Elsewhere

And now, a little poem for you.

Best experienced if spoken aloud with a French accent and a steady
rhythm. You may also, at your option, imagine a little lounge
electronica as the backing track.

—-

beautiful dragonfly
you see your shadow
you think it’s another one
but it’s just an illusion of you
beautiful dragonfly
you just don’t know
no better

there is a camera, on the corner
of the buildings
watching everything we do
if you fuck up, they will come after you
so don’t fuck up
not today

(refrain)
beautiful dragonfly
it is just an illusion of you
beautiful dragonfly
just don’t fuck up
not today

A beautiful day today, perfect day for a trip to Sequim and the Lavender Festival. Traffic, especially waiting for the ferries,
was pretty gnarly — took us almost 6 hours (!!) for what is, I’d
guess, normally a 3 hour trip. When we arrived there were only 2 hours
left to see the lavender farms before they closed for the day. But that
was enough. And on the way back, taking a slight backroad detour, we
happened upon a mama deer and two fawns, as well as what we think was a
coyote, although it could have been a large brown fox — not sure.
Spotted a couple hawks during the day, too, a surprisingly common site
in the Northwest wilds.

It’s a beautiful little spot.
Evergreen forests everywhere you look, the waters of Puget Sound
nestling against white shores and carving quiet bays into the land, the
Olympic mountains looming in the background, closer than I’d seen them
before. On the ferry ride over, I stood on the bow and felt the warm
sun and brisk marine breeze wash over me as I ogled white-topped Mount
Baker to the north in the Cascades. The highways are two lane ribbons
hidden among the forested hills, the towns are small and historical,
the strip malls are few and far between. We didn’t quite make it to
Port Angeles, but looking at the map, there aren’t any other towns
after it until you get to Forks halfway around the Olympic peninsula,
on the west side of the mountains. Just one lonely highway and lots of
trees and sky.

The sun had just set as the return ferry set
off from Kingston, and the familiar deep blue summer twilight soaked
the sky, stars just beginning to peek through. As we approached
Edmonds, we could just make out the Seattle skyscrapers to the south,
each glowing with a hundred little lighted windows. In fact the entire
shore, north and south and straight ahead, was covered with little
yellow lights. Ah yes — we were returning to the metropolis.

Although it’s prettier and more natural than most others I’ve seen,
it’s still a metropolis; huge highways, bridges, planned suburbs, strip
malls, stoplights and express lanes and HOV (high-occupancy vehicle)
lanes and oh, did I mention on our way up today we witnessed a kid spin
out and flip his old Honda Civic upside down into a ravine on the side
of the highway because he was trying to weave through traffic about
20mph faster than everyone else? And the party kids in the neighboring
building in our apartment complex who like to stay up until 3am on hot
days and play music and drink and throw beer cans in the pool? And…
and…

Whew. Sometimes you need to get a change of scenery for
some perspective. I bet, before the boom of the last few decades, that
this entire area was a lot like Sequim. I actually know someone at work
who is native to western Washington and nothing would please her more
than if all the industry in the area went bust and all the
up-and-comers went back to wherever they came from and left the natives
to enjoy their Northwest without the luxury SUVs and latte chains and
clearcut hillside developments.

After today, I think I completely understand her point of view.

“No more rock ‘n roll music,” he announced in a company-wide voicemail. “It does
not create the kind of atmosphere that we want around here. And a new
dress code requires suit and tie for all employees. We need to make the
IT department respectable again.”

Some corporate goons came around confiscating people’s headphones and iPods. They made me
take down the two small posters of guitars that I have up in my cube.

At an all-IT meeting, the new CIO stood at the front of the room
bandstanding himself. “I’ve brought you all here to tell you my
opinions about how things should be run going forward,” he boomed with
a snarky, smug grin, reveling in his own pomp. Someone in the audience
shouted back (maybe it was me?), “Aren’t you going to ask us our opinions? Don’t you care what we think? It’s our company too! Bring back the rock ‘n roll!” And everyone cheered.