Gabriel is going to read today's post, guaranteed, for one reason and one reason only: I spent the evening with him last night. And people think
I'm a narcissist!
I'm off to a great start.
It's not really a matter of "thinking," on my part, to be fair. It's kind of my brand. It's kind of hard to go on the way I used to about how beautiful I am, though, when virtually every time I see a photo of myself I can only think about how much I look like my maternal grandmother. Gabriel had his front-facing camera on his phone at one point last night, pointed at his own face, and studied it for a few seconds. He said he looked like he should be on a boat, singing sea shanties. He wasn't wrong. I took a look at
the photo and said he should really have a pipe in his mouth. He chuckled and said, "Correct!"
I immediately had to show him
a similar selfie I had taken just last week. The key difference is that while Gabriel looked like a fishing boat captain, I looked more like the scaggly old man at the end of the street that children are frightened of. When I happened to see myself in my phone camera that day, looking down and thus creating a bunch of folds in my neck, with flyaway strands of hair on either side of my head, I just thought:
Jesus Christ. So I took my picture. Much in the same way, I think, that Gabriel snapped his own selfie last night.
Gabriel happened to see one of the women in the stands at the soccer game I went with him to, who had given him the tickets. He went over to them and chatted for a minute. I saw her friend move over a seat briefly, then move back. I later learned that they had suggested we join them, but apparently he told him I am "not very social" and may not want to. This was funny because I'd have been fine with it, although in retrospect I think it was better for us to have our own space, given the personal nature of some of the things we talked about. Still, it might have given the woman he knows a somewhat inaccurate picture of me, and maybe even surprising given how much time she and her girlfriend had spent asking me about Indian food and chai at Lea's birthday party on Friday. I don't think I gave a particularly "unsociable" vibe then. Granted, I had spent some of that party alone in a chair out on the patio because there were too many people inside, but that's beside the point! Gabriel told me that when the did all look back to wave at me, he told them, "He's the guy with the white hair." I literally smiled as I waved back at them, so presumably I did not look unfriendly.
Apparently, Lea knows a ton of lesbians. She has many lesbian friends. Lesbians love her. Some of her best friends are lesbians. She's the Straight Queen of Lesbians. A straight, lesbian icon. She's the P!nk of sporting footwear. She got tickets to last night's
Seattle Reign from those lesbian friends.
But, she didn't feel like going to the game last night. So, after running through a list of much more logical choices for him to offer his spare ticket, Gabriel called me on Sunday evening to ask if I wanted to go. His pitch, knowing that no sporting event would ever interest me on its own merits, was that it was a chance for us to hang out. I had no other plans last night, so it was a persuasive enough argument: I was like, okay, sure.
One of my favorite parts of the evening was having my first chance to ride the new RapidRide G line, which shoots down Madison Street and only just opened last Saturday—planned since 2012, and under construction for the past three years, starting with
replacement of water and sewer mains. This was a big reason for the extended construction period, the start of which itself was delayed by the pandemic; predictably it quickly left
businesses running out of patience. The same goes for drivers, and even pedestrians, in the area: the project felt like it was taking an eternity.
But hey, that's all in the past now! Construction is done, and notwithstanding the rampant contempt among drivers—very much including Shobhit—who say converting the two center lanes along Madison to bus-only unnecessarily causes greater gridlock among the rest vehicles in the other lanes, now down to one lane each way, I'm quite happy to see the RapidRide G line finally up and running.
I do feel compelled to note that, theoretically, RapidRide has fewer stops than regular bus routes, as part of, you know, the whole "rapid" idea. And I compared the RapidRide stops from 17th to 3rd along Madison Street to the stops now on the 10 and 12 busses from 15th to 3rd. Indeed, the G line has fewer stops, technically—two fewer—along that stretch. I'm sure the margin is wider when comparing to RapidRide's northeastern end at 28th Avenue, but of course all that matters to
me is the stretch from 17th (on Madison) or 15th (on Pine, where I live, a block north of Madison).
It was fun to ride the G line for the first time, noting the spaciousness of the bus, and particularly the doors on both sides of the bus—as some, but not all, of the stops were constructed in the center of the street, a big part of the length of the construction project. But, I can't say it felt notably different in the time it took to get from home to 3rd & Madison than it would have previously on the regular bus route #12.
The key benefit, I think, is the frequency: most of the day these buses go by every six minutes. You hardly even need to look at a bus schedule, because no matter when you walk to a stop a bus will be coming in a matter of a few minutes. I checked One Bus Away anyway, and walked over to catch the 5:43 bus at Madison & 17th.
I did enjoy this part: my connecting bus downtown, at 3rd & Columbia—two blocks from my stop to get off the G line—was also a RapidRide bus. This was the first time I had any bus itinerary with transfers where both buses were RapidRide lines. The Trip Planner told me to get on the C line, and indeed, there was one just a couple of minutes after I got to that stop.
There was also a RapidRide H bus just before it, which I did not get on only because the Trip Planner told me to get on the C line. I only noticed when I got off the C at the Lumen Field stop that the H line also stops there. Duly noted, for future reference! (The C line, however, goes over to West Seattle from that stop with no stops in between, another useful thing to note; I did not realize there was a transit iternary that convenient all the way to the heart of West Seattle—as opposed to the Water Taxi that only goes to the eastern shore—now.)
Gabriel was kind of disappointed, and even moderately apologetic, about how sparsely attended the game was, but truly everything about it was much more my speed. I was afraid I'd be in the middle of a huge, screaming crowd, but the whole evening was very mellow. That said, it also meant that way too many of the food vendors were closed. Gabriel had me meet him at the Wamu Theater, saying he usually gets a (veggie, obviously) hot dog at a stand across the street from it that he then takes inside the stadium. I was actually looking forward to that—it was genuinely the thing I looked forward to most about going to my first professional soccer game—but none of the stands outside the stadium were actually open.
I waited a few minutes for Gabriel, after arriving right at 6:15 as agreed. I truly didn't care about waiting. What stake did I have in any of this? I was just there to hang out, which was what I did. He later told me he usually has to park several blocks away because of how crowded it usually is, and he only saw while running to meet me—something he really didn't have to do—that there were plenty of places closer he could have parked.
And then, finding suitable food became a bit of a thing. With the usual hot dog stand closed, we had to look for food inside the stadium, where most of the food vendors were also closed. We finally found an area with several joints open. We even settled on getting manh mi sandwiches from one place . . . only to be told they were out of them. I was told they'd have more in ten or fifteen minutes, and when we returned about that much time later, after settling for completely unadorned, prepacked vegan hot dogs, they were still out of them. We then went to the Tutta Bella stand and Gabriel got a cheese pizza for us to share.
After all that, we still found our way to seats right as the National Anthem was about to be sung. Our tickets were for seats right next to two strangers in a seat of unsold seats, so Gabriel found us another spot that would be less awkward.
Gabriel went on to explain to me how the Seattle Reign was once one of the best teams, and now we aren't very good because of a "fire sale" they did on their best players after their star player, Megan Rapinoe,
retired. Gabriel got a photo of the digital sign noting Rapinoe's retired jersey number, angry that Lumen Field was using that as a "proxy" rather than hang a woman's retired jersey number next to all of those proudly displayed as permanent fixtures for retired Seahawks jerseys in the same stadium where our professional football team plays.
I noted that I was not sure I had ever even been inside Lumen Field before. As far as I can discern from my Flickr account, it appears this was indeed the case.
I know nothing about soccer and even I could tell the team isn't that good. The played the New York Gotham, which apparently does have some very good players, and most of the game was spent with the Reign defending their goal, with Gotham keeping the ball on that side of the field most of the time. Our team never scored any goals, and by the time Gotham scored their second, with several minutes left on the clock, many in the strikingly small crowd—I think maybe forty percent, if that, of the seats at Lumen Field were even open for seating—immediately starting filing out.
Gabriel then said there's a bar he always goes to for a drink after a game. They don't even have outdoor seating, so this genuinely surprised me. He'll go in with a mask on, order a drink, and when the place is packed after an actually well-attended game, presumably only remove his mask only any time he takes a drink.
It's a place called
Hooverville, and being a Monday night after a quiet, losing soccer game at which
the dog tricks halftime entertainment was genuinely the most exciting thing to occur, the bar was pretty much dead. We walked all the way to the back, and it was empty enough that Gabriel was comfortable sitting without a mask on. Two guys later came back and played a game of pool near us.
It was here that we spent some time chatting about fairly heavy stuff to happen recently, which I won't get into. That wasn't all we talked about. We also talked about the surprisingly polite graffiti I saw in the men's room toilet stall, which read,
I suck pleasant cock.
When we were done, we went out the back door right next to where we had been sitting, and we were right into the alley where Gabriel had parked. He gave me a ride home.
Oh! I nearly forgot to mention when we were leaving the stadium. Gabriel started sliding down the railings between landings of the concrete stairs, honestly making me imagine him falling over and smashing his head. He was fine, of course. There were three cops standing at the bottom of the staircase, kind of eyeing Gabriel with probably the same kind of thought, like: I hope we don't have to give medical assistance to this dipshit.
Gabriel started telling them how he used to do this in college when he and I were roommates. I cut him off to say to them, "I'm the one with dignity." And everyone burst out laughing, while I just turned to continue walking to the bar.
Gabriel laughed and said, "That's going in the blog!"
I wouldn't want to disappoint.
[posted 12:43 pm]
