Point A: Seattle

I don't want to be unfair to Seattle and harp on the lack of sunlight (uggggghhhhhh), overabundance of hipsters (noooooooo), and you know, other crappy stuff. Seattle is relentlessly cool. Here is an incomplete and poorly organized list of some of the things that I really like about this place:

Rachel:

This is my bestie. We are wearing sunglasses because that's what cool people do.

Rachel is my bestie. She moved to Seattle to get a PhD in fish. I'm not a scientist so every time she explains to me what she studies, I fail to understand and consequently, when people ask me what she does, I oversimplify. She's obviously smarter than I am, which is why she makes great life choices like enrolling in graduate programs and I make life choices like quitting my job without a backup plan in order to drive across the country in a $500 car.
She's cool enough to make you want to move to a new state for no other reason than to be near her. I'm not going to embarrass her by writing more about her. Mostly because I'm rushing this post so we can go have drinks together.

Coffee:

This would have been a better picture of coffee if I wasn't clumsy and always spilling things

Coffee was invented in Seattle in 1856. When displaced Midwesterners in the mid-19th century braved the Oregon Trail in order to be closer to their best friends (OMG! What a coincidence!), they found that the Puget Sound was so thickly populated with red fruit-bearing trees that there was no room to erect cheese factories or saunas. In the same fashion that they deforested vast swathes of ancient growth east of the Mississippi earlier that decade, these veteran loggers quickly clear-cut millions of acres of coffee trees and burned it for firewood in an attempt to keep their houses a little less damp and dark. Before they completely effed up everything, native inhabitants were all like "Whoa, dudes. Chill out for a sec" and they taught the newcomers to put down their saws, harvest the seeds from the fruit, and turn those seeds (known today colloquially as "coffee beans") into a hot, caffeinated beverage that sustained the settlers through their first dismal winter (locally referred to as "the season of suicides"). The beverage grew in popularity as the residents realized that they could stay awake longer, have worse breath, and...I don't know what else coffee does. I'm still not a scientist.

Seattle does great things with coffee. Milstead does the best things. They make a mocha with Theo dark chocolate (produced a few blocks away) that is so good that you'll become a mocha convert and try to order it in other, lesser coffee shops and then when the inferior coffee shops serve you something made with HFCS-laden milk chocolate syrup, you silently weep to yourself that you just spent $6 on something GROSS and you should have gone to Milstead in the first place.

I'm also going to miss Bauhaus, Caffe Vita, Stumptown, and Caffe Ladro (if only for the Medici).

Cocktails:

Go to Roxy's. Order the Restraining Order. Enjoy it.

Because Seattle is a foodie town and because everyone here is under 30, unmarried, and unhappy, residents here try to drink away their misery with a lot of complex, expensive, and awesome cocktails. I'm a huge fan of this. Liberty Bar in Capitol Hill has a menu that you'll want to read cover-to-cover put together by really good-looking bartenders who will happily light rosemary on fire and put it in some scotch with some other great things for you because they want to make you happy. Macleod's in Ballard makes an Inverness Mule, which is a Moscow Mule but better because it's made with scotch. For a mere $12, you can get a smoked chocolate and Laphroaig milkshake with fresh whipped cream at Hot Cakes. I don't know about drinks that don't have scotch. They're probably also good. But today, on my last day in Seattle, I discovered the Restraining Order at Roxy's. This cocktail consists of a shot of well whiskey and a slap across the face for $4. Seriously. The waitress WILL SLAP YOU ACROSS THE FACE. HARD. WITH AN OPEN PALM after bringing you alcohol FOR LESS THAN FIVE DOLLARS. It's my favorite thing. My cheek still hurts 13 hours after ordering the this drink. Thank you, Karen. You were a gem.

Attractions:

THUG LIFE

There's a giant troll under the Fremont Bridge. There's also a huge statue of Vladimir Illyich Lenin in Fremont (which some total D bag defaced with red paint). There are a lot of other cool things to look at and do outside of Fremont but I don't know a lot about them. Lenin and Troll are the most important.

The Amenities of Living in a Large City:

Oh man, what a great concert venue.

I grew up in a town with about 3000 residents. There weren't a lot of amenities, attractions, or big ticket events. Seattle has a lot of people here and they really like doing things like listening to music underneath the Space Needle. Seattle is a BFD partially because it can take credit for world-renown artists such as Jimi Hendrix, Nirvana, Heart....

Wait. Can we talk about Heart? Can we talk about how they played The Immigrant Song at Bumbershoot this year and I almost wept because I was overwhelmed by how cool it was? And that Kit's boyfriend from the L Word SHREDDED the guitar? And how Ann Wilson now looks like the president of the PTA but rocks harder than, like, ANYONE? I had a long conversation with a stranger on Pike Street because she had a perfectly rendered reproduction of the "Barracuda" album cover tattooed on her calf. Until I heard Nancy Wilson fill the Key Arena with her angelic rock goddess vocals, I thought that that was maybe a regrettable choice. 

Cool things happen here. There's affordable public transportation that goes everywhere and is safe and timely. Seattle has a bunch of professional sporting teams (except basketball, which everyone is really mad about) and the stadiums are close to the downtown AND you can bring your own cheese inside. On the first Thursday of every month, you can go to some dope museums for freezy (Author's choice: watch a hilarious musical about a devastating fire at MOHAI). The city is densely populated with local businesses that carry quality items instead of miles of strip mall wasteland. There are a lot of great things.

Liberals:

I didn't take this picture because, as you can see, my arms are occupied. Alex Garland took it.

The Left Coast is pretty rad. You can compost at McDonald's. There are bike lanes everywhere. Gay marriage and recreational weed are legal AND NOBODY IS FLIPPING OUT ABOUT IT. The candidate races here are contests between different shades of liberals and the current mayor out-liberaled the mayor-elect by saying that not only would he support a $15/hour minimum wage, but he'd consider an even higher one. But he didn't win, so Seattle's going to have to deal with a measly $15 minimum wage pretty soon. (Ugh. Conservatives.) Kshama Sawant won a seat on the city council BIG TIME and she's a socialist. Not an "Obama-is-ruining-the-country-because-he's-a-secret-socialist" socialist, but a genuine believer in the principles of Marxism. She won handily. And sitting city council members went out to chase ballots in order to help her oust an opponent who would be considered a radical leftist in any other city in America.

In Seattle, hundreds of people will come watch you get arrested for civil disobedience to protest wage theft violations against fast food workers and the police will allow you to walk to the paddy wagon without handcuffs, feed you vegan bologna sandwiches, give you book recommendations about how CEOs are sociopaths, and apologize for being slightly curt when asking you to respect the "no talking during the perp walk" rule. Or so I'm told. I don't know any of this for certain.

Food:

Honey lavender and salted caramel are the normal flavors.

Dick's Deluxe

Salted caramel and honey lavender ice cream at Molly Moon's

Chocolate frozen custard at Old School

Street hot dogs with grilled onions, cream cheese, and sriracha 

Pho from Babar

Theo's chocolates

Honey-drizzled truffle oil popcorn at the Can-Can

Avocado-kale smoothies at that little drive-through place by Seattle Bouldering Project

Meat clouds in the ID

Tabasco-creme fraiche wings at the Rabbit Hole

There's a lot of really good food here. It can be obnoxious sometimes when you're hungry to try to read menus that seem to have nonsensical combinations of ingredients, but maybe you should just try it because it's great.

People:

There are a lot of people other than Rachel who made Seattle feel a little less lonely. Some of Seattle's finest residents fed me, danced with me, put makeup on me at Sephora, sang karaoke with me, went to sporting events with me, played skeeball with me, went with me to political events, and were pleasant and friendly even when it was pitch black at 4 PM and  raining. I'm really glad I got to spend time with them. I would list and post pictures of them but I'm only going to get about four hours of sleep and I have to drive 10 hours tomorrow.