A city in the central Puget Sound approximately 30 miles south of Seattle.

Famous for the ever ambient scent well-known as "The aroma of Tacoma" noticed driving Interstate 5 caused by the presence of paper-mills, industry and waste treatment plants in close proximity to the freeway. It is this fact that also earns the city lesser nicknames like: T-town or The armpit of Washington.

Another 'claim' to fame is they are the "America's #1 wired city" (this is perpetually displayed on the Tacoma Dome readerboard visible from I-5)due to the municipal electric company, Tacoma Power, getting into the broadband business by building a fiber-optic infrastructure from scratch and launching Click! Network, providing direct competition with @Home. The first city in America to take on a private cable company.

Tacoma is also the place that was famous for the old Tacoma Narrows Bridge, nicknamed Galloping Gertie* that blew down in a windstorm on November 7th, 1940 due to poor aerodynamic engineering in regards to crosswinds...not to mention it is the K5 logo.


* "Galloping Gertie" is the more historically accurate spelling of the nickname, and there are many references available on Google versus "Galloping Girdy" which there is already an existing writeup on.

Tacoma, like many cities in the Pacific Northwest, congealed around a mill -- in this case, a lumber mill, in 1853. The mill attracted the Northern Pacific Railroad, and Tacoma's fate as a major trade hub was set in steel.

The railroad came to Tacoma's Commencement Bay in 1872. A dozen years later, Commencement Bay began receiving shipments of tea from "the Orient." Official recognition of the City of Tacoma came one year later. Fourteen years after that, in 1887, Northern Pacific lay down rails across the Cascades, spurring the city's fivefold population boom.

Since its founding, Tacoma has nurtured its successful economic pairing of shipping with industrial manufacturing.

Linguists agree that the name Tacoma is derived from a Native American name for Mount Rainier, but sources disagree as to whether it's from "Tacobet," meaning "Mother of the Waters," or "Ta-ho-mah," meaning "snowy mountain."

the best way I ever learned to be deathless
was when I was a 12-year-old black boy who survived
two gunshots to the side of my neck
and survived the 5 o'clock news, a pedestrian
screaming into the camera lens, its first-person shake
in a run across the parking lot over to me
gulping gently, head on its side, wrists turned on their sides,
ankles on their sides, knees on their sides, stomach
up, palm casing open pincers on my neck
shaving blood against the asphalt to wipe my hand clean every
now and then inside a light circle the camera bulb continued
to cast even as they walked away to let me sleep
without rest for 14 hours of self-holding
letting my other limbs twitch as needed, not allowing my
self to turn over for constant kidney scream, trying
hard to digest and bleed until I surrendered to my feet
trying to find my street, neighborhood, anything familiar
surroundings traffic lights overpasses cornerstores
slow landmarks eventually lead me all the way through
to the living room with my mother's ribs leaning
into a dinner chair, so that both her hands could be free
to hold a doubled grocery bag open and empty, wide
eyes thrusting it towards me eagerly, thrusting it again,
I am so sorry, come in, come in


April, 2014. Gradually edited since.

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