Urban Energy

After being my mother's sole caretaker for nearly a month straight, I'm relieved to be taking a few hours off (my sisters are relieving me for part of the weekend), which I'm spending on the east side of the water, in Seattle proper.

In fact, I'm in the most densely populated and energetic zone of Seattle, at the center of the urban complex, and I love the energy here. It's got little in common with where my mom lives, an hour's drive and an hour's boat ride away (including waiting and loading). Over there, Obama is a socialist, but over here, he's a mild reformer. In Port Ludlow, gay marriage is a controversy. On Capitol Hill, it's a right.

But it's not just people's politics. Every aspect of culture you could name between here and there shows up on the radar in a comprehensive pattern of diametrical opposition. This place is overwhelmingly young and aggressively accepting of life in the unmerciful present; that place, overwhelmingly old, clueless, left behind.

There are lots of gen-X urban professionals on the Hill, some with quite a bit of money. But the stench of thousand-dollar bills doesn't hang over this place the way it does in the neighborhood where I'm staying, and neither does the decaying odor of right-wing ideology.

This makes any decision about the future a no brainer. I'll be moving over here sometime next year, probably to the Greenwood-Phinney Ridge neighborhood.