How long ago was the subject ennui? Hee, hee.

I got a call from my aunt in Seattle last night saying the family party is scheduled for July 18th, a Sunday of course, so I'm going to go out and buy a ticket. The train? I don't know, I'm thinking of flying up, renting a car, and staying for a week, going out and shooting some photographs of the places I used to live, maybe going up through the islands. I haven't done that in decades. Stay in cheap motels (if there still is such a thing as a cheap motel) and drink beer in the roadside taverns. Only in Washington state. Rainier beer by the scoop in the Red Robin. Maybe not the Red Robin. I'm a long way from my university days and hanging out for a drink at the Red Robin tavern is maybe pushing it a bit. Shit, the Red Robin. When's the last time I thought about it?

For some reason I'm sitting here writing this and wondering how much of what I'm writing is a kind of sales job on myself. I'd like to take the train because it's so easy and laid back. Bring a book, take a nap, watch all the back alleys of all the small towns along the tracks. Old wood flaky paint buildings rain soaked along the wet black asphault roads of the Pacific Northwest. Maybe you have to grow up in it to appreciate. Kind of like those taverns with the long shuffle boards and the plastic beer signs hung on the walls, drinking in the late summer afternoon near Lake Washington ready for whatever the evening might bring. I'm not sure how you photograph that, how you communicate any of that visually to someone who's never been there, never felt the electricity.

Well, I'm sold, that's sounds pretty good. The train it is and I'll take a week.