0.17 Circling the drain

By 1999, it was no longer possible to imagine the Weekly —or, for that matter, Seattle—recovering its equilibrium. And with each passing day, it was increasingly difficult for me to tell whether I wanted it to. The city was spinning glamourward, and while there had been times A year ago, a few months ago, last week, yesterday, a minute ago, a few minutes hence… when I regarded such a trend as the death of everything I treasured, now I found myself more often than not excited by it, convinced that the Squishes and Joeys of the world were Promethean purveyors of the technological fire that would make gods of us all. I decided that the flow of wealth toward them for business models that made no apparent sense was proof that they knew something profound about the future that the rest of us could only dimly sense was there, and I came to believe, happily, that my destiny, and the city’s, lay in the direction they were taking it.

I became quite insufferable on the subject, dismissing my erstwhile coevals’ alarm over the opening of retail outlet after retail outlet—Pottery Barn, Restoration Hardware, Tiffany’s—as Chicken-Little thinking, the panicked focus on risible side effects when Seattle’s ascent into glory was the real story. We are not, I would insist, being transformed into Bellevue, Sausalito, LA; what is really happening is that Seattle is coming of age, leading the world into the 21st-century Technological Era, and being well compensated for it in the bargain. We were changing from backwater to bellwether. The dramatic transformations all around me—the quickening of the pace of life, crowding on the freeways, the frenetic rush everywhere all the time, the heightened sense of urgency and excitement in the streets—all testified to Seattle’s arrival at the cutting edge, and the mushrooming population here testified to the world’s endorsement of The Seattle Way. We were arriving at a point relative to the rest of the world that back in 1990—during the hype and heyday of the Goodwill Games—had been mere pretension. Rushing headlong into the New Technology and the New Economy, following the Squish-and-Joey generation, we were realizing that long-held vision of the Greater Seattleites of yore: Seattle had finally arrived among the trend-setting cities of the world. New-York-Pretty-Soon had grown into More-than-New-York-Right-Now.

Yet I fell prey at the same time to an unacknowledged unease. I lapsed into a careful, steady schedule of drinking through the workday, editing and writing Weekly stories in an anesthetized haze, downing pints of sanity-pickling local microbrews Mac and Jack’s African Amber, whenever possible. at lunch and dinner, and employing massive doses of coffee to get me through the mornings. I couldn’t see that I was in mourning. While my dismayed family watched me grow fat, glum and comatose, Squish and Joey chose to be enormously entertained by this regimen, and came down to my office nearly every day to take me to lunch and watch me drink while they sat there regaling me with insults, tales of their travails and battles with the Wee Little Man, and visions of the world after F5 went public and made them multimillionaires.