Market Off Market

Anker Ballard Flats has a new business coming into their ground-floor retail space. A new sign says, Market Off Market. I have not found any additional information about this business. Is it another brewery, a mini grocery store (15-minute neighborhood energy), a restaurant, or something else? There is a new retirement community across the street, which might support a local milk-and-eggs market.

The location is also across from Gilman Playground, a community gathering space for dog lovers (illegal), sports leagues, families with young kids, summer camps, high school kids smoking doobies on the bleachers, and pickleball enthusiasts. A general store would do steady business.

∩

Someone unscrewed our neighbor's ∩ bike rack and stole their electric bike. The rack was found a few houses down. Ring cams are everywhere, but thieves know nothing will happen like coddled college protestors. The revolution will not be televised, but criminal activity will.

My ring cam mostly captures circadian domesticity, which is not engaging content for the app. 👍💬 Viewing shared footage of trespassing, vandalism, and theft might make us believe the community lacks civility.

Negative filtering is not only a cognitive distortion but a media distortion.

Some of the best moments of my day are the serendipitous greetings and short conversations with strangers I encounter. I learn so much about the community from these brief interactions. Conversations are often less defended, less performative, and more honest.

***

The fledgling Japanese Maple has grown. It started as a small rooted twig near the next-door plot where a house and trees once stood. Maple tree samaras travel by wind and propagate in other locations. Ellie pulled the twig and transplanted it to an area where it could thrive best.

The lot is fenced with discarded cinder blocks from an old foundation. When it rains, a declination and hollow collects water and looks like a tiny pond. Crows drink and forage during the day, then leave for the night to wooded areas to roost.

Sometimes, we find tin foil pieces in the same area outside our front door. According to the Audubon Society, “Curious crows will often fly off with an object, then lose interest and leave it behind. If the crow happened to leave an object where humans put out food, those humans might get excited and lay out even more food”.

Crows are food-motivated and intelligent, so the “gifts” are learned behavior that helps them obtain more food.

***

UPDATE: A Seattle Police officer knocked on my door; he found the neighbor's bike. Our neighbor was unavailable, so they told the police to drop it with me if the bike was found. While the culprit dropped the bike and ran, justice was served.. A big “thank you” to the Seattle Police Officer.

A Succession of Weeds

The Safeway vestibule that is no longer accessed accumulates human filth. An armed security guard walks the perimeter, moving people: two men dissectings a bike, sleepy people slumped in a car, and a tweaker performing a monologue - Shakespeare in the parking lot.

The planting strips are bare. Plants that once filled a corporate landscape plan have since died because no one has been paying attention. The green scheme is just an ornament to drive profits without integration into the community. It’s a one-off project that can be ignored. I don’t see a gardening crew on retainer.

The strips are dumping areas for SDOT construction signs, dog pee, packaging and wrappers blown by cars, and discarded memoirs of unwell minds.

And yet, I see this bare patch -in contrast to cement and asphalt- as ugly when it should be the other way around. I’ve taken the well-manicured position instead of nature’s fighting against the death blanket of cement and asphalt. So let ugly dirt be and let nature have its course without human intervention - a succession of weeds.

Escape The Vault

Metal support wire angles up a utility pole attached to a stake in the ground. Vines have cybernetically grown in and through the metal wire and yellow covering like a cyborg appendage.

We are partially made of plastic. Recycling won’t save us. Only stopping the source will. There are innovative start-ups like Timeplast that are creating plastic-like materials that can be programmed to dissolve in water with specific life spans: 30 minutes, a month, a year.

In David Cronenberg’s film Crimes of the Future , a group of evolutionists modify their digestive systems to be able to ingest plastics and other materials via a candy bar supplement.

It reminds me of another human-made technology with unforeseen consequences - the smartphone. Initially a tool to improve our lives, it is now rewiring our brain chemistry to become isolated, angry, fearful, and depressed humans. We are now seeing the mental health crisis of young people due to social media and its years of inculcation. Self-harm and suicide are rising, facts and fundamental truths can be destroyed with memes, and our country is on the verge of a dictatorship.

When I engage with my phone, I cling to lies of journalistic lies to assuage anxiety and fear. That’s what the media has done. Without facts, we are all just pushing opinions. And opinions are like assholes; we all smell like shit. The choose-your-own-reality of online content will destroy society. It already is.

I walk West Woodland's sidewalks. This is the antidote for me: embodied experiences using all five senses. A new brewery opened in the industrial zone as glacial zoning laws change with the death of old Ballard.

I walk in, and beer drinkers socialize among the stainless steel stills. I enjoy the non-hipster ambiance. I buy an IPA 4-Pack called “Escape The Vault.” The can says, “Quit your day job and escape the vault!”

Avian Amuse-bouche

I walk across the Ballard Locks. Work continues on the cement construction and installation of new miter gates. Work is scheduled through 2024.

The first lock is drained, exposing barnacles for seagulls to pluck off watermarked walls - think an avian amuse-bouche. The waterless hollow reveals the feat of engineering completed over a century ago by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Few people walk the locks like during salmon season when the fish ladder is a spawning frenzy. On the Magnolia side, I walk to the heron rookery. The top-heavy twig dwellings sway on bony branches. A lone blue heron sits on the retaining wall of Commodore Park, looking for prey in the foamy white water of the spillway.

A woman says two baby herons fell from rooks due to high winds, only one survived. An adult heron got caught in the twig framework and hung itself, dangling for weeks before it was removed or disappeared like an Ivy League president.

My Ballard’s article “Ballard Locks Heron Colony Booms In 2023” reports:

Every season the colony loses some chicks—Jacobsen said the causes vary. Sometimes eagles snatch chicks from the nest, chicks fall from the nest, competing siblings push others out, or they starve. This year, volunteers with Heron Habitat Helpers estimated 39 chick deaths. Every season the colony loses some chicks—Jacobsen said the causes vary. Sometimes eagles snatch chicks from the nest, chicks fall from the nest, competing siblings push others out, or they starve. This year, volunteers with Heron Habitat Helpers estimated 39 chick deaths.

The woman, looking up into the trees with hands as visor, concludes, “That’s nature, though.”

🐉 Here Be Dragons

Ballard Industrial Zone, Seattle

A man in the produce aisle of Fred Meyers picks apples furtively. He then screams SKANSA! A minute later, he screams MICROSOFT!

I walk to Ballard Blocks along 14th Ave. A young girl, waiting for her school bus, says “Hello” and waves at me with a tiny plastic hand protruding from her shirt sleeve. I laugh and say, “Good one.”

A dragon sculpture guards an old house clinging to a different century and country. Security cam disclaimer offers backup.

Car Culture Fatalities

2428 NW Market St.

Seattle Greenways brings awareness to car culture in Seattle and advocates for pedestrian and bike-centered streets.

Frozen Tire Ruts

I didn’t venture far from the apartment.   Roads and sidewalks are icy, so you look for sure-footing on crunchy snow where dogs defectate.   I took the kids to the nearby playground at St. Alphonsus Church.  It’s a destination we frequent year-round.  To walk familiar routes over and over again may seem monotonous, but there is always the chance to find novelty if you are attuned to it.  Xavier de Maistre journeyed around his room feeling that staying put was far more convenient than the hassles of travel.  As Alain de Botton said in The Art of Travel, “The sole cause of a man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”

The kids enjoy walking in frozen tire ruts and seeing the water move underneath.  Their masterful ability to be present is what we lose as adults.  Adults search, spend money, attend retreats, become addictive and clingy in order to experience fleeting presence.

I am in my head a lot these days.  I seek action to avoid silence, opinions to comfort uncertainty.  Yet these are delusional tactics to avoid my 48-year old self.  To find nothing in the silence is terrifying to me.  Is there a difference between “nothing” and “nothingness?” The former may be about a deficit, the latter about abundance.