0.19 Sodom and tomorrow

I woke up the morning after Caitlin’s pronouncement and resolved never to look back. I feared that I would be turned into a pillar of salt by the Caitlin-mediated god offering me redemption. I pictured Seattle as a smoking ruin, to be instantly forgotten and fled in search of some relatively prelapsarian city—like Seattle before the boom—and I was wary of plunging into my self-pitying spiral again.

As if to acknowledge the wisdom (and maybe even the virtue) of my decision, a job suddenly materialized. One week to the day after my unemployment compensation ran out, after five months of unemployment, I began work writing newsletters, fliers and web pages for the King County Department of Transportation. Cosseting commuters. My office, it turned out, was in Maynardtown—a short walk through Pioneer Square from the ferry terminal—with a view out to the south, looking directly at two classically vulgar Paul Allen vanity projects: the new Seahawks football stadium and the new buildings around the Allen-restored old Union Station. I would have expected to view them as horrifying, if not downright threatening, encroaching as they were on the edge of the sacred center of Seattle. Instead, from the safety of my Maynardtown perch, in my new state of mind, they looked a world away—as harmless, now that the boom was over, as they were ostentatious. They looked more like the ruins of a fallen, bloated Empire than new monuments to a new Emperor.

In a way, they were ruins—the boom they pretended to honor had gone bust before the paint on the football stadium was dry, and Amazon, the primary tenant in the Union Square project, was laying off employees by the hundreds. It was as if Allen had built them not with the intention that they have a useful life before fading to ruin, but simply to be ruins. He wanted to leave a stain on the landscape that would immortalize him. I couldn’t look at them without thinking of Jonathan Raban’s line about the Pyramids: “Mr. Big was here.”

In the cold cleansing light of the technology bust, all the boom-delivered dangers to Seattle looked faded, worn, weakened. Gleaming new office buildings were plastered with vacancy signs that looked like white flags of surrender. The big success stories of the boom—Microsoft, Starbucks—had become just another part of the corporate scenery. Their novelty worn off, their growth curves flattened, their competitive environments completely changed, their founders grown into middle age, they had lost their novelty, their charm, their power. They were reduced like their corporate elders to a kind of white noise in the background. They were faded celebrities—still there, still glittering, but no longer vibrant, no longer leading the way to a glorious future, no longer objects of fascination, no longer dangerous.

I saw firsthand one morning how precipitous the fall can be from glamorous startup to establishment white trash. I was standing in a Pioneer Square Starbucks, at the corner of First and Yesler, when I saw a tourist couple walk in. The man was a classic: in his 70s, sporting a straw fedora, loud shirt, oversized Bermuda shorts, and black socks and shoes. He looked like the result of a collaboration between Edward Hopper and David Hockney. He and his wife took only two steps into the Starbucks theme park before he stopped, enraged. “Let’s go get coffee somewhere else!” he said. “I don’t want to go to a franchise .”