De Libertas Quirkas

Visited the neighborhood of Fremont, Seattle today, known alternately as "The People's Republic of Fremont" (for its association with various counterculture elements) and "The Center of the Universe." Their unofficial motto, De Libertas Quirkas, translates roughly to "the freedom to be peculiar," and everywhere this motto rings true. Below are several pictures of landmarks in Fremont, including the Fremont Rocket, the "Fremont Troll" (a troll under a bridge!), and a massive statue of Vladimir Lenin. Learn more about Fremont here, if you'd like.

Seattle

For those of you who know me personally, you will know that my family recently moved to Seattle. I am presently with them, having arrived Saturday morning at 3am local time after a nearly four-hour delay at O'Hare Airport in Chicago. I am sitting comfortably in our home in the Magnolia neighborhood. Outside our window, to the south, like some beautiful painting, Mt. Rainier towers over all below it. For some scientific reason beyond my understanding, the mountain appears to be floating, its base shrouded in the same pale blue as the sky above and around it. Magnificent.

From our rooftop, one can view the many fishing boats in the water below as well as the tops of the houses all around. This home is smaller than our previous homes; it is three stories with roughly three rooms on each floor, including a fourth floor that is an open rooftop. Below, the lights from the boats and surrounding buildings dance upon the water's dark, gently swaying surface. Here is a place of peace.

I will stay here until my appetite for the city has dissipated sufficiently for me to gin myself up to go back to Kentucky. I will occupy myself with tourism, to be sure, but my primary hope is to spend much of my time writing. Writer Julia Cameron says in her book "The Right to Wright" that when a writer possesses a concrete sense of place, it "make[s] for writing that a reader can connect to." This is my challenge.

Which is why it is so important that I left Kentucky for a time. I need to break routine and change my environment in an effort to be more productive. Here's where we see if that gamble pays off.