Let's begin in Little Italy. I'm in a bar called the Spring Lounge. It's small, woody, and very boozy. The man next to me recognizes that I'm not a regular. He knows I'm from out of town. "Where are you from?" he asks. I tell him, "Seattle, which is presently freezing." New York City is 50 degrees F; Seattle is 15 degrees F. The New Yorker, who is familiar with Seattle, thinks I'm bullshitting, checks his phone, and is shocked to find that I'm saying it like it is. Yes, this is the coldest it has been in 30 years. Yes, this is the world we now live in: the end of the stable Holocene and the beginning of the unstable Capitalocene (also called, incorrectly, the Anthropocene—capitalism is not a part of human nature; it's historical and cultural). 

The following day, my plane, 737 Max (more about that in another post), landed at Sea-Tac Airport. Getting out of the plane took forever. The airport's Green Line North Train Loop tram was easy enough to find, but something was up when my partner and I arrived at its doors. Pipes somewhere in the airport had snapped. The D Gates exit was closed. We had to go to C Gates and climb up several flights of steps. Make sense of the confusion. Find the hard signs to Link's station. The plane landed at 8:30 pm; we were on a Columbia City-bound train at 11:20 pm.

But the story does not end there.

MLK Day—the day it was reported that more pipes snapped in Sea-Tac airport and "flooded the baggage claim area"—was pretty cold, but not as cold as Sunday or Saturday. Things were warming up. But, at the same time, stories of flooding, and brown flooding, were rising. 

And:

And:

And:

That cold-snapped pipe did not make the news. It was next to my crib. It thawed and cracked on January 16. Seattle Public Utilities was called to turn off the main source of water, but they were too swamped to promptly deal with my emergency. I was not the only one in this situation. Sea-Tac, Seattle University, and Angry Beaver were joined by flooding in homes and apartments all over the city. And so it is. We got a glimpse of the future that we're already trapped in, like light that has entered the event horizon of a black hole. We are all going into the Capitalocene. There is no going back. Once fully inside of it, life on this planet for the large-scale organisms (insects to mammals) will be radically different.

If this cold snap tells us anything meaningful, it is that we have, in Seattle, an infrastructure that's not at all prepared for what will become normal: extreme weather events. We are instead worried about pleasing the business community, enforcing "public safety," punishing taggers, and the like. We vote as if we are not experiencing violent and unprecedented swings in the weather. This bewitchment finds its expression in the key concerns of our elected officials, which are unified by one concern: high and endless economic growth. We want to dream as if the Holocene is not done and gone. This is the council and City Hall we now have. And yet, our infrastructure is not at all prepared for the kind of environment that's really emerging from 300 years of unchecked economic growth.