Category: Before

Ken Hucherson is a Kirkland preacher who declared a boycott against Microsoft after they supported a state gay rights bill. At this moment, he’s running laps in Cal Anderson Park across the street from me, a park that was named after the state legislator who tried for years to get a gay rights bill passed. He’s yelling as he runs — not about anything in particular, or at least not about god or about gay people. This isn’t his first visit. He was out here one day last week too.

Also, he’s dyed one side of his goatee gray and the other black. I like his beard that way, it looks good.

It’s quiet around here. I’ll break the silence again with a print calendar for May:
Letter Size
A4 Format

More sometime…

Our team of researchers have combed through reams of data and compiled a schedule of what you can expect from the coming month. Their document is called the April Beans for Breakfast Print Calendar. It comes in two sizes, the first for those in the U.S. and adjacent countries, the second for those who live elsewhere:
Letter Size
A4 Format

I slip into the park on the way back from the post office and stop and sit. I’m carrying nothing with me. I would usually have a book, a notebook, Treo, a camera, the Stranger or the Weekly, or a cup of tea or hot chocolate: a prop to distract me from myself.. The park is filled with people with props: dogs on leashes, juggling pins, an R/C plane. No hula hoops today, not yet anyway. I finish, well nothing, and walk back to the apartment. Kelsey drives past in a pickup. I ran into him a few minutes ago, on foot going the other way. He’s staring straight ahead at the road, his lower jaw working away at a piece of gum. By the time I step out of the park, the model plane is stuck high up in a tree.

I found a Polaroid camera sitting on a dumpster.

Each picture is a little disappointment. The color, the washed-out faces, the anti-climactic wait for it to develop: all of those. They’re still fun though. They’re fun little disappointments.

The dark cloud is blown behind me before its rain reaches the street. Now it feels like the raindrops are falling from the sun. I walk through the sun shower for a bit and reach a dry patch of sidewalk, not touched by the rain. Then, a couple of blocks on, there’s a place where its still falling.

I have eight prints to give away. They’re 6″x8″s made on a Kodak printer at a drugstore. The print quality of most of them is great, but I’d rate a couple of them at just pretty good. Most are photos that have been posted here at one time or another.

The subjects of the photos are:

• seagulls (taken)
• Cold K (taken)
• a winter hat
• windows
• stickers (taken)
• a crustacean
• a famous Italian explorer
• a Lincoln administration cabinet member

If you’d like one, claim one of the items listed above in the comments and send me an email (jeffATstruatDOTcom) with your address. Also, let’s do some fake marketing research, in your comment tell me: If you left a bowl of jelly beans out to be picked over for a few days, which color would the largest number of the leftovers be?

I give Tricia a flower. She gives me a cookie. I’m not saying the one gesture is a response to the other. But it has happened just like that more than once.

There’s a large furry hornet sitting in the grass next to me. It’s moving slow because of the cold or it’s busy with a patch of clover pollen. It’s hardly moving. I lay down to soak in some more sunlight, to recharge my head where doughy histamines have given way to foggy anti-histamines. I turn sometimes to poke at the hornet with my finger or my camera. Eventually it’s bothered enough that it jumps from between the grass blades and flies a few menacing circles around me, then bolts.