Backstory: Downtime for me means vacation to another city, usually couch-surfing at a friend's while decompressing. This was written while visiting Seattle from the endless blanditude of suburban Virginia after several glasses of good red wine and a pretty awesome day.

It's always gray here, except when the sun pokes through a wreath of clouds to illuminate the gardens on the side streets or the bright purple dreadlocks of the shopgirl from the lampwork glass store. Down along Pike Place, the hobos are spinning tales for money, indie girls are spinning needles for scarves, and the air smells like fresh fish, fresh bullshit, and a firm heaping of coffee.

Seattle. Filled with art and cafes and self-consciously disaffected people dressed in earth tones and black, too much affected irony, dot.com money and hipsters duking it out with younger hipsters: condos vs. bars and expensive drinks versus cheap local beer. Too close to Redmond, too far from San Jose; slouching towards San Francisco's stoned, laidback cousin who didn't quite make it big back in the nineties. It ain't Silicon Valley, but it's not quite like anywhere else east of Chicago, either.

Seattle. They're just as likely to put peanut butter on a burger as aged gouda. Seattle. Right down the road from the Yakima Valley, filled with cheap - but good - wine and local microbrews. City of the beautiful and apathetic, drinking until dawn, drinking good coffee until the sun comes up and then some, the hobos hitting you up on every corner as you stumble home, admiring the pretty indie boys and the grungy postpunk beauties.

Fuck, Seattle. Camo and business suits, black and earth tones, the Market, Ballard, University, Wallingford, the Mountain. Delivery thai, used bookstores, beautiful houses and glowing Japanese maple, rattling, badly-working doorknobs, artisan foods and goods, rusting industry, the sudden rains in the afternoon and clouds throughout the year flirting with and spurning the sun.

I love you, Seattle. Keep changing.