CoronaQuarantine, Day 83: Seattle Protests, Day 4
I took my early-week walk to the office after work yesterday, and Alexia joined me—at this rate, she's going to be at the top of the Social Review standings next time I post them. As of right now, she probably does rank #1. Shobhit and I should go on some of our own walks or something. It's just that it's hard because of all the hours he works and when his hours are.
Alexia's job is apparently consistently frustrating for her, so my worry that she might bow out of walking to my office with me yesterday turned out to be unfounded; she really wanted to get out. She couldn't leave until 5:20, so that gave me time to call Mom and wish her a happy birthday—she turned 68 yesterday. I called her as soon as I finished work at 4:30, but Bill told me she was in the bathroom; I called back at 4:40, so we had roughly forty minutes to talk. We even had a surprising lot to talk about: the protests (about which I was almost shocked by how much she came down on the side of the protesters); our now-official plan to visit them the first weekend of August (and she was totally on board with us limiting time spent inside their house, to minimize risk of spreading COVID); Shobhit's and my plan to go to the Washington Coast later this month. In fact we could have easily talked much longer, which kind of surprised me, but it was time to leave with Alexia.
And, Alexia and I agreed it was still best to steer clear of the route through the middle of downtown as we did not want to run into where there would either be or soon be protesters, so we walked north on 15th to John, then took John and mostly Denny Way down to my office.
I feel like I took a bit longer than usual in the office. Some stuff was par for the course; I always pilfer the pantry for a snack, for example; and get a cup with several pumps of vanilla and lavender flavoring syrup for making my tea a London Fog Tea Latte on Friday. But, my Grocery receivers stack was thicker than usual, and I had the extra stack I'm handling for HBC to help out Steven while he's detained working on new store setup at Central District. A bit of a bummer was seeing how even thicker the new stack of Grocery receivers was, and I had to grab another of Steven's stacks, so this is pretty much all I'm going to have time to work on on Friday.
Alexia's son Bram not long ago moved into the new apartment complex built up around the Capitol Hill Light Rail Station, and he texted her while we were walking back that people were already gathering at Cal Anderson Park, so it was clear there was going to be another night of protests. Helicopters hovered again, and Alexia and I still made a point of giving the park a couple blocks berth, even though we could see things were pretty mellow at that moment. We agreed that it couldn't hurt just to be safe, and we walked back up John after Broadway, to 15th and then back down to our building that way.
Shobhit worked at Total Wine & More yesterday from 3:30 to about 10:00, and he also made it a point not to take even transit that usually goes down Pine—he took the #8 at 15th & John and which goes the very route Alexia and I had walked, down to Queen Anne & Mercer, where he transferred to the #8 to get out to Total Wine in Interbay off 15th (different 15th; 15th Avenue West as opposed to 15th Avenue East here on Capitol Hill). He took the same buses in the inverted order on his way back, both ways texting me updates along the way. He made it both ways without incident.
I did check Twitter quite a lot during the rest of the evening after I made myself dinner, and I had thought I might watch two episodes of The Leftovers but wound up getting only one watched because I paused it and spent so much time on Twitter. It was clear a lot of police excessive force and chaos was still happening at protests around the country, but so far as I could tell, the Seattle protests last night were far less dramatic than they had the previous three nights. As of yesterday the city has issued 9pm to 6 am curfews every night through Saturday morning, which the cops are clearly only enforcing on protesters and it's not being enforced anywhere else, even though the "ask" is that everyone stay home during those hours if they can. I'm not convinced ever issuing a curfew of any kind was ever smart or necessary.
There has been photos and footage of excessive force by the police all over the country the past several days, and the Seattle Police Department is no exception by any means. In fact at this point I am wholly disappointed by police as an entire institution, and I'll take reform at the minimum, but have been pretty easily convinced to support defunding them completely. Gabriel sent me this link via text just this morning, and I immediately donated $20.
As for last night, the helicopters hovered overhead for a bit, suggesting there were crowds of protesters somewhere; I saw people getting out of their cars with that as their clear destination when Alexia and I were walking back along 15th, and Shobhit texted me about people being around when he was walking back that same stretch from the bus stop after busing back from work. But, last night I did not hear any flash bangs or see tear gas smoke or anything. This did get posted yesterday, which is of course just another in a long string of disappointments.
[posted 12:38 pm]