I think I’m already stuck on this book. Maybe I just don’t feel up to it this weekend, but I can’t even think about it without thinking it isn’t that good. I don’t know, I never had this problem with Summer Rain because the whole plot was there and it was just a matter of doing the work and coming up with the details, and Rumored had its problems and there were many second thoughts, but it eventually pulled through. The problem now is that a lot of the notes I’ve taken in the last few months don’t really fit this book, and it makes me wonder if I should just finish this and start something else with those notes, or just start the something else, or do both, or do neither, or who knows what. So tonight I’m just dicking around, maybe editing the web site, and playing video games.
I was thinking about Seattle today, which is always bad news. I was playing around with traffic cameras on the web, because part of an underpass collapsed here, and I wanted to see if there was a picture of it or anything, and while googling around, I found the WSDOT web page and started checking out their cameras, and it made me miss Seattle so much, it was pathetic. It’s hard to explain, but back when I was there, I always spent my Saturdays driving around. When I first moved there, I was always broke, but I still had the almost-new car and it got great mileage, and I’d spent all of my time driving up I-5 to Northgate mall, or down I-5 to Southcenter, our out on I-90 to Bellevue or across the 520 to Kirkland, or wheverever I needed to go. I drove a lot, because everything had a parking lot, and even though traffic pissed me off, I had a tape player and an air conditioner and the new car smell and I didn’t care.
And looking at the pictures… I mean, check them out sometime. Every road in Puget Sound is perfectly carved into the hills, with grassy meadows and evergreen trees wrapping around every terrace. You can’t drive five miles in Seattle without crossing over a lake or passing by a large body of water. Maybe it’s just something familiar to me about looking at these cameras, all of them positioned right at places I remember, that makes me reminisce. But when I look at that and then I look at what I do on most Saturdays here, it’s depressing. I know I took the scorched earth approach when I burned my bridges leaving Seattle, and I think assistant managing a McDonald’s here probably pays more than doing my current job back there, so I’m not in any rush to leave New York, but I just wish I could hop in my car that I don’t have and drive when I’m sick of staring at the same four walls and I want to get out.