The Northwest, Day 3: Friends and Places

Day 3 started, as most days do, with coffee and quantum physics.

The plan was to check out those Needle-adjacent museums and meet up with the Seattle homie Darwin, and this esoteric cafe was a deterministically inevitable feature of the journey. I had my second latte while wife tracked down Darwin, a person who is notoriously tricky to track down. He'd just returned from a weeks-long vacation in Hawaii, and was likely some combination of asleep, at work, hung over, lost or without a phone.

Museum of Pop Culture

The MoPOP was a wiggly purple koopa shell in the background of our park walk the previous day, and it was no less wiggly once we were through the pipe.

We were transfixed by a five-story video screen blasting k-pop music videos just waiting for the bathroom.

Turn the corner and there's a branching chamber struck through the middle by a towering cyclone of guitars. Take one flanking blacklit passage and you're in a pixelated world of video games, AR, VR, consoles, demos, history and future.

I wanted to get that Seattle music scene experience, and here was the entire transitory existence of Jimi Hendrix, down to his majestic regalia, talismans, and weathered passport, blazoned in a pharaoh's chamber. I think I read every single hieroglyph on the walls and as many of his hand-written diary pages, lyrics, and drawings as I could squint at.

Another room held vestiges and horcruxes of Seattle's native grunge scene. Dozens of battle-scarred instruments and t-shirts, tour memorabilia, Dave Grohl's drum kit, Kurt's cardigan, the list goes on. The seasonal exhibit was a tribute to Prince, and the artwork that people have produced to describe the life of Prince would befit a voodoo temple.

We took a staircase down, down and found a darker passage. The way split in two, and we were offered a sinister lefthand detour, glowing infernal red. Instead we forged ahead into a tunnel of sleek polished metal and glass and blinking lights. The Science Fiction realm.

It was slow going; my mind was blown by every exhibit.

Spock's uniform. The screenplay for Alien, with hand-drawn storyboards. Luke's light-saber and dismembered hand. Actual Sarris from Galaxy Quest. Scripts and props and relics from the entire cinematic history of sci-fi.

That's besides tons of interactive retro-future modules where you can pilot a mid-budget TV spaceship or parse yourself into infinite dimensions of light and space for an IG pic.

Sci-fi gave way to fantasy, and an armory of the weapons of Middle-Earth, the lost & found of Hogwarts, and vintage pieces and tributes to stories that have not yet made the leap from page to screen.

Ok, I was getting caption fatigue by this point. Fortunately, the winding fantasy land led (through a hollow tree) to a gallery of paintings.

I was not prepared to encounter Youthful Brewmaster in a fine art gallery.

Or Deathwing.

Beyond the hollow was a cavern devoted to Magic: The Gathering, more weapons, a sleeping dragon on a golden hoard, and so much more than my feeble mind can hold.

The end of fantasy led naturally to horror, circumnavigating back to the sinister path. It was great, and gruesome, and I failed to take any pictures.

Let's move on, because this was our MORNING. This day was just getting STARTED.

New Character

By now Darwin was waiting for us in the Needle zone, and it didn't take long to spot him; he has always been a vibrant slash of color on an urban canvas.

Lizett met Darwin in a public speaking class at Antelope Valley College. They bonded over the shared absurdity that is Lancaster's 13th grade (ask them to tell you about the hot dog presentation). He's an artist and a Seattle native, and after a morning experiencing the city's underground music mythos and pantheon, I felt a greater understanding of what that means.

Back in the day, Darwin was on board for any party, fest, trip, warehouse rave or shenanigans (when he wasn't already on another trip). The Antelope Valley kids were discovering the universes outside the AV, between the intrusions of college classes and restaurant shifts.

Kid Cudi's Man on the Moon II was the soundtrack of this 2010-ish era, and Darwin embodied my approximation of Mr. Rager. Whenever we hit him up for a mission, he was as likely to be backpacking Chile, sitting in a tent at Coachella, or flying solo at a Digweed show in Japan.

So it would have taken a month to properly catch up, but we sat in the (impressive) food court of the bougie mall and went deep over pizza and IPAs and an elixir Darwin had on hand (of course he did). We talked about old friends and new struggles, and saw each expressed in his recent art pieces, in a portfolio pulled from his magical traveler's backpack.

Now we had a guide to the worlds of Seattle, and after lunch went straight to the top to get the lay of the land.

The Needle

Here we lingered and enjoyed that good gloom we'd come to see.

Disconnected from our routines and immersed in the strange and the nameless, we are free to rise and look at our lives and the world in a grander context.

Up here the joie de vivre of people is apparent. Why build a landscape-piercing spinning glass observation deck in the clouds? How else would you see the giant arachnids dancing over the rooftops below?

The Mario World park, misshapen museums, Barinade crater, and our hotel were all little glyphs on our pause-screen map. Out across the dark misty bay, the ferry ports and Bainbridge Island waited to be discovered. But first, the Chihuly.

The Chihuly

Chihuly is a world-renowned glass-blower who blew open the world of glass. His wiggly glassworks are gossamer strands of primal imagination drifting through the black corridors of the mind.

I appreciated entering the Chihuly with a shaman whose connection to the work and experience with the experience enhances one's own. Art is a conversation between you and the artist. People might sift through a shallow reading, pulled by the flow of the masses, but the opportunity is there to create a headspace and make a personal connection. So naturally, from his magical backpack Darwin produced a set of wireless isolation headphones filled with dope psybeats, and together we drifted.

It was chilly and sprinkling as we walked through the glass garden. A small crowd was gathered in a courtyard, watching a woman work molten glass at a hot glowing furnace. Glass flowers grew from glass vines, and the infinite tendrils of the Old Ones reached and grasped from the earth's core.

The Chihuly exited beside a monorail station, so we hopped on board. Being a small-town yokel, taking big city public transport always feels like official passage into the realm, like a Hogwarts Express with hobos.

We roved the streets of downtown, Darwin leading the way to one of his spots. We stopped at several small, curious parks, and made friends with the local folk.

The spot was a bar with Jupiter in its name, and there we chilled and caught up some more. After a good while and a few Elysians (another drink of the people, I learned), I went to pee and realized the bar was connected to a massive arcade.

It was rad. We played hella games and met a rescue bulldog named Rosie. Day turned to night as we played 3-way Pac-Man and Simpsons Road Rage, so the next stop was dinner.

The spot was sushi, and so authentically decorated I felt like I was in a shrine. I think there was a stream running through shrubbery beside us. We ordered everything on the menu, and the food was so good I still tear up thinking about it.

After, we fell back into party kid ways. We walked the food off through the downtown streets, which were mostly deserted on a Monday night, and I looked up another local techno joint on my phone.

The Dungeon

Everything I read had confusing or conflicting information, but somehow or other we ended up peering down a dark alley toward a nondescript side door to something sketchy, which is how all the best nights start.

Inside the door was a little hallway, and a doorman behind a desk. The doorman wrote our names down and explained that this establishment was a private club, but we were in luck because tonight the DJ had opened the invitation up to the public. The next door was deliberately ominous, for this was a club for dark souls. He warned us that they pour their drinks heavy; this wasn't a place for casuals. We paid the cover and by doing so may have joined a coven, but we made through the portal.

It was dark, cavernous, and deserted. I think a few people sat around the lounge, which overlooked a good-sized dance floor. We dug it. The DJ was playing bleak jams I never thought I'd hear in a club. For some reason I instantly ordered a round of adioses, and we turned the pages of a grimoire which sat on a pedastal - the karaoke track library. It was karaoke night.

The DJ played Fever Ray's If I Had a Heart, and I had to float over and give props. He followed up with Nine Inch Nails, Linkin Park, and other moody jams. At some point he started enticing us to karaoke, but we weren't there yet. So he took the mic himself for a few diddies.

I sought libations beneath a shrieking fleshless demon from a bartender with the vibe of a battle-hardened vampire. He turned out to be one of the nicest dudes I ever talked to. I told him where we were from, he told me about his past life in San Diego, we chatted about the great things about each environment, and the club, and he noted that they pour serious drinks as he mixed my next adioses.

Maybe one other small group showed up and lingered in the lounge the whole night. We had the run of the place, which made it easier to jam like no one was watching. The DJ really wanted someone to sing, though. It became an oddly adversarial relationship. I think he was annoyed that weren't karaokeing. We may have compromised with him by agreeing to sing along loudly to certain songs. Lizett and Darwin tore through a request of Down in Mexico, with vocals, despite the DJ's protest. They were finally getting psyched up to take the mics, but suddenly the bell tolled and we were on our way out.

It may have been dead, and undead, but if I was a Seattlite, I would definitely join this dank goth dungeon club. They had a variety of gruesome functions, including the techno night I had been looking for and which had recently moved to a different night. The Emerald City etc.

Now out on the streets, it was clear the potions were as powerful as promised. We ran amok for a little, but soon it was time to go. Lizett and I planned to hike in the morning. We called an Uber and tried to get Darwin to let us drop him off on the way, but he wanted to walk. Somehow we thought this was alright. We said goodbye next to a rack of pay-to-ride bicycles and got in our Uber.

Our last image as the Uber turned the corner was of Darwin strolling over to the rack of locked bikes and then climbing all over them like he was going to ride them. We wondered if he was going to be alright.