The Whole Toolbox

I remember the moment I realized that everyone in Seattle owned a head lamp. It was raining (superfluous?) and we were packing my friend’s Subaru for a hike outside of the city, a getaway from the freakishly clean streets of Seattle proper and the chilly passive-aggressive tentacles of the Seattle Freeze.

Seattle is an undeniably nice city, so of course I didn’t trust it from the first day. There’s a lot of smiling at strangers which is a general policy I can get behind but not, like, every stranger. Be reasonable.

Going to Seattle for what ended up being less than a year was one of those decisions that to this day I just can’t fully explain. It’s in good company, with my taking out 100K of student loans to go to music school, my getting my tongue pierced in the basement of a mall in Thailand when I was a teenager… things I don’t technically regret but only because my brain has successfully suppressed my ability to regret things almost entirely, the result of a well-meaning if overzealous coping mechanism (wanna switch brains with me yet? Just say the word.)

I just sort of ended up there. I came out of college MUCH less sure of where I wanted to go in life than I was that first day, excitedly moving in with two strange guys in a shitty apartment in Back Bay. I was gonna be a high powered music industry executive, A&R maybe or music supervision for film. I left with zero clue about what I actually wanted to do. I had spent so much of my life kicking and screaming, working hard to be taken seriously as a kid, fully intending to take by force the opportunities I wasn’t handed, always focused on the next stage, the next adversary to vanquish. But I always felt hamstrung, like I was just perpetually on other people’s schedules and I could never get a good explanation as to why.

Now I’m sure my therapist would have some feedback on my framing but the point is that when I was finally out on my own things just felt… open. Not real.

In a lot of ways I still can’t picture what’s next. I can imagine possibilities, wildly different from each other, versions of *happiness* that are equally elusive, but none of my plans feel particularly dependable.

Right after school there was a thick fog between me and my future so I made a decision, and that decision was Seattle.

So if I understand it correctly every newborn baby in Seattle is blessed by a lumberjack, their foreheads brushed lightly with a sprig of evergreen, and then they are issued a head lamp. Everyone’s got ‘em. And I do understand the functionality. It’s just that it’s a piece of equipment I had never thought for more than 500 milliseconds before.

Speaking of which the contents of the average trunk of a car in Seattle is a vibe. Head lamp. Dehydrated food. A flare gun. Kettlebells. A rain water filter. A slack line. You stick your hand in there and you just can’t know what’s gonna happen. It’s like a crunchy grown up version of the treat bowl at the dentist. You might never see that hand again.

While I don’t have a car, my own personal collection of equipment" is similarly a melange of objects that paint a picture. A night guard to counteract the effect of channeling my annoyance with other human beings into Olympic level grinding. A cheese grater. A pedicure tool, which is just a second cheese grater (skaters’ feet are gro$$.) A stand mixer so people know I bake and care about others’ opinions. Matte black so people think I got it for the baking alone.

Prescription drugs, which to my dismay are essential to keeping my mind in a reasonable place.

This little tool to pluck hairs off of your face that I can use while I watch episodes of Seinfeld. A monthly Metrocard. My skates. Sunscreen.

I did start crossing off items on the To Buy list for Antarctica. Merino wool leggings, fleece mid-layers. I’m thinking a lot about which color hats will make the statement I’m looking to make when paired with the bright yellow parka that everyone’s issued. I’m already wondering where I’m gonna store a huge yellow parka when I get back. It reminds me of my Rotary blazer, the one issued to all exchange program students around the world. It was a unisex blazer only in that it looked horrific on you no matter your gender identity. It made even the hottest South American teenagers look like they ran a funeral parlor in 1960. But we all had one, and we expected to decorate them with physical objects from our year abroad. I’m 90% I used a clothes pin to attach a hacky sack. The kids are my school played a game called takraw which was basically volleyball using your feet and a rattan ball. When I broke out my hacky sack they called it “takraw falang” which of course means “white person takraw” or, weirdly, “guava takraw.” Turns out we white foreigners share a Thai name with a piece of fruit. My nickname was Dang Mo which meant “watermelon.” Kids would try to tease me, saying my parents must be pineapples.

I was always charmed by Thai kids being what they considered mean. Thai people max out at fruit humor. I’ve been told to fuck off by more than one American child.