 at the Elliott Bay Book Co., Peter Miller Books, and a few other select outlets.

They were partying like it’s 1999 again last Friday when another WTO protest march took place. This one didn’t directly connote the anniversary of the Seattle trade-meeting debacle but rather noted this year’s meeting in Qatar, a land that doesn’t let such foolishness as freedom or democracy get in the way of making deals and bucks.

Of course, here in the U.S. it’s quite harder these days to demonize something with “World Trade” in its name, without giving an audience all sorts of other unfortunate memories. Thus the banner proclaiming WTC and WTO to be equally disastrous. The rest of the visuals in the march rehashed common protest topics not directly related to word trade (the Iraq sanctions, the drug war, and, of course, Mumia Abu-Jamal).

They’ve torn down the Flag Plaza Pavilion at Seattle Center. Another of the Center’s dwindling inventory of 1962 World’s Fair buildings, it hosted everything from cat shows and rave parties to the touring King Tut artifact show. Bulldozers are now at work preparing the lot for the replacement, Fisher Pavilion (KOMO’s parent company bought the naming rights).

The comforting sights of the Standard Time rainy season in the great PacNW include those of kids defiantly playing at the Center’s International Fountain and a Metro bus’s unwiped windshield portion glistening in another vehicle’s taillight.

My ex-Floridian neighbor across the hall, who is wont to ring my doorbell at assorted hours for assorted reasons, rang early Thursday morning.

“Do you KNOW what it is outside?” she proclaimed with baited breath.

“It’s AUTUMN!!

“Do you KNOW how long it’s been since I experienced autumn? Fifteen YEARS! The air is so crisp and biting. It’s not hot. The leaves are becoming beautiful. It’s amazing. You’ve got to appreciate it.”

And I hope you appreciate it as well.

THE NEWSPAPER HEADLINES and the TV special-report titles were full of gross overgeneralizations about the entire nation’s mood: “America Heals.” “A Nation Years for Normality.” “Country Demands Action.”

I’ve got a gross overgeneralization of my own to offer: America Wants an Aspirin and a Hot Water Bottle.

AUTUMNAL CLOUDS and cool temperatures arrived Sunday, and are quite welcome. Don’t like it? Go to Florida.

DAVID LETTERMAN GAVE an amazing eight-minute speech tonight, on his first new show since the attacks. It was the most consistently sincere moment of his 20-year hosting career, and may indeed have signaled the end of the Age of Irony.

Dan Rather’s on with Letterman as I write this, and he’s giving a brutally pro-war sermon, pleading with the nation to gird its collective loins and gather the “staying power” to unquestioningly support whatever follows, including ground-troop invasions in multiple countries. That, he claims, will prove the nation’s mettle. As you may have discerned, I have a slightly different belief–that following the same path and strategy for years on end, no matter the results or lack of results, is one of the the Vietnam debacle’s top contributing factors.

I’m recalling the last lines of Letterman’s opening speech, in which he said the most important thing anyone can have is courage. It’ll take courage to call for a less visceral, more thoughtful response to the terror–not because we don’t support our country but because we do, and we want it to do the right thing.

In the usually-brightest part of an unusually glaringly bright year, three days of rain and low overcast made a most welcome appearance this week. So comfy, so refreshing, so fresh-scented. The diffused light, the soft colors of everything, the relaxing heaviness of the air. Don’t like it? Go to Albuquerque.

ELSEWHERE:

Rock stars reviewed according to their reported sexual prowess. (Found by Pop Culture Junk Mail.)

AT FIRST, I’d not planned to mention rain in my new Seattle picture book. It’s a cliche, I thought; the topic of too many cutesy-wootsy “jokes” in newspaper living-section columns and dorky greeting cards.

Then something happened. The rain went away, and stayed away most of this past winter.

Dunno ’bout any of you, but I came to miss it. Without the rain and the overcast, winter in Seattle is merely a slightly warmer version of winter in Liverpool.

It was as if all the changes wrought upon the city in recent years had altered not just its economy, its ethnography, and its cost of living but its very climate. All became bright, sometimes glaringly so.

Our usual, predictable seasonal-affective-disorder season got supplanted by nine-hour days of Technicolor brilliance interrupting fifteen-hour nights of crisp (but above freezing), starry skies. Instead of the grim, fatalist aesthetic of Cobain, Lynda Barry, and Ray Carver, we had a cheery, thought-free, go-for-it look and feeling better suited to techno music, glass art, and demographically-correct magazines. (Too bad the economy couldn’t keep up with the sunny disposition, particularly those once high-flyin’ tech companies.)

It was a disconcerting experience for someone accustomed, both psychologically and physiologically, to spending week after week under the low silver canopy of overcast (which inspired the surreal image of a giant indoor city in Stacey Levine’s novel Dra-).

The main salient feature of western PacNW rain isn’t really the precipitation. It certainly isn’t the volume of downpour, which even in an average year is less than NYC and several other big cities. It’s the dim, diffused light that makes going from indoors to out seem like those early Masterpiece Theatre shows where the interiors were in brightly-lit video and the exteriors were in drab 16mm film. (On a heavily overcast day, my new digital still camera insists on flash outdoors at high noon). It’s the lo-visibility “grey-out” conditions on the water. It’s the water-torture drip drip drip. It’s the mildewy scent that gets in your clothes and never goes away.

This past week, the drizzle came back, at least for a few days. Not enough to relieve the alarmingly low levels in our hydroelectric lakes, but enough to remind us what it’s like.

NEXT: Millions are reading and writing more than they ever did before. That’s supposed to be bad?

ELSEWHERE:

• What, you expect to always get tons-O cool shit on the Net for free?…
• Could the movies be an innately right-wing medium? (found by Arts & Letters Daily)….

IT’S BEEN A WILD COUPLE OF WEEKS for many of us. So today, something lighter, from my forthcoming Seattle photo book with ace shutter-clicker Lori Lynn Mason.

FOR THE LONGEST TIME, I believed the Interstate Highway System was one of the things that ruined American society in my lifetime.

It destroyed urban neighborhoods, ripped cities’ internal social fabric, and propagated suburban sprawl. It destroyed the glorious creativity that was once roadside America, and instead gave us malls and bland chain motels.

But I’ve more recently learned to like a few things about the freeways, particularly our own I-5. Still not necessarily as a road, but as an engineering feat and a public artwork.

So it was easy to see the idea behind a poster some folks put up around town last year, trying to promote car-free and greener cities. The poster’s illustration of a fantasized post-car future had I-5 still standing (as was the Kingdome), only used for bicycles and P-Patch gardens.

There’s a beauty to the freeway, both graceful and grandiose.

Especially where it rises into the sky, and where its lanes combine and recombine with other highways’ lanes. Such spots include the Spokane Street interchange with the West Seattle freeway, and the almost Greek-ruin-esque pillars west of Capitol Hill.

The freeway’s sheer, outscaled beauty in these places makes one almost forgive its sins.

Almost.

NEXT: Another piece of the Seattle character–its work ethic.

ELSEWHERE:

• Selling Buddhism to hip white Americans: Emphasize the meditation and the personal growth, leave out the religion and the self-discipline….

LONGTIME READERS KNOW one of my regular schticks here is the ode of praise to that rare and precious treat, snow in Seattle.

Yes, I know I could see and play in snow any day from Thanksgiving to Easter (most years) with just a short trek to Snoqualmie Summit. But the whole point of my urban-snow adoration is to have the white stuff here, temporarily reshaping the city’s landscape and its patterns of life and attitude.

Normal life becomes well-nigh impossible. Automotive transportation, the basis of almost all aspects of everyday existence in the western U.S., becomes first risky and then futile.

Throughout the city, children and even adults learn to just forget about whatever they thought was so important and to instead enjoy the evening, the day, the unplanned vacation. The speed and intensity with which ordinary, drudgery-stricken Seattle citizens turn into joyful, heartful, true human beings is truly an astounding thing to behold.

It’s not a raucous, violent energy but a playful one, in which everyone becomes fast friends sharing the spirit of play amid a bright, quiet, serene setting. A city of isolated individuals and families becomes, for one or two days every one or two years, a real community.

So, of course, the local powers that be and their media minions fear and loathe it.

Every winter, the TV newscasts run huge scare-mongering “Snow Alerts” any time there’s even a hint of coldness and precipitation occuring in the Puget Sound basin at the same time. Ninety percent of the time, these alerts prove wrong; leading blow-dried anchorpeople to snicker in “relief” the following evening.

Then, on those rare occasions when snow does fall, and it does stick to the ground, and it does accumulate, the media coverage emphasizes themes of disaster, terror, and major inconveniences.

(One notable exception this time: NorthWest Cable News, which juxtaposed its usual car-crash stories with call-in segments from regional citizens who couldn’t stop saying how beautiful their neighborhoods had become and how much fun they were having.)

But, alas, this momentary interruption of daily drabless with a glimpse of our full potential to live and love is as short-lived as a snowman. And we’re lucky to even have a momentary interruption.

If Seattle had snow more often, or for longer periods of time, the citizenry (and the governments running the region’s street systems) would be better prepared to make car travel, and hence work and everything that goes with it, continue as normal without interference.

Snowstorm 2001 didn’t last for five days like Snowstorm 1990, but it was the biggest, most beautiful Seattle snow in four years. I was out in it until 1:30 Friday morning, because I knew it could start to melt away by midday. Which it did.

But for one exhilarating night and one beautiful day, the city knew what it was like to know play, to know real passion, to know, just for a moment, real life.

NEXT: University Way’s latest crisis.

ELSEWHERE:

• Abandoned images left behind in America’s photo booths….
• “What’s Your Pokename?”…

BEFORE WE BEGIN TODAY, a gracious thanx to all who came to my big event last night at the downtown Seattle Borders Books. Another such event’s coming next Thursday (see below). And, again, apologies to those who couldn’t access this site earlier this morning. (I’ve been assured, again, that it won’t happen again.) But for now…

I CLOSED LAST NIGHT’S SHOW with some aphorisms and words-O-wisdom. Here are some more. (Some of these I’ve used before, on the site or in other scattered writings.)

• The baby boomer bragged about how, when he was younger, he marched and protested to try and save the world. The world listened to the boasts and replied, “That’s all nice, but what have you done for me lately?”
• If we printed fewer poems about trees, we’d have more trees.
• A Libertarian is a Republican who smokes pot.
• I watch TV, I eat meat, I shop at regular grocery stores. I demand the right to not be a hippie. (And that doesn’t mean I’m a Republican.)
• If God didn’t want men to watch TV, He wouldn’t have shaped the corners of the screen like a woman’s shoulders.
• Women aren’t just equal to men; men are equal to women too.
• Women and men are just about equally ignorant of one another; but the men are a little more likely to admit it.
• Everybody’s ignorant about something.
• Just about everybody’s beautiful when naked. It’s just that some bodies are better made for wearing clothes than others. But our great-grandchildren will have see-thru, microchip-controlled force fields to keep the air around their bodies warm and dry, so they won’t need to bother with this dilemma.
• People have been having sex since before you were born.
• Everybody loves black music as long as it’s at least 20 years old and performed by white people.
• For 23 years, the picture-postcard view of downtown Seattle from Alki Beach has been of a bookshelf of office towers, bookended by the Space Needle and the Kingdome (both of which were reproduced as Jim Beam bottles you could theoretically use for real bookends). When the Dome goes, that nearly-symmetrical image will go too. Safeco Field just doesn’t make a good bookend.
• The Mariners keep winning at home! Are they feeding Safeco Field food to the opposing teams or what?
• We can’t afford all the money that’s moving here.
• Science uses big words for the sake of precision. Pseudoscience uses big words for the sake of intimidation. Social science uses big words for the sake of obfuscation.
• If you can’t stand the heat, move to Anchorage.

IF YOU MISSED last night’s wonderful live reading/event, there’s another promo for The Big Book of MISC. next Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there. Aloha.

MONDAY: How can one be “hip” when there are fewer and fewer “squares” to rebel against?

ELSEWHERE: Some of the top cliches in bad erotic writing: “Everyone has a perfect body you could break a brick on…” “All women in a position of authority have secret desires to be submissive…” “Any woman described as having a scientific occupation will invariably be occupied with making her breasts larger…” “No jealousy…”