Does anybody know what time it is?

It's time for the Fremont Solstice Parade!

. . . I would add "and Fair," but Laney and I skipped that this year. After the parade, which lasted barely more than an hour—from where we sat, anyway, right at the start of the parade on NW 39th St and Leary Way NW—we walked toward the Fair, looking first for port-a-potties. We found a rather long line for a line of 10 of them, which moved fairly quickly. Then, looking to bypass food trucks we had no interest in, we walked around the block to the east. But, when we saw the thickness of the crowd, Laney decided she wasn't up for it. That was fine. I can spend more time at the Fremont Fair next time.

Anyway, I need to get back to that photo at the top of this post. I loved his body paint design, and attempted to include the photo in my post to socials with 16 shots from the event—and Facebook's algorithm immediately removed just that shot. Dammit! It "violates community guidelines," it says, because nudity is not allowed for us to share.

Of course, 10 of the other photos I shared technically feature nudity. But, I could get away with posting it because the algorithm clearly can't tell there's nudity when large amounts of body paint patterns are involved. And here's the thing: in the above shot, Facebook's algorithm clearly identified the tip of the man's penis, which is not covered in paint. Had he painted over his penis with red, it probably would have also gone through.

This even complicated my ability to share the photo here—not because of Squarespace, but because of Flickr. Flickr allows a lot more, but you have to set "safety" levels on each photo depending on the type of nudity. No nudity at all? That can stay "safe," the moderation level at which photo uploads default. Bare butts or bare breasts? These have to be marked "moderate," and when other people (whp are not Fllickr members) see those photos on Flickr they first come up as a static box, but when you click it then you get a warning that it contains nudity and a choice as to whether you want to see it. Full frontal nudity, or anything sexual, requires the safely level of "restricted," which means only other logged-in Flickr members can see it. It also means that, as in the case of the above photo, Flickr blocks the "share" feature where it provides the html commands to copy and paste so you can embed photos, as I have done with all the shots below.

Here's how I got around it: Flickr also lets you view multiple sizes of each shot, and with the size I wanted, I just right-clicked to get the image address of the shot, and wrote up the html commands to embed the image myself. Whew! Aren't you glad I did the work so you could see Clock Man's cock? Seriously, though: the cock is immaterial—something stupid social networking sites don't understand, like nuance or context. What I love about the photo is the spiral clock design.

Facebook can be so annoying.

Anyway! Shobhit had an evening shift at work today, otherwise he almost certainly would have come. In fact, he has only ever been able to join me four times, and not since 2019 (the other times being 2015, 2007 and 2006, although he missed the actual parade in 2006). I actually went by myself three years in a row between 2012 and 2014, and likely would have again today if I'd had to—but Laney was available, and even willing to deal with a multi-bus transit route to get there. Nice!

It was her first time, which really amazed me, as the Fremont Solstice Parade and Fair is a longtime Seattle institution, and Laney's been around for decades. I suspect a lot of it just had to do with her schedule in the past, and now that she's retired, it's super easy for her to make time for all sorts of shit.

The parade is scheduled to start at 1:00, and I had suggested we aim to get to Fremont by noon—a very good suggestion, as it turned out, given their changed parade route this year, and our joint decision to walk to where the parade route started so it wouldn't be as crowded. And even there, it got pretty crowded. Just nothing like down by the Lenin statue, where people were like 8 deep along the route. (That may be an exaggeration. 4 probably isn't though. You get the idea.) Anyway, in order to do this, we needed to catch the #49 bus downtown at 11:21. I suggested to Laney that we meet at the bus stop at 11:15, and that's what we did.

Also at my suggestion, Laney brought her two collapsible lawn chairs. This made all the difference in the world, and they weren't even difficult to transport, being fairly light and easy to carry in their bags with a strap on them that we could swing over a shoulder. However, the bus we finally got on was about ten minutes late, clearly because of backed up traffic on Capitol Hill due to maintenance needs shutting down Light Rail stations between Westlake and SoDo Stations. There were Link Shuttle buses from Capitol Hill Station to Westlake, and also, probably due to the "Capitol Hill Pride" that is for the first time scheduled the Saturday before Pride Weekend (not to be confused with Capitol Hill PrideFest, put on with actual success by Seattle Pride, on Broadway the Saturday of Pride Weekend), which presumably would have been why the #8 and #10 were getting rerouted also through the intersection at Broadway and Pine.

In any event, we finally got on a bus, and once we got downtown, we were too late for the #40 bus that was supposed to be our connection to Fremont. I remembered from last year, though, that there are three buses that go from downtown to Fremont (just different destinations beyond that in all three cases), and I just figured out what the other two were, and we decided we'd get on whichever of the three was the next to come to our stop, at 3rd and Pine. Within minutes, that happened to be the #62.

That bus was very crowded when we got on it, and only got more so as we got closer to Fremont, in the end having to wait like three light cycles at the Fremont Bridge, the first of them because the drawbridge had to come up to let a boat pass. Once we finally got off the bridge and to the stop just past 34th St, we then set about walking the roughly half mile to to spot we found to set up our chairs, on the corner of 39th and Leary Way.

The Fremont Fair website said the parade kicks off at 3rd and Leary, which is actually a block from where we set up our chairs—and we only did that because, after walking west on 39th to bypass the crowds on 36th, we were suspicious of the fact that no one was sitting on the curbs along Leary on the block to the north. I still thought the parade would come down from there, so we set up our chairs right on the southeast corner of Leary at 39th.

It still worked out, but the parade actually came out on 39th, across the street from us, and turned right onto Leary, so we were literally at the very start after all. This caused a slight challenge as I could not look up the street to see contingents coming, as they turned in front of us right from the street we were on. Thus, when the nude cyclists were the first contingent as is tradition, they did not ride past us, but rather in large circle that curved back around right in front of us.

I still got a lot of shots, though—all combined, 103, including 11 video clips. I also separated them into two sets, one just of the nude cyclists (58 shots, although it appears to be only 22 if you view it as a non-Flickr member, not logged in), and the other of all the other contingents (45 shots, including 10 video clips, most of them of the several really fun marching bands).

Last year, when Gina and her friend Jennifer came up from Olympia to join me, I took 76 shots of the nude cyclists; 33 shots of the other contingents; another 31 shots of the Fair; and 26 of the "Seattle Art Car Blowout" alone. I already noted though that Laney and I left shortly after the parade and did not really do the Fair—she had a blast today though and said she would definitely do it again. Maybe next year I'll at least figure out where the cars are, because those are really fun and I think Laney would enjoy them.

Today, though, once we had each finally gotten to pee and then we decided not to brave the crowd at the Fair, Laney agreed to accompany me to the Apple Store at University Village. Thankfully, once we just walked over to Fremont Ave at 35th, there was a bus stop there for a bus that goes straight there—nice for people in Fremont! I've never understood why there isn't a single transit option straight from even downtown to University Village, a pretty major shopping center—which also has the city's only Apple Store.

Sometime over the past week, my AirPod speakers seem to have blown out. I have AppleCare on three of my Apple devices currently (AirPods; iPhone; MacBook Pro laptop), so I figured I might as well put that to use. Shobhit also got his phone battery replaced not long ago due to his battery life being degraded, so I figured I would ask about that too.

Here are some things I learned at the Apple Store today. First, you can't get assistance on multiple devices with the same store appointment, which is dumb. The young woman who assisted me with the AirPods managed to work their system to my favor, though, and had me first in line for the iPhone discussion as soon as she had me plugged in. She had to run diagnostics on the AirPods, during which another employee, this time a middle-aged guy, came to talk about the phone. This was when I learned the second thing: you're actually supposed to keep your decices plugged into charge overnight every night, even if it's either early or fully charged before you go to bed. The guy said there are too many things that often happen overnight with updates, etc, which will only happen while on wifi and plugged into charge, as otherwise it takes too much power. So, note to self: plug phone in every night. Ditto the MacBook, apparently.

Anyway. The diagnostics confirmed the AirPods were damaged, and they replaced them for me at no charge. That alone made having AppleCare worth it to me, although for that device I only got a couple of years of coverage. I bought the things last fall, though, so there's still some time. The phone battery was a different story—oh, I guess you could say I learned three things at the Apple Store today, because the third one is that they'll only replace the phone battery if it is degraded to 79% of original capacity. Mine is only down to 89%.

The guy looked at my battery usage history to see if he could figure out what was making the battery drain so quickly, and he could not find anything major that jumped out—although he could tell that I use the Facebook app a lot. That was nothing compared to what we knew was the reason my battery drained so quickly today, though: it was because I spent a couple of hours taking photos, and in particular, video. My camera app is also set to take Live Photos, and it only occurs to me now that that's probably also a big contributing factor, as it basically means every photo I take is a two-second video. I won't stop using that feature, though, it has come in wildly useful for months now. The wedding video I made for Gabriel and Lea would not have been at all the same without it.

Laney waited outside most of the time I was in the Apple Store, which wasn't a super long time. She got herself a coffee at another place at U Village, and then was delighted by the public space outside that new Apple Store they expanded into back in 2018. She was sitting on one of the wooden lounge chairs and even invited me to sit with her for a few minutes before we got up to head back home again—winding up on a "U District Station Express" bus that goes straight from that stop on 25th, curving around the south end of the UW campus and up to U District Light Rail Station. Why it doesn't just go straight down 25th to University of Washington Station by Husky Stadium, neither of us could figure out.

But, whatever. This was Laney's first time stepping onto the actual platform and seeing the awesome public art at U District Station, so there's that. And even thought the downtown stations are closed this weekend, we were able to take Light Rail from there, past University of Washington Station and then on to what temporarily ends at Capitol Hill Station. We parted ways there, Laney insisting she could carry both of her chairs home from there (I tried to walk her home so I could carry one of them for her, but she insisted I didn't need to), and then I walked home and set about processing and uploading my photos.

[posted 11:07 pm]

So yesterday was the 2023 Fremont Solstice Parade and Fair, at which I took easily over 200 photos and videos, of which I kept 165—by far the most I ever have at this event.

Shobhit had campaigning to do so he didn't come, but Gina and her friend Jennifer came up from Olympia to join me. Neither of them had ever been to it, but the idea came to me when a photo of the giant rocket in Fremont came up in my Facebook Memories from March 25, 2020 earlier this year. I added another comment to the thread, three years later, saying maybe now was the time. They both agreed, and I eventually did my due diligence following up about it with regularity just to keep it on their minds: letting them know in April that the exact date was June 17; then following up again on June 2 to make sure we were all still on; and yet again this past Monday to discuss transit details.

Most of those texts were over Facebook Messenger, and included Beth, as I thought Beth might want to join us. I actually haven't yet gotten a full sense of whether Beth really likes Jennifer—when the topic came up over Easter in April, Gina actually asked Beth "Is that okay?" when we talked about having Jennifer join us, although Beth was like, "Of course," and seemed almost confused as to why she would ask. That's all I have to go on though, so I could be reading way too much into things there. All I can say beyond that is that during our exchanges on June 2, Gina confirmed that Beth had a meeting on June 17 and would not be able to join us, so it would once again be just the three of us with Gina, Jennifer and me, just as it had been at the Washington State Fair in 2015, 2018 and 2021, this being a new thing for us all to do in an "off year."

Gina's plan at first had been to drive to Angle Lake Station and take Light Rail the rest of the way into Seattle. I didn't know, for a while, whether I'd have access to the car, and in the end Shobhit needed it for his campaigning. And then, when I texted Gina and Jennifer to share what the fares and the trip times would be, both or Light Rail from Angle Lake Station to Westlake Station ($3 and about 40 minutes each way) and the bus from downtown to Fremont ($2.75 and about 15 minutes each way), Gina evidently decided then that the public transit idea was too much trouble and decided just to drive after all. Jennifer drove over to her house in Tumwater and Gina drove up from Olympia.

I still took transit all the way there myself, taking the #11 from home to downtown, and then transferring to another bus from downtown to Fremont, arriving shortly after noon—for an event scheduled to start at 2:00. I had already figured out which buses go from downtown to Fremont, and three of them leave from the same stop at 3rd & Pine; all I had to do was get on the next one to come by once I got there. A #5 bus that was running 11 minutes late arrived within a couple of minutes, so that worked out perfectly.

Gina had shared with me her GPS ETA, and it had said 12:02 at Fremont Ave & 34th. My bus was scheduled to get to its closest stop to there, about seven blocks away, at 12:03. Somewhat predictably—not because of Gina but because of overall traffic yesterday, especially in and around Fremont—they arrived a good ten or fifteen minutes after I did. They wound up finding street parking at 34th & Wallingford, so, after meandering around on my own for a bit, I walked all the way to meet them over there.

Then, we all walked back together. Our pace had to be a bit measured due to Jennifer's apparently delicate knees; she said as long as she didn't have to do a lot of stairs she should be fine. I gave them the choice of killing time in the Fremont Fair or staking a spot with the blanket tote, and they chose walking the fair. In the end I never actually opened the blanket tote, which was fine. Better to have it and not use it than to need it and not have it.

I found a great pair of earrings. I paid twelve bucks for them. I sae them at the first booth we looked at, took Jennifer's advice of looking through others too, and eventually bought these at that first booth after passing it again on our way out at the end of the parade.

Also, Gina was hungry, and Jennifer had never seen a PCC store, so we went into the Fremont PCC and got some lunch. which we ate at one of the PCC tables just outside. When we were at the self-checkout, I asked a lady working there if this was the store's busiest day of the year. She said, not really: they get tons of people through the store but not a lot of them actually buy stuff. I hadn't considered that.

From there, we made our way to the end of that first block of the Fremont Fair on 34th, which is also where the building the Fremont PCC is in is located, and then turned right to head up to 36th where the parade route was. Halfway up those two blocks we found the aforementioned rocket, and it seemed appropriate to get a group selfie there. I confused them slightly by how far away into the intersection I walked to get the shot, but that rocket is very tall (53 ft) and I didn't want to be so close to it that it had to be at an awkward angle in order to fit it into the shot with us.

By this time, it was about ten till 2:00, and on this stretch of street, the crowd along the sidewall was already 2-3 people deep. How was I supposed to get good photos? I decided to lead us a bit further up 36th to the northwest, and we got all of about half a block before we actually found a small quasi-hole in the crowd, making us only two-people deep behind two people sitting in chairs on the curb, so it was actually perfect.

I guess I forgot that, although the parade technically starts at 2:00, the traditional nude cyclists lead the pack before the parade—and so they were already riding in their circles in front of the crowd when we got there. It clearly hadn't already been happening for very long, though; the whole group rode in so many circles we saw the same people pass in front of us three, maybe four times.

The Fremont Solstice Parade's nude cyclists is a fascinating, local tradition. Plenty of other cities now have "Nude Bike Rides" and there's been a "World Naked Bike Ride" since 2001, but the Fremont Solstice Parade has featured its nude cyclists with body paint since 1993. There's also a distinction to be made, as events like World Naked Bike Ride aim to make a political statement, and the Fremont cyclists, just as with all the other contingents in the parade, exist much more to make an artistic statement.

Fremont's cyclists had become such an established, annual tradition by 1998 that when police actually arrested a couple cyclists, the city did not file charges, reportedly quoted as saying, "in order to prove indecent exposure, it's necessary to show the person's intent was to be obscene and cause alarm." According to Wikipedia, continued controversy of varying degrees continued to surround the nude cyclists at the Fremont Solstice Parade through the early 2000s, but they have been such a reliable part of the parade for so long now, that they are inextricably linked and just as much of a local institution.

All that said, I think there may have been fewer cyclists yesterday than usual, for no other reason than the weather. Luckily for everyone, the weather was dry, if still slightly cool at around 60°, for the entire duration of the parade—but, although thankfully there was never a heavy downpour, it was wet and misty clear through the point at which we all arrived at Fremont. The misting dried up shortly after that, but with weather like that, it presumably lowered the numbers of cyclists (many of whom probably started their body painting while it was still misting) and spectators alike. Based on my photo archives, it would appear that yesterday was indeed the wettest of all days throughout the years that I made it to this event.

There is an unfortunate trickiness to my sharing the photos of the parade, and particularly the nude cyclists—because of Flickr's limits on sharing photos of nudity. I took so many photos yesterday that, although I still created one photo album for all 165 shots, I actually have them separated out into four different albums, for easier navigation: "Fremont Solstice Fair," "Fremont Solstice Parade: Nude Cyclists," "Fremont Solstice Parade," and "Fremont Solstice Fair: Seattle Art Car Blowout." Once I find the time, I will likely go back and do the same to my photos from previous years.

Anyway, you can really upload everything you want to Flickr—even sexually explicit content—but they have strict rules about nudity, even if the nudity isn't in the least bit sexual (this part is the most irritating to me, basically puritanical), and what can be publicly accessible. Any other Flickr member can see anything I upload; they will just encounter a pop-up warning for "sensitive" content that they can choose to click through to see, if it is flagged as either "moderate" or "restricted." "Moderate" is required if breasts or bare butts are visible. "Restricted" is required if genitalia is visible. I learned the nuances of these rules the hard way a few years ago when someone reported so many of my photos apparently "incorrectly moderated" that my account was locked until I fixed them all–which took some doing. Neither "moderate" or "restricted" photos are visible to anyone who is not a Flickr member.

So, if you aren't on Flickr, and you were to click my nude cyclists photo album, you'll only see an album with 16 shots on it, some of those only "public" (unmoderated) thanks to strategic angle positioning of handlebars in front of a crotch, or something like that. If you are on Flickr and click that link, you'll find an album with seventy-six shots, a vast majority of them with nudity of varying levels of severity.

I can tell you this much: the people who are on Flickr love these photos, making nude cyclist photos from over the years (dating back to 2006) eighteen out of my twenty all-time most-viewed photos. This is the only event I ever go to that features a ton of naked people, though, so it's not all that surprising that my nude photos are by far the most popular on my account.

I actually enjoy the rest of the Fremont Solstice Parade, which Shobhit has in the past shown no interest in whatsoever, wanting to leave as soon as the nude cyclists are past. But, the rest of the parade features a great deal of creativity in its own right, and honestly I can understand some historical resentment of the nude cyclists stealing their thunder. Probably my favorite this year was the human wind turbines.

I did miss part of the beginning of the parade behind the cyclists, though, because I had to pee so desperately that I needed to go in search of a bathroom. I wound up back at the Fremont PCC, where there must have been 15 women in line for the ladies' room, but I was able to walk right into the men's room, waiting only about a minute for someone to finish in the stall. I was pleased to be able to get back to the parade within ten minutes. The time stamps on my photos indicate that the nude cyclists rode in circles in front of us for a good 35 minutes, and the rest of the parade lasted a solid forty minutes.

After that, we went back to browse the several blocks of booths of the Fremont Fair, and I'm not sure we even covered them all. We did all thoroughly enjoy the "Seattle Art Car Blowout." We made our way back through the booths in the direction we came, stopping at one place where a spinner on a necklace read "Happy Birthday" but for some reason Gina thought it said "Butthole," and she even asked: "Does it say butthole?" The vendor lady was so amused by this she said she might indeed have to make one that said that, and Jennifer was literally laughing about this for the rest of the day.

I had a slightly embarrassing moment of my own, at the booth where I bought the disco ball earrings. I could not find the vendor person to make my payment to, and when a woman walked into the center area of the tent where I was standing, the keys hanging off her belt made me think perhaps she was who I needed. But when I suddenly said, "Do you work here?" she immediately said in an embarrassed tone, "Oh I thought I could walk through here!" I laughed and said, "I'm sorry, I'm not challenging you—I'm just looking for whoever I can buy these from." Clearly I need to work on my tone, which can really change the perceived meaning of something said or asked. (Gabriel used to complain about this in college, the way I said "Gabe!"—back when "Gabe" was still how I knew him—whenever calling for him, in a way he thought made it sound like I was unhappy about something.)

I finally found the guy, bought my earrings, and then we made a mutual decision to walk over to Gasworks Park, which I wanted them to see. Gina had said she had maybe another hour in her before she'd want to head back home. Jennifer said The Amazing Race had shot in that park once; I wouldn't have known that. We were only at the park for maybe twenty minutes, where both Jennifer and I took a couple of pictures, and then we all went back to their car, as Gina offered to give me a ride home. They made a brief pit stop to get a light dinner at Dick's in Wallingford on the way.

Fremont Solstice Parade 2024

Fremont Solstice Parade and Fair 2023