Slackjaw's Forum

I haven’t been sleeping all that well lately and I’m not sure why. The heat could be a factor, though it’s already been hotter than this, so could the lack of a breeze to break up the stagnant air. I tend not to do well with the fans blowing all night, but I do even worse sweating in our stuffy bedroom, so if it’s hot I’ll usually turn one on. These days, my neighbor heads out for work at 5a.m every morning. I know this because he parks his ancient van directly behind his ratty tent trailer taking up all the room beneath the birch trees on one side of our lot. He gets in, slams the creaky door shut and after a few errant tries, starts it up and heads out. Why is his van parked outside our single-wide you ask? Well it’s a complicated story but I will do my best to explain it all to you here. When the Simpson’s, our old neighbors who lived a few lots down, moved to Purdy, they decided to give their trailer and lease to a sibling. She’s married and has a couple of kids an...

Saturday night was spent up in Arlington for the summer solstice . We met up with the same group of people that we meet up there every year, sitting around the fire singing songs and watching the kind of stars that you can only watch when you’re far away from city lights. The Older Boy saw the Big Dipper for the first time. The kids all played together staying up late and of course, waking up early with the sun as well. The weather was almost too hot for my liking but we stayed until lunch before packing it in and heading south. After we’d made the long drive back down along I-5, through the mysterious weekend traffic-jams of the 520 intersection, past the MLK exit we used to take before the boys were born, past the Federal Way Mall and the Poodle Dog restaurant in Fife, we sat on the stoop of the single wide gathering our strength and trying to figure out how we were gonna make it though the next few hours of a nieces birthday party hosted at one of Sweeties sister’s ho...

I joined a group of lawless wheat-paste posterers the other night, driving around the city with a tub of water and a cheesecloth covered mason jar full of flour. T_ and L_ are the guys behind Beautiful Angle who go out once a month armed with a stack of freshly printed heavy paper, some staples and a well thought out route, covering the city with their unique brand of underground art. Sweetie has liked their posters for a while now and over the course of the past year or so, started to email back and forth with T_ . We ran into them at a local bar a while back when Sweetie recognized one of them. T_ lost half of his finger in an unfortunate bookcase-building incident at the start of the year and made it easy to spot him I guess. Of course that’s just Sweetie really; she has an eye for that kind of detail. They were really surprised to be outed in public like that, but it led to an invitation for dinner over at T_’s house and that led to a request for me to write a post...

This is the story of Ike’s first few days of life. It’s a small part of a project I’m working on and I thought I would put it up. It can be a hard read, and it's pretty long, just so you know, but the good part is Ike lived. -Slack We were on the way to Seattle Children’s Hospital and we weren’t speaking. Somehow it seemed like enough just hearing the thudding of the road in between all that silence. What was there to say anyway? At that point, I had pretty much accepted the thought that Ike wasn’t gonna survive that long trip in the ambulance. I sat there driving next to Sweetie thinking about the last two days and how in all that noise and confusion, under the breathing tube and IV wires, I had found a small bit of face I could touch to say good-bye and let him know I loved him – how I leaned over and said “be brave.” The ambulance team packed him and what equipment they couldn’t carry onto the gurney and left to make the drive up Interstate Five to Seattle. How f...