I was walking down to the grocery store yesterday, which takes me past a pretty busy intersection. There’s a homeless shelter just down the street and the bums like to work those corners, begging motorists for change while they’re waiting for the light to change. There was a guy there that day, standard hand-lettered cardboard sign in hand, bumming for coins, and he saw me and shouted, “Hey, man! Happy new year!”

I fired off a “You, too” and kept on walking. About five steps along it hit me: What possible happy new year could this guy have? Short of winning the lottery, I’m not sure there’s much that’s going to improve his current life status. What new year wishes could I offer him that wouldn’t be simply bitterly ironic? Here’s hoping you don’t lose a foot to frostbite? May no yuppie teenagers soak you in gasoline and set you on fire? To a year where you don’t finally succumb to psoriasis?

I need to find another route to the grocery store.

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If you’ve never been to Seattle, the traffic system seems to have been laid out by drunken, blind squirrels. Roads come and go at random directions, loop around, cross over themselves. It’s not unusual to have five- or even seven-way intersections. And so, if someone does the traditional jackass thing in heavy traffic and pulls into the intersection knowing full well they won’t get through it before the light changes, they can block traffic in up to six different directions. To dissuade the practice, there are signs up informing you of the fine for being that kind of social douche. The cost for blocking an intersection? $101. Yes, one-hundred-and-one dollars.

I’m not sure what the thinking is there. Is that the magic price point people don’t want to go over, like the Nintendo Wii, where people say, “Hey, I’m willing to spend $199 on something, but over $200? Forget it!” Is it just to make it more inconvenient at the ATM when you go to get the money to pay the fine? “Aw, man… now I gotta take out $120, then find someplace to break the twenty…” Whatever the reason, all I can say, based on my observations of Seattle drivers, is that fine obviously ain’t nowhere near high enough to stop them. Maybe they should up it to $102.

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I wrote recently about how much of the joy of the fall season is sucked out of Seattle by the near-constant damp that mats the leaves into a sodden mess. You don’t crunch through these leave, you sort of moosh through them. They’re wet, sticky, heavy. They’re not kicked up by the breeze. They don’t playfully dance in the wind. They’re down and they’re staying there.

Doesn’t stop people from trying to move them.

Pretty much every morning, around 7:30 or so, you’re treated to a chorus of leaf blowers around our apartment, and pretty much all up and down the street, as maintenance guys engage in the futile battle against leaf-covered sidewalks. Yes, the loud, ear-shattering, pointless, ineffective spawns of Hell that are leaf blowers, destroying the early-morning quiet (as quiet as it gets here, anyway) as sullen men sweep them back and forth, over and over, trying to move solid masses of dead plant life with puffs of air. It doesn’t go so well.

I’ve never liked leaf blowers. They’re stupid-loud and don’t do the job they’re designed to do any better or faster than the rake they supposedly replace. And that’s with dry leaves. With the wet clumps we have here, the leaf blowers are totally outmatched. But still, unwilling to part with their cool little toys, even in the face of stark evidence that they’re useless, the workers continue to whip out their mechanized wands and attempt to blow the leaves away. And they’ll keep at it for the better part of a half-hour. That’s a joyous time to sit by the window, listening to the constant roar and scream of the engine as they accomplish nothing but feel cool doing it.

Can’t wait for winter and the half-inch of snow that will require them to break out the snow-blowers.

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Autumn has always been my favorite time of year. Growing up in rural Indiana, I loved this season. The gradual drop in temperature. The slow change of color in the leaves. The air had an edge to it somehow. Not the sharpened knife blade that winter winds brought, but just a sharpness, a tang. It was crisp in a way that is hard to define but easy to appreciate.

And the leaves… Mounds, drifts of them, spread and piled everywhere. Reds, oranges, yellows, an explosion of color in the trees and on the grounds. Sure, there was some grumbling about raking them up, but it seemed a small price to pay for walking ankle-deep through them on the way to school, listening to the crunch and rustle under your feet. And sometimes a small eddy of that crisp wind would pick up a handful and cast them into the air where they would catch the sunlight and turn into a blazing dance of color. A shifting, living stained-glass window, there for that one perfect moment and then gone forever. It was a time of magic.

Seattle in autumn is like walking through wet cardboard.

The air here, almost constantly damp, doesn’t have that traditional autumn edge. You don’t breathe it deep into your lungs because it feels like someone is pressing a wet gym sock into your face. The air coats you, weighs you down, and leaves you feeling like you need a towel at all times. And while there are leaves on the ground, they’re limp and lifeless, dull and dreary, matted down by the frequent rains. Even when it doesn’t rain, there’s still the aforementioned humidity that keeps them soggy, a sodden mass that doesn’t crunch underfoot, but merely makes a sound like walking in slightly damp mud. Instead of dancing into the air, they stick to your shoes and pants legs, giving you the joy of peeling dead, dripping plant detritus off your clothing.

Can’t wait to see what winter’s like.

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