Packwood, WA

Mount Rainier in the distance

Packwood, WA is the first town on State Road 12 out of Rainier National Park, and one of the few places where you can go to buy supplies if you happen to be out in the woods, casually roughing it.

Packwood is a funny little town. It has exactly one radio station, KACS Christian Radio, no cell-phone coverage, four coffee shops, five churches, and everyone seems to have high-speed wi-fi. The sporting goods store has a huge, faded Obama "Yes We Can" poster hanging from the rafters. The view from the grocery store includes Mt. Rainier in the distance; these people see every day what Seattlites spend good money and put good effort into seeing once or twice a year.

There are two gas stations, a Chevron at one end, and a Shell at the other. The Shell has a fast-food restaurant inside it and a lot big enough for tractor-trailer rigs. The Chevron has full service at all the pumps, provided by an elderly gentleman in a clean, pressed Chevron uniform straight out of the 1950s. The woman behind the cash register, likewise. The bathrooms were spotless, and my windshield was clean when I got back. The pumps are mechanical, not electronic and require a key to reset and operate. The prices on gasoline between the two stations are the same.

Restaurant For Sale

The biggest operator in the area appears to be "Four-U Real Estate," a big wooden building at the far end of town, which sponsors the local newspaper as well as the aforementioned radio station. There were dozens of "for sale" signs lining both sides of SR12 as I headed into Packwood, all of them belonging to Four-U, including one at this kitschy "Bavarian-style" restaurant, which was locked and boarded up from the other side. The restaurant was next to a locked up motel of the same architecture but no for-sale sign. Still, the paperwork on the front of the motel suggested it had last been open in April, and as far as I know there are no ski resorts on this side of the park.

Aside from the funny Jesus statue and the radio station, Packwood didn't seem particularly religious. The guy with the Obama poster also had a truck with the bumper sticker, "Driver does not carry less that $20 in ammunition." At the grocery a pair of artist/hipster types were greeted by the clerk, who clearly knew them as if they lived there, and later I saw them drive off in a beat-up Volkswagon Bug with Kerry/Edwards bumper sticker.

Inland Radio...

Christian Radio in the "Inland Empire" area of Washington is an entirely different beast from the radio as it plays here on the very leftist coast. Here, the radio is a combination of exhortations to stay with the faith, reminders that no, really, we do have a way to explain away all those nasty things the scientists and historians are saying and doing about the biblical "truth," and reminders to send in your tithes and donations as necessary.

Inland radio is both more communal and encompassing.

The encompassing part is kinda scary: in their world, in the news, there are no Muslims, Christians, Jews, etc: there are only "Believers" and everyone else. You're either a "Believer" or an infidel. That's one very scary shift in vocabulary.

The biggest piece of news was how the ongoing turmoil in Iran is making it much harder for "Believers" to preach inside Iran, but how it also presented an opportunity for "Believers" to press harder.

In fact, that was one of the things that really made my hair stand up-- every single news article contained an examination of how the incident being described could be used to extend the power of the Believer Hegemony. Often, in the mainstream media, there's an examination of who's up and who's down in any conflict, but in every case, every news article included an "We can and will exploit this event to the Church's benefit by doing such-and-such." Very creepy.

The more communal part was an hour-long "Let's pray for..." message. One prayer, for a boy with brain cancer, reminded me of Heather MacDonald's piece, The Conundrum of Prayer. But it was strange to hear "We're still praying after two years for Bob to settle his legal troubles..." as if there were no more to be said, and the whole audience had been following this obscure, talked-in-whispers legal issue, and knew everything about it. And I still wondered, what good did all that praying do? Whom did it comfort? Did it feel like accomplishment without accomplishing anything?

Still wondering.

Today...

Horse and Carriage

Today was a heck of day. I had two interviews, one with a recruiter and one for which I had to sign an NDA. The recruiter strongly recommended that I cut down on the confusion by crafting two resumes, one for my L33t Javascript Skillz, the other for the more staid middle-tier, and if I didn't want to keep getting server and system jobs I should take the C/C++ references off entirely.

She also recommended I craft an elevator pitch. "I'm a middle-tier application server developer who can use the modern frameworks-- Rails, Django, PHP-- to marshall your data into a web-ready form, and then I use HTML, CSS, and Javascript to present that data to clients in an attractive, accessible, and functional website." Something like that.

But being downtown for several hours gave me a chance to visit the beloved Pike Place Market, and listen to people on the radio babble about how we used to be the town of Doc Maynard and Ivar Haglund, but, y'know, it's time to move on. Well, fuck that. I like Seattle the way it is. Especially now, when the weather was beautiful, even if I was sweating in my corporate-ready uniform of sport coat and casual shirt. No tie, blessed be. I love Seattle. The brick facades and horse-drawn carriages, and horse cops, give you a chance to believe you're living in a place that is still civilized enough to have the resources for such frivolity.

Man fixes bus mirror

It's not always perfect here. The metro buses have these new mirrors that hang out over the curb when the bus brushes up against the cement, and this one obviously had a close encounter with a lamp post. I keep imagining what would have happened if that had connected with someone's head. I can't help but wonder if that's already happened.

And I also had an idea for an awful, awful joke. I might show it to you.

Seattle Porn, Revisited!

Is it bad of me to think that I'd actually like to watch Grope Is The Thing With Feathers? Or Acres of Clams?

[Hint: Probably NSFW]