In which I walk around Lake Washington and urge you to buy a bookstore or three.
Hi!
Last Saturday, I did my annual walk around Lake Washington. It was a little early in the year, and I almost undertook it impulsively. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to complete the full loop without a few weeks of psyching myself up for it first.
It turned out to be one of my easiest trips around Lake Washington ever, assisted in large part by the fact that long-standing construction projects in Juanita at the top of the lake and Mercer Slough at the eastern edge of the lake have both finally ended. Without having to take long detours, I wound up walking a relatively short 49 miles—102,297 steps.
I left the house at 4:19 a.m. and returned at 8:59 p.m. I mostly ate protein bars bought from grocery stores along the way and drank Gatorade—though I’m happy to report that fresh watermelon juice is just as reinvigorating and electrolyte-laden as any sugary sports beverage. I made no major stops, aside from bathroom breaks. My heart rate for the day is kind of astonishing to see—not too high, not erratic at all. Just steady, all day.
One unfortunate variation this time around: The trail running shoes I have sworn by for the better part of a decade, Brooks Cascadia waterproof runners, are a little bit different this year. Brooks has unfortunately fallen for the trendy Hoka shtick of overinflating the cushioning of their shoes, and the Cascadias were too goddamned cushy. I wound up developing a bad blister in the center of my left foot that I’m still feeling five days later. It’s the most painful and long-lasting injury I’ve ever had from one of these walks.
Brooks has been very good to me so I’m not eager to give up on them yet. But if next year’s Cascadia models are as over-cushioned as this year’s, I might have to find a new trail-running brand. When will this marshmallow-footed athletic shoe trend finally die?
Part of the reason that I took my yearly walk around Lake Washington so early in the year is that I’m thinking about adding a second circumnavigation of the lake at the end of summer or the beginning of fall, before it starts to get dark early. I’m not sure if this is a good idea or not, to be honest.
This one long walk has become so important to my mental health—a pillar of my emotional life and something that I dearly look forward to every year as winter draws to a close—that I wonder if adding a second walk might be good for me. Or maybe it’ll be the equivalent of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs by making it less special somehow.
Because coming home after walking steadily in a giant circle around an enormous body of water is still, after all these years, an emotionally powerful experience. I still feel a little high, filled with a glow that stays with me for days afterward. I might not be able to jog, or throw a ball, or hold a yoga pose. But I can walk a really, really long goddamn time.
I’ve Been Writing
On the Pitchfork Economics podcast, Goldy and I talked with Jamie Keene, a former Biden administration economist, about her new report that makes a very compelling case for a very important point: Whenever the next progressive wave takes the White House and Congress, it’s important that they not waste time trying to repair the social safety net that the Trump White House has left in tatters. Instead, they should build new programs that invest deeply in people who need food, unemployment, and income assistance without all the means testing and terrible constraints that have been written into the system over the last 40 years or so. It was a great conversation.
I’ve Been Reading
I had been saving Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s second novel, Long Island Compromise, for a vacation, and I’m so glad I did. What an absolute pleasure this big, sprawling novel about generational trauma and its impacts on one rich family full of frustrating twerps turned out to be. It’s deeply funny and while it is about trauma, it also satirizes modern novelists’ overuse of trauma as a narrative crutch. It’s not reinventing the wheel, but this one is a phenomenal reading experience. I recommend taking it out for a spin the when you’re taking some time off and have extra attention to commit to reading.
Michael Pollan developed a very clear pattern to his career in the early 2000s: first he writes one important and culture-changing book (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and then the publishes a few books on the same subject that just aren’t as compelling because they feel made up of outtakes from the big important book (In Defense of Food, Cooked, Food Rules). But while How to Change Your Mind, his treatise on psychedelics, was clearly supposed to be the big important book of this new cycle of his work, I actually enjoyed his most recent bits-and-bobs book, A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness, even more. It’s a swift-moving and wide-ranging guide to human consciousness that unfortunately takes a long and unnecessary detour into AI, but it still changed my understanding of how my own brain works. (I wish Pollan had asked all the interview subjects who claim that we have a moral responsibility to treat AI humanely if it develops consciousness why they don’t seem to give a shit about human suffering at home and abroad, even though we know that starving children in Sudan, Gaza, and Haiti are just as conscious as you or me.)
Unplugged is one of those books you accidentally read on vacation because it’s suddenly available after you’ve read everything else. It’s a memoir from Tom Freston, one of the founders of MTV who got his start importing goods from the Hippie Trail in Afghanistan and India, and it’s a pretty generic American business story with a couple of great anecdotes spread around to keep you interested. The opening chapter, when Freston is fired from his job as CEO of Viacom and is greeted on his way out the door by dozens of applauding employees, is pretty cringy, but things improve from there.
Walking Into the Night by Olaf Olafsson is a novel that fictionalizes the story of William Randolph Hearst’s real-life butler, Christian Benediktsson. It’s a slender novel that asks how someone could possibly take on a role that forces them to supplant their very personhood in service to a wealthy eccentric, and I enjoyed it. But Benediktsson’s pre-butler history wasn’t as interesting as his time serving Hearst, and I wanted the book to offer more hot gossip about Hearst’s inner sanctum. It was all a bit too chilly and austere for my tastes.
Sayaka Murata’s Vanishing World is a novel set in a dystopian Japan in which the breeding of children is outsourced entirely to in vitro fertilization. Through the application of omnipresent government propaganda, the marriage between a man and a woman is considered to be a strictly family arrangement, to the point where sexual activity between husband and wife is considered a taboo. Instead, people are encouraged to develop romantic relationships with fictional characters in their manga and anime. This was a short, zippy novel that asked some truly bizarre questions and pushed some ideas of sex and gender roles in child-rearing to the absolute limit.
Don’t Cry Because It’s Over—Smile Because You Should Buy a Bookstore
Lots of people have come to me in a state of panic about the announcement that Ada’s Technical Books on Capitol Hill will be closing. Does this portend doom for Seattle’s independent bookstores, they want to know? Are books finally finished once and for all?
Honestly, this news doesn’t freak me out at all. For one thing, the owner of Ada’s, Danielle Hulton, is one of the most straightforward people I know in the local book scene, and I take her at her word that she was ready to move on from bookselling for personal reasons. So far as I’m concerned, this says nothing about the industry at large.
And also: Ada’s 16 years of independent bookselling is not a failure. Businesses come and go. Not every bookstore can be a precious legacy business handed down from generation to generation. It’s perfectly okay for a business to shutter after a good run. This is one of my pet peeves about sites like Vanishing Seattle—they treat every business closure as a tragedy or a death, when in fact cities are meant to change. It sucks when one of your favorite places goes away, but I guarantee you there are other favorite places out there waiting for you. Seattle has dozens upon dozens of independent bookstores, and while none of them are as specifically devoted to science and technical books as Ada’s, I promise you can find another bookstore out there that speaks to you and your needs.
Which kind of leads to my big point: Hulton is now ready to sell off the three Fuel Coffee locations that she bought and transformed into small bookstores six years ago. If you’ve ever wanted to run a small neighborhood bookstore/cafe, I urge you to consider this your big chance. These are beautiful spaces in Montlake, Capitol Hill, and Wallingford that are just dying for an opinionated and passionate bookseller to come in and take them over.
I personally feel as though the three Fuel locations were underutilized in terms of programming to activate the communities. I think they’d be ideal spaces for book clubs, small readings and musical performances, and other creative community events.
I know there are at least three people out there who have always dreamed of owning a bookstore in Seattle. To those people, I urge you to check out the Fuel Coffee locations and dream big. There’s bookselling magic waiting to happen in those spaces. All it would take to make it happen is someone like you.
Dream big!
Paul
P.S. Confidential to those of you who are just here for the dogs: Obie and Wally just had their annual vet visits and are doing very well. Obie’s on a pain management program for his arthritis but he is doing spectacularly well for a 12-year-old greyhound. Wally is a sporty little fireplug whose teeth need a deep-cleaning that he is sure to not enjoy, but he is otherwise the picture of health.
Paul Constant 