BOY IN BONDAGE

You were tied to a table in the studio where the NoSafeWord podcast is recorded. Apparently that's a thing with the locally produced and wildly popular gay BDSM/kink podcast: There's always a boy tied to the table in the recording studio during recording sessions. You seemed like a nice boy—does your mother know what you get up to on a Sunday night?

EAVESDROPPING AT THE PANAMA HOTEL TEA & COFFEE HOUSE

We heard you talking to a friend on Sunday at the Panama Hotel Tea & Coffee House. You explained to her that you had plans to go on a date that had been arranged online. Online dating was not, you said to your friend with a touch of snobbery, your thing. But your mother, who wants to rediscover love, and who also thinks you have been single for too long, thought it would be just grand if you and she tried it out together. Your mother had a date later in the week. Your date was the following week, you said. You were thinking about visiting the aquarium with this virtual man, but your friend, who was drinking black coffee, recommended that you instead go with him on the new First Hill Streetcar. It takes riders all the way from the International District to Capitol Hill, she said, and there are lots of things to do there: bars, restaurants, great people-watching. First Hill Streetcar is no good if you are running late, but it's excellent if you are meeting a potential lover.

CHILLY SCENES OF FATHERHOOD, GREEN LAKE EDITION

It was a gray, chilly weekend morning. Your son was struggling mightily with his Rollerblading lesson. You, a bearded, middle-aged dad, were walking on the path around Green Lake with him. He looked about 8 years old. You held his hand and pulled him alongside you as he tried to skate forward. But he lost his balance and collapsed, feet splaying out in opposite directions. He looked up at you, tired and frustrated, and pleaded for you to stop the lesson. You looked down at him, and, still holding his hand, roughly pulled him back up and onto his skates. Rather than offer words of encouragement, you gruffly ordered him to keep going. He began to cry.

SCREAMING CHILD AT LITTLE SI

Were you wearing a puffy vest? An oversize red stocking cap, or maybe a yellow one? Gloves or no gloves? It was impossible to tell. Your family was surrounding you at the base of Little Si, obscuring you from view. They were trying to calm you down, trying to reassure you. It's only a mountain, child. Only a metaphor for the assailable. A living museum of nature's boring wars—boulder vs. gravity, oak vs. pine, dachshund vs. sudden incline. But with the regularity of an ambulance siren, your cries pierced the air. You could see the moss-lined playground for what it really was: a long afternoon with your own family.

TAI CHI IN THE INTERNATIONAL DISTRICT

On a brisk but bright Monday afternoon, you, a man in you 80s, were sitting and sunning yourself at the International Children's Park in the International District. Your eyes were closed and you were perfectly still as happy children scampered past you, squealing. Fifteen minutes after we noticed you, you stood up and began doing tai chi, your quiet, slow, and graceful movements punctuated only by the sounds of your deep breathing. Your arms seemed to dictate the force of the breeze that blew across our face. After a few minutes, you resumed your seated position and closed your eyes. A little girl toddled past you as she left the park, stopping to wave bye-bye. Somehow, magically, in spite your eyes being closed, you smiled at her and waved back.

FROM FOOD STAMPS TO CEO

You—a younger man and an older man—were sitting at a table in the cozy underground fireside room of Cherry Street Coffee in Pioneer Square on a recent Thursday morning. "I did a year of food stamps," the younger man said, adding, "That's not easy." The older man chuckled and said, oh, he'd been there, ha-ha. "A long time ago, of course," the older man added. After talking about market positions and core businesses, the younger man reassured the older man, "I'm a tech guy. I just fell into the CEO position."

YOUNG AT HEART IN WEST SEATTLE

At Youngstown Cultural Arts Center on Saturday night, you—a bearded man in your 50s or 60s—were the only one dancing to Timm Mason's eerie set of abstract electronic music and to Don McGreevy's powerful symphony, The Temporal Nature of Stability, which is a solemn orchestral meditation about oblivious citizens of Pripyat being poisoned during the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear-plant disaster. Your liquid-limbed hippie moves were wildly inappropriate and distracting, but points to you for not giving a fuck what people think.

NOT RACIST

"I'm not racist," you confidently told a companion at a party full of white people playing folk instruments. Well, in that case.