What I Can Tell You About Seattle Based on the People I’ve Met Who Are From There

SEATTLE IS FUNNY

A few years ago, I worked in New York University’s library and had
friends in New York City who worked mostly as copywriters. We e-mailed
each other in giant e-mail threads each day. Two of the people usually
in the e-mail threads used to live in Seattle. One day, one of them
e-mailed, “When I worked at an ISP in Seattle, I actually had access to
all of our customers’ e-mail accounts. One day, the guy who sat across
from me read Jimmy Kimmel’s e-mail.”

SEATTLE CAUSES PEOPLE
WITH COLLEGE DEGREES TO
GET
NEAR-MINIMUM-WAGE
SERVICE JOBS

About a year ago, a person e-mailed me telling me to read a “story”
he had published in an online magazine. The story was called
“Clichés vs. Concrete Words.” The first sentence was
“Clichés are not as good as concrete words because
clichés leave out information.” The person was 22, his name was
Brandon, and he lived in Seattle. Later, I went to Seattle on a book
tour and Brandon came to my reading. He was working as a copywriter. We
had dinner together. A few months later, I read on his blog that his
contract as a copywriter was over. A few months after that, I read on
his blog that he got a job at a cafe. “I steamed some milk and I shook
the milk around and said look at that milk, look at that milk,” said
his blog. Brandon has a BA in psychology.

SEATTLE DOES NOT HAVE
AN ABNORMAL INFLUENCE
ON MY LIFE
ON THE INTERNET

“Seattle” searched in my Gmail account has 260 results. “Chicago”
has 264 results. “Orlando” has 175 results, and I grew up there.
“Boston” has 217 results. “San Francisco” has 142 results. “Las Vegas”
has 44 results. “Brooklyn” has 727 results, but I live there.

SEATTLE IS ACTUALLY
“DIFFERENT” THAN
OTHER
PLACES

The other person from Seattle in the e-mail threads mentioned above
often said things that didn’t make sense. In one e-mail he said, “I
asked someone from the Onion to write my bio, and then I was
elected president by an army of red ants.” I read his e-mail, clicked
reply, without thinking typed “Go back to Seattle, Shya, if you want,”
and clicked send. If Shya was from anywhere else except maybe Iceland
or Easter Island, I don’t think I would have instinctually typed for
him to “go back,” and for sure would not have typed “if you want,”
which maybe only “works” for Seattle because Seattle seems inherently
like a “choice” whereas other places seem like “condemnations” or
“places impossible to permanently leave.” I’m not sure what I mean by
this.

SEATTLE IS ACTUALLY
“BETTER” THAN ANYWHERE ELSE IN
AMERICA

For some reason I never heard Shya—or anyone else I know from
Seattle—say anything like “In Seattle I would never be attacked
on public transportation” or “If we were in Seattle right now we would
not be playing two-person poker on a Saturday night drunk.” People from
Alabama or Florida or anywhere else seem to always be talking about how
Alabama and Florida are a lot better than wherever they currently are,
I think because they are trying to convince themselves that they were
not “cheated” out of something by growing up in Biflow, Florida. It
isn’t sarcastic at all when someone from Alabama says they wish they
were back in Alabama. But people from Seattle when elsewhere somehow do
not ever try to convince themselves of anything, I think because they
feel like if they say something like “In Seattle my chicken fingers
would never be served raw by accident” it would be like saying “A
poodle is a kind of dog” in that it’s “an accepted fact” to people from
Seattle that Seattle is “better” in the same way that it is “an
accepted fact” that poodles are dogs. Someone would never try to say
that a poodle is a kind of cat.

SEATTLE IS “ADVANCED”

I know someone from the internet from Seattle and he likes the novel
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy a lot. His name is Matthew. I
argued with Matthew on the internet one time. I said The
Moviegoer was melodramatic and did melodramatic things in regard
to existential despair. I met him on my book tour last year. He works
in a bookstore. I’m not sure exactly why, but when I was around him I
felt strongly that he enjoys existential despair a lot. He seemed to be
experiencing existential despair at a higher level than me and to be
almost actually “having fun” with his experience of it. I can’t think
of any concrete details regarding why I felt this way. But it makes me
think that Seattle is from the future, because I feel like in the
future people will strive for existential despair, for more fulfilling
and purer kinds of existential despair, in the same way people in
Brooklyn strive for an apartment closer to the L train. This makes
sense because existential despair is usually talked about in books and
people in Seattle read books more than people in other places.

SEATTLE IS “DISTURBING”

One night on my two-day book tour in Seattle, I was walking with
Brandon and we saw a man and a woman straddling a windowsill off the
third floor of an apartment. Half their bodies were outside the
building and they were “making out.” This made me say something about
how the only way the man and woman could “feel aroused” anymore was to
have half their bodies in the air 30 feet above the ground. Which made
Brandon say something about a Bret Easton Ellis novel. Which made me
think about people secretly going around torturing and murdering people
and tying people with rope in bedrooms and filming it. Which made me
feel like that was what was happening all the time in Seattle.

SEATTLE IS HARD TO THINK
DIRECTLY ABOUT AFTER
YOU’VE
BEEN THERE

On my book tour, I read in two stores in Seattle. People said that
to get to the other store I needed to take a bus to “the other side” of
Seattle. When I looked at a map, I saw two parts. I felt surprised.
There were two main parts and I understood that I needed to take a bus
across an “irrelevant” area in order to reach “the other part of
Seattle.” After that, I sometimes realized—while chewing food,
staring at something, listening to a person speak to me, or
whatever—that I was thinking things like “I wonder what the other
part of Seattle is doing right now,” as if “the other part of Seattle”
were an interesting friend. It was distracting me from thinking about
other things, things that could lead to actual results in concrete
reality (rather than further alienating me from humanity), but I really
felt curious somehow and so kept thinking about it. Now, when I think
about Seattle, I start thinking about Nirvana or Tom Hanks or
something, then my brain interrupts with “Which Seattle, the one part
or the other part?” My brain does not distinguish or visualize either
part, there are not even abstractions that I associate with either
part, but somehow this still happens. And my thoughts about Seattle
stop there. It seems very hard—too hard—at this point in my
life (or maybe I just don’t “want” to do it) to think beyond “which
Seattle?”

PEOPLE IN SEATTLE ARE BORED RELATIVE TO NEW YORK CITY

I was the only reader at Elliott Bay Book Company and maybe 50
people came. I was confused, sort of. In New York City, usually 10 to
15 people come when there’s two or three readers. One time I had a
reading with Tony O’Neill in Manhattan at 2:00 p.m. on a Saturday and
one person came. I was wearing a bear suit and Tony O’Neill and I stood
on the sidewalk outside the bar and Tony said things like: “Poetry in
here. Free event. Bear reads poetry. Bear reads great poetry. Suicidal
bear on… on Viagra reading poetry. Poetry. Bears and poetry. It’s
free. Bears, poetry. Bear reads poetry. In here. It’s free.” No one
came in the bar. No one even stopped walking on the sidewalk. I was
wearing a full-body bear suit.

SEATTLE PUTS “READING” ABOVE ALL OTHER THINGS

I was walking near the downtown Seattle Public Library and felt
strongly that it was the “center” of everything in Seattle. I went
inside the library and my feelings were confirmed. I felt really
intelligent and existentially superior while inside the library,
talking on Gmail chat on a public computer, walking around taking
cell-phone pictures of red walls. I had the feeling I could look out
the window and see the rest of the city, from a “bird’s-eye view,”
though this was not true, there was not an elevated area that I knew of
where I could do that like I might from the Empire State Building.
Still, walking on the street toward the library, I felt that I was
“nearing” the “epicenter” of Seattle, and walking away from the library
I felt like I was leaving behind the “main activity” of my day.

OBESITY ISN’T A PROBLEM
IN SEATTLE

People in Seattle seem less obese. I felt little or no intimations
of obesity while there and I don’t know anyone from there who is obese
or even overweight. In Brooklyn, it is difficult for me to view anyone
as “not obese or overweight.” In Brooklyn, people seem “beat down” and
“made obese” by unseen forces, whereas in Seattle people seem
“strengthened” by some kind of aura of well-being emanating maybe from
the downtown library. People in New York City eat at Taco Bell a lot;
people in Seattle are knowledgeable about not mixing food groups. On my
book tour, I had dinner with someone who talked about fasting every six
months. I can’t remember ever having dinner with someone in New York
City who viewed “fasting” as a possibility.

SEATTLE IS SARCASTIC
ABOUT SPORTS

When I watched baseball as a child, I always felt strange when I saw
the Seattle Mariners on TV. I wasn’t sure then why I felt strange, but
now I think I know. I think it’s just that the blue uniforms they used
to have made it seem like they were “merely screwing around.” The blue
uniforms, in combination with being called the Mariners, made me feel
strongly that they actually wanted to be playing Marco Polo in a
swimming pool but were forced into professional baseball and so wore
blue uniforms to “continue the dream” of “screwing around” in a
swimming pool for five hours every day with no responsibilities. Ken
Griffey Jr. was a Mariner then and he seemed to be the perfect example
of what I just typed about. He seemed to always be trying really hard
at being good at baseball which to me only conveyed that he was
distracting himself really hard from thoughts about wishing he lived in
a special world where each day you woke up, played games in a swimming
pool with other adults, ate dinner, played more games in a swimming
pool, and went to sleep.

SEATTLE TRICKS PEOPLE

When I make myself think concretely about Seattle, I get an image of
a 12-year-old Native American boy reading a Sherman Alexie story
collection in a Starbucks and it’s raining outside, then I seriously
think, “The harsh reality of growing up in Seattle. Seems bad. Hard.”
But if I think abstractly about Seattle, I feel a strange emotion like
I’m currently living in a clean, well-furnished house with expensive
electronic equipment in Tennessee in May by a small river on a green
hill with no other houses nearby and that I have a steady cash flow and
am working on multiple projects each day with a lot of excitement and
no obligations. It feels really good and the opposite of hard. So
“Seattle” abstractly means to me something like “basking in the
sunlight of overwhelming gratitude for life and art” but concretely
means to me something like “feeling like there’s no possible routes for
escaping a life of poverty and alcoholism while staring at sentences
written by Sherman Alexie in an environment of people shouting things
like ‘quadruple soy latte.'” I don’t know. I feel “tricked.”

LIVING IN SEATTLE HAS AN
“INSANE” EFFECT ON
SOME
PEOPLE

I feel that if I moved to Seattle, I would stop writing completely,
not use the internet, and do something “insane” like dedicate my life
to looking at barnacles very closely but without microscopes or any
other magnifying device. There would be no purpose to the activity. I
would do it every day. I know I feel this sincerely because when I
think about it I feel emotional. A barnacle would eat me and Werner
Herzog would make a documentary probably called Barnacle and
in interviews say, “The insane effects of the barnacles of Seattle are
inexplicable, yet it is not necessary to probe into the ecstatic truths
of Tao Lin’s sudden attraction toward barnacles.”

LIVING IN SEATTLE HAS
A “REFRESHING” EFFECT ON WHAT BOOKS
PEOPLE WRITE

Currently I write short books about depressed people experiencing
problems with human relationships while “fighting” “various things”
like “meaninglessness” and “despair.” If I moved to Seattle, my next
book would probably be 1,000 pages about “one seagull’s journey from
religious abstinence to occasional, discerning, and safe sex with close
friends.” I don’t know, I think it would sell a lot of copies. I’m not
just making a joke. I really feel I might create something like that if
I lived in an “urbane” apartment in Seattle.

SEATTLE IS IMMUNE TO
“REAL” DESPAIR

I feel like most people in Seattle have “given up on life” due to a
comprehensive knowledge about existentialism but in a “good” way that
doesn’t feel bad at all. They wake up, go to work copywriting shampoo
advertisements, go home, lie in fetal positions facing the back of
their sofas, and feel beautiful and existentially awesome. I can
successfully transpose existential despair onto any city, but when I do
it to Seattle something happens and it becomes “really good” somehow. I
think Kafka would have “thrived” in Seattle and written something like
seven 800-page novels about the happiness of crippling loneliness with
titles like Helvetica Font and The Seattle Public Library
Is Beautiful and The Joy of Existential Non Well-Being.
The passage from Ronald Hayman’s biography of Kafka that reads, “One
Saturday evening [Kafka’s sister] came home from the shop to find
[Kafka] sitting on the sofa, staring blankly in front of him. Aware he
had been eating very little, she asked whether he was going to have
supper, but he did not answer, and they just stared at each other,”
would instead read “One Saturday afternoon [Kafka’s sister] came home
from Elliott Bay Book Company to find [Kafka] standing on the sofa,
smiling widely with his arms out in a kind of ecstasy. Aware he had
just published his fifth 800-page novel, Freedom in Capital Letters
with 19 Exclamation Points After It, she asked whether or not he
had seen review copies yet, but he did not answer, and they just
grinned at each other a lot.” The passage, from the same book, that
reads, “[Kafka] decided to write a frank letter to [his
fiancée’s father], and show it to [his fiancée] before
sending it. It would explain how, for about 10 years, he had been
increasingly aware of lacking the sense of well-being most people had.
Her father might like to recommend a doctor who would examine him and
report on his findings,” would read, “[Kafka] decided to write an
800-page novel about how happy he felt that something like ‘bagels’
existed, and show it to [his editor at Knopf]. The novel would explain
how, for his entire life, he had been very happy. [His editor at Knopf]
might give him a $2,000,000 advance and let him design the cover
himself.”

PEOPLE IN SEATTLE
HAVE CHOADS

When I think about Seattle, I think about people who are very
professional and clean and intelligent going home to apartments where
everything is in Helvetica font. When they take off their pants, they
have choads. A choad is a penis whose width is the same as its length.
Having choads makes them think less about sex and focus more on
creating beautiful streets and buildings and drinking coffee and
subscribing to literary journals. I think in environments of a lot of
coffee, lower levels of poverty than average, and higher subscription
rates to obscure literary journals people start having choads. It feels
logical somehow.