Notes on a Mesoculture

Seattle, October 2016

The heart of downtown is soft white in its sleep. Silence from Steward to Yesler. Shuttered inclines to vacant lots sign off 3rd Avenue from the day’s fits and a lone bus stops with no one to board. Footsteps echo louder than the homeless screams and traffic horns of five hours prior; transplants whisper in their NPR voices as if the city were a courthouse of centuries old marble and all who enter its august gates venture reproach should any dead open their weary eyes. In this white corridor, this Niflheim, the lost are helmed by lamplight, migrating south from the developer’s approach, its monochromatic bootheel— and in its path a dusty tavern where pink haired teens pay to play. They stand on the stage where Cobain once stood, where Staley stood. As if the old gods are hidden in the walls and might join their choruses for the price of admission. They wear safety pins and sing about anarchy to a crowd of two drunks and their parents who set up the drums and Marshall double stack. Their software engineer father is desperate to purge his mind of the algorithmic architecture governing his days, his city, flushing the world with profoundest sterility inviolate even amidst the junkies and needles strewn on the sidewalk. He nods dutifully to the bass beat and searches under the dim lights for a familiar feeling. Drip of serotonin. And for a moment, when an old fuzz pedal smolders the tube amp’s cry, it’s as if by his seed he saved not his youth, some Priapus, not even the mummified remnants of his century, but an eternal transcendent vigor, a noise that lifts, laments, not as threnody of lost time but as the gushing universe heatblood crashing over the divide between all he could ever be and all that he could have been. They park in the bus lane loading up gear, driving home to the morrow’s void and leaving the street in its quiet repose. Two miles off: the home of Saturday night. Middle aged goths dance obscured by lights that pulse to digital drumthroes of 80s darkwave; bodies thin, obscene, sensual alike become one shape, one effluvium, a null and formless genital, fearing the dawn not for its light but its silence: the empty conversations naked without cover of dark, the solemn and solitary walks home. In this city of wakeful passions never acted upon, all dream of better revolutions. And beneath that dreaming: that muse, that milkless mother lays barren, medicated, splayed beneath the pocked streets and dysgenic air where moths chase the city lights to tender desolation.