sleepless, yes

 Oh, didn't he ramble?
Or, six hours in Seattle

The barista is in Marcus Mumford's uniform, the bastard, and it's totally working. I catch his eye through the window and my bag on the chair simultaneously, go down hard in unsalvageable wrought-iron clatter. Oh, balls.

*****

I'm passing the ground-level offices of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. On the sidewalk, two teenage girls in sequined nightclub getup are taking turns posing for an immense photographer whose mass appears to preclude him from shooting from anywhere but his spread-legged seat on a stone bench. "Super cute, Tanya, super cute," he commends the blonde. She is smoldering away obligingly with one gold-bangled hand on what I suppose is her hip. The brunette is making fish faces into a compact. Immediately in front of them all is a large TV installation looping silent footage of Africans wasted with malaria. I'm very confused.

*****

Pike's Place Market, swarming, socks and sandals. There is a guy playing the banjo. Five stalls down, another, with a bigger beard. Across the street, another. His beard is the biggest; he's also hula-hooping as he plays. Now, that's one-upsmanship.

*****

I spend two hours in the Seattle Public Library. It's fucking beautiful.

If you saw me, you saw me thumbing through the Lewis and Clark journals or holding the door for a woman with a stroller or leaning on the folio table with a pencil in my mouth. But I was at the altar, really, of community, curiosity, humanity; I was on my knees.

*****

New game: climb on every statue of Christopher Columbus I can find.

Evidently I'm so averse to solo travel that I latch on to bronze reproductions of the professionals.

*****

Across the runway, the outline of the Olympics cuts a sleepy seismograph across pink blotter-paper sky. The sinking sun quivers behind an invisible plume of jet exhaust.

As the plane taxis, its whirling propellers reflect quick slivers of the sunset at the height of their arc. The blades slow and the slivers widen to glancing gold wedges, then vanish as the plane-comes-to-a-com-plete-stop.