This would be my favorite photo from the Fremont Solstice Parade today. I love the framing, the composition, and the bubbles. Usually my favorite photo, or favorite photos, from this event are heavy on the guys I find super hot; I didn't have that reaction to a whole lot of them this year, even though the crowd of cyclists—which these days also includes people on skareboards and roller blades and Lime scooters and self-balancng scooters—was as huge as ever. It could have been partly that I chose my viewing spot kind of poorly, though.

I spent much of the day thinking I had remembered going last going to the Fremont Solstice Parade last year with Laney; I forgot until I looked at my calendar that, instead, Shobhit and I chose to go to Georgetown Pride last year, which was on the same day. (This year they've bumped it to a month later in the summer, which means it'll happen while Shobhit and I are in Amsterdam this year; I'll have to look at the scheduling again next year, but I'm glad they've chosen a different day than Fremont Solstice.) Anyway, I last went to the Fremont Solstice Parade two years ago, when I went with Laney. And I remembered that we found pretty good viewing spots right where the parade began, so that's what I did with Ivan today, who happily just took my lead on the matter: I had us get off the bus on 34th when it was already being detoured, and we walked up 36th to the start of the parade. We were at NW 36th St right where Leary Way veers into it, and we sat on the curb across the street from where the regular parade contingents flowed south onto 36th from 2nd Ave NW.

A bit annoyingly, the Fremont Fair website explicitly states, "The 2026 Fremont Solstice Parade kicks off at 3rd and Leary Way." That's like two blocks further northwest from where I chose for us to sit, and clearly insinuates that the parade would pass right by us there. We could see the contingents staging across the street on 2nd Ave NW where it opens out onto 36th, though. What's more, the famous nude cyclists that have been opening this parade for decades don't come from that direction; they come from the opposite direction, and then loop around. They didn't always do this. In fact the entire parade route used to end at Gas Works Park but they don't involve that park at all anymore, opting instead to close down several blocks for the fair.

We did get a parade ambassador lady come up and talk to our section of the crowd, and she pointed out a blue line across the street and said not to cross it with any of our limbs. But then, when the nude cyclists finally did start coming, this nude traffic director guy allowed the cyclists to loop past us to the northwest just once, and then created a barrier like half a block southeast from us, with crowds quickly gathering over there and blocking our fucking view!

Without thinking as clearly as I really should have been, I told Ivan I was going over there and I would be back. It was kind of rude of me to expect him to just sit back there on the blanket tote I had brought (a much lighter one so when it was stored in my backpack it would not put too big a strain on my back; I'm still a bit weaker even three and a half weeks since the accident), as I didn't really think about how much time this parade spends on the nude cyclists. The parade itself lasts barely more than an hour, and the nude cyclists must go on for at least half an hour beforehand.

I got most of my best photos from that spot, though; you can see the nude cyclists in their own, 67-shot photo album here (but also part of a 128-shot album of the overall Parade and Fair here). After a while, I thought to look back and check on Ivan, and he turned out to be just a couple of feet away from me. "Matthew!" he called, and even indicated he had picked up my backpack for me, which I really appreciated.

Anyway, another note about my photos of nude cyclists: unless you have your own Flickr account, you won't be able to see a lot of them. I am required to flag any photos with full frontal nudity—basically, any lower genitals—as "restricted," and those can only be viewed by other account holders on the site. If there is merely partial nudity, such as breasts or bare butts, I can label them as "moderate." These ones can be viewed, but they come up obscured first, with the option to click to view. No, wait, I just tested it; that also only happens if you're another Flickr user. I just logged out and viewed the album and only the 9 photos of cyclists that I could load as "safe" are visible.

You know what? Fuck this! I want to be able to share all of these photos! You won't be able to see tags or captions or anything like that like on Flickr, just the photos themselves, but I have now loaded all of today's photos on my OneDrive account, and you can view them there. Click here for painted penises!

I've been going to this event off and on for two decades now, but I discovered after we got home that this year made my tenth time. I haven't gone with Shobhit since before the pandemic, in 2019; honestly it's a bit frustrating with him because as soon as the nude cyclists are over, he loses all interest—and I quite enjoy the Fremont Solstice Parade post-cyclists. In fact, I texted Laney today from the parade about how people at this parade seem to have a sense of camp—some of it even overtly queer—that Pride seemed to have mostly lost years ago. Not only that, but the parade lasting barely more than an hour is a lot easier to swallow than the four hours it takes for all the contingents in the Pride Parade to go by. I really think they should start getting more strict with rules about just meeting deadlines in order to get among a limited set of contingents, but whatever.

Pride still means way more to me, for the record. It's very personal and I still have a good time at it. My only point is that they could learn some lessons from the Fremont Solstice Parade.

At Shobhit's suggestion, I had made a cocktail to bring with me. I didn't even start drinking it until the parade began, but not having peed since before Ivan and I left at about 11:00 this morning—Shobhit didn't go with us as he had other plans today—it was maybe 50 minutes later that I had to pee so bad I was in increasing agony. I asked Ivan if he wanted to wait there or if he wanted to come with me, and he said he'd wait there. Thankfully I found Fremont Fair port-a-potties only a few blocks away, and because the parade was still going, the lines were pretty short. Still, the parade was just ended when I got back, and Ivan was standing in the street looking for me. I had already folded up the blanket tote by then, which I did after we returned to our spot after getting closer to the cyclists but then there was a bunch of people standing around there so there was no point in sitting any longer.

Ivan said he was willing to walk the Fair with me, and that I have not done since Gina and her friend Jennifer came up from Olympia for this event in 2023. Laney was still far too wary of crowds so when I went with her in 2024, we did not walk the fair. With anyone else I might have spent more time stopping at booths, but we just walked through the fair, with one notable stop at the Art Cars parking lot. I got a few good pictures there. And then we walked through the crowd down the streets of booths, not even all the blocks but probably a slight majority of them. I only stopped briefly at one of them, to look at a bunch of queer-themed earrings. I didn't buy any though. I did need to find a bathroom yet again, something that happens frequently when I drink cocktails, where I have to pee really bad and then again within ten or twenty minutes.

After that we managed to get on the #62 bus back toward downtown with the bus coming up to the temporary stop right at the north end of the Fremont Bridge within minutes of us getting there. Between that stop and the stop right at the other end of the bridge, though, that bus was packed clear until we got downtown. Ivan and I got a bit separated while boarding, and while I found a chair to sit in, he wound up standing the whole way right by the side door in the front half of the bus.

We got off at 3rd & Pike, and when I gave him the option of catching a bus up the hill from Pike or just walking, he was eager to just walk, clearly exasperated by the crowd on that bus. We had discussed going out to eat at a Thai restaurant, but then he suggested Annapurna on Broadway, a favorite place of his, though he thinks he hasn't been there since before the pandemic. Stunningly, the last record I can find of eating there myself was July 2017—nine years ago!—when I went there with Ivan after Shobhit made a dinner that was way too spicy.

Ivan and I both had matat masala, and it was delicious. I had a piña colada with it. Ivan also ordered a cocktail, which was surprising; he told us a couple of visits ago that he doesn't drink anymore "because I don't want to become an alcoholic." I should have known I could continue to rely on his inconsistencies, though. I mentioned this when he ordered a cocktail today and he was pretty nonchalant about it, like well, he just wants one now. "I don't think I've had a cocktail in about a year," he said. God knows if that's even the truth. He has a long history of being kind of weirdly duplicitous about the things he shares with me.

This was his one full day of his visit this time, but he did get here early enough yesterday for us to go see the queer horror movie Leivicus, which I really liked a lot and Ivan seemed to like just okay. He actually got here while I was at work and Shobhit let him in, around 2:30; he really was here early enough for us to go to the 5:10 showing that I would have preferred, but he asked to go later. When I got home from work he was napping, and I later realized thst the previous two nights of 12-hour graveyard shifts would have been a good reason for him to want to go later; he knew he was going to be tired and need rest when he got here. (I did ask him, and I guess from where he's staying in Edmonds, he busses to Lynnwood Station and then takes Light Rail down from there.)

We watched a movie again today after getting home—sort of. He asked if we could watch something, as he often does, and so I went to look at my top 10 movies in 2025. I suggested Black Bag and he seemed interested enough. Except he totally snoozed through half of it. And maybe a quarter of the rest of the time, he just browsed on his phone. I don't think he paid very much attention to the movie at all. I even paused it at one point when he was clearly nodding off, but then he told me to keep playing it. Maybe he just gets some kind of comfort in the sound of the TV being on. Shortly after the movie ended, he went and took his shower and went to bed, even though it was like 7 p.m. I bet anything he'll get up for a bit again tonight before going to bed again. Somehow he prefers these graveyard shifts he works, but I truly don't know how he does it.

He'll head back to Edmonds tomorrow. It was still a delight to have him here, as always.

[posted 9:43pm]

Does anybody know what time it is?

It's time for the Fremont Solstice Parade!

. . . I would add "and Fair," but Laney and I skipped that this year. After the parade, which lasted barely more than an hour—from where we sat, anyway, right at the start of the parade on NW 39th St and Leary Way NW—we walked toward the Fair, looking first for port-a-potties. We found a rather long line for a line of 10 of them, which moved fairly quickly. Then, looking to bypass food trucks we had no interest in, we walked around the block to the east. But, when we saw the thickness of the crowd, Laney decided she wasn't up for it. That was fine. I can spend more time at the Fremont Fair next time.

Anyway, I need to get back to that photo at the top of this post. I loved his body paint design, and attempted to include the photo in my post to socials with 16 shots from the event—and Facebook's algorithm immediately removed just that shot. Dammit! It "violates community guidelines," it says, because nudity is not allowed for us to share.

Of course, 10 of the other photos I shared technically feature nudity. But, I could get away with posting it because the algorithm clearly can't tell there's nudity when large amounts of body paint patterns are involved. And here's the thing: in the above shot, Facebook's algorithm clearly identified the tip of the man's penis, which is not covered in paint. Had he painted over his penis with red, it probably would have also gone through.

This even complicated my ability to share the photo here—not because of Squarespace, but because of Flickr. Flickr allows a lot more, but you have to set "safety" levels on each photo depending on the type of nudity. No nudity at all? That can stay "safe," the moderation level at which photo uploads default. Bare butts or bare breasts? These have to be marked "moderate," and when other people (whp are not Fllickr members) see those photos on Flickr they first come up as a static box, but when you click it then you get a warning that it contains nudity and a choice as to whether you want to see it. Full frontal nudity, or anything sexual, requires the safely level of "restricted," which means only other logged-in Flickr members can see it. It also means that, as in the case of the above photo, Flickr blocks the "share" feature where it provides the html commands to copy and paste so you can embed photos, as I have done with all the shots below.

Here's how I got around it: Flickr also lets you view multiple sizes of each shot, and with the size I wanted, I just right-clicked to get the image address of the shot, and wrote up the html commands to embed the image myself. Whew! Aren't you glad I did the work so you could see Clock Man's cock? Seriously, though: the cock is immaterial—something stupid social networking sites don't understand, like nuance or context. What I love about the photo is the spiral clock design.

Facebook can be so annoying.

Anyway! Shobhit had an evening shift at work today, otherwise he almost certainly would have come. In fact, he has only ever been able to join me four times, and not since 2019 (the other times being 2015, 2007 and 2006, although he missed the actual parade in 2006). I actually went by myself three years in a row between 2012 and 2014, and likely would have again today if I'd had to—but Laney was available, and even willing to deal with a multi-bus transit route to get there. Nice!

It was her first time, which really amazed me, as the Fremont Solstice Parade and Fair is a longtime Seattle institution, and Laney's been around for decades. I suspect a lot of it just had to do with her schedule in the past, and now that she's retired, it's super easy for her to make time for all sorts of shit.

The parade is scheduled to start at 1:00, and I had suggested we aim to get to Fremont by noon—a very good suggestion, as it turned out, given their changed parade route this year, and our joint decision to walk to where the parade route started so it wouldn't be as crowded. And even there, it got pretty crowded. Just nothing like down by the Lenin statue, where people were like 8 deep along the route. (That may be an exaggeration. 4 probably isn't though. You get the idea.) Anyway, in order to do this, we needed to catch the #49 bus downtown at 11:21. I suggested to Laney that we meet at the bus stop at 11:15, and that's what we did.

Also at my suggestion, Laney brought her two collapsible lawn chairs. This made all the difference in the world, and they weren't even difficult to transport, being fairly light and easy to carry in their bags with a strap on them that we could swing over a shoulder. However, the bus we finally got on was about ten minutes late, clearly because of backed up traffic on Capitol Hill due to maintenance needs shutting down Light Rail stations between Westlake and SoDo Stations. There were Link Shuttle buses from Capitol Hill Station to Westlake, and also, probably due to the "Capitol Hill Pride" that is for the first time scheduled the Saturday before Pride Weekend (not to be confused with Capitol Hill PrideFest, put on with actual success by Seattle Pride, on Broadway the Saturday of Pride Weekend), which presumably would have been why the #8 and #10 were getting rerouted also through the intersection at Broadway and Pine.

In any event, we finally got on a bus, and once we got downtown, we were too late for the #40 bus that was supposed to be our connection to Fremont. I remembered from last year, though, that there are three buses that go from downtown to Fremont (just different destinations beyond that in all three cases), and I just figured out what the other two were, and we decided we'd get on whichever of the three was the next to come to our stop, at 3rd and Pine. Within minutes, that happened to be the #62.

That bus was very crowded when we got on it, and only got more so as we got closer to Fremont, in the end having to wait like three light cycles at the Fremont Bridge, the first of them because the drawbridge had to come up to let a boat pass. Once we finally got off the bridge and to the stop just past 34th St, we then set about walking the roughly half mile to to spot we found to set up our chairs, on the corner of 39th and Leary Way.

The Fremont Fair website said the parade kicks off at 3rd and Leary, which is actually a block from where we set up our chairs—and we only did that because, after walking west on 39th to bypass the crowds on 36th, we were suspicious of the fact that no one was sitting on the curbs along Leary on the block to the north. I still thought the parade would come down from there, so we set up our chairs right on the southeast corner of Leary at 39th.

It still worked out, but the parade actually came out on 39th, across the street from us, and turned right onto Leary, so we were literally at the very start after all. This caused a slight challenge as I could not look up the street to see contingents coming, as they turned in front of us right from the street we were on. Thus, when the nude cyclists were the first contingent as is tradition, they did not ride past us, but rather in large circle that curved back around right in front of us.

I still got a lot of shots, though—all combined, 103, including 11 video clips. I also separated them into two sets, one just of the nude cyclists (58 shots, although it appears to be only 22 if you view it as a non-Flickr member, not logged in), and the other of all the other contingents (45 shots, including 10 video clips, most of them of the several really fun marching bands).

Last year, when Gina and her friend Jennifer came up from Olympia to join me, I took 76 shots of the nude cyclists; 33 shots of the other contingents; another 31 shots of the Fair; and 26 of the "Seattle Art Car Blowout" alone. I already noted though that Laney and I left shortly after the parade and did not really do the Fair—she had a blast today though and said she would definitely do it again. Maybe next year I'll at least figure out where the cars are, because those are really fun and I think Laney would enjoy them.

Today, though, once we had each finally gotten to pee and then we decided not to brave the crowd at the Fair, Laney agreed to accompany me to the Apple Store at University Village. Thankfully, once we just walked over to Fremont Ave at 35th, there was a bus stop there for a bus that goes straight there—nice for people in Fremont! I've never understood why there isn't a single transit option straight from even downtown to University Village, a pretty major shopping center—which also has the city's only Apple Store.

Sometime over the past week, my AirPod speakers seem to have blown out. I have AppleCare on three of my Apple devices currently (AirPods; iPhone; MacBook Pro laptop), so I figured I might as well put that to use. Shobhit also got his phone battery replaced not long ago due to his battery life being degraded, so I figured I would ask about that too.

Here are some things I learned at the Apple Store today. First, you can't get assistance on multiple devices with the same store appointment, which is dumb. The young woman who assisted me with the AirPods managed to work their system to my favor, though, and had me first in line for the iPhone discussion as soon as she had me plugged in. She had to run diagnostics on the AirPods, during which another employee, this time a middle-aged guy, came to talk about the phone. This was when I learned the second thing: you're actually supposed to keep your decices plugged into charge overnight every night, even if it's either early or fully charged before you go to bed. The guy said there are too many things that often happen overnight with updates, etc, which will only happen while on wifi and plugged into charge, as otherwise it takes too much power. So, note to self: plug phone in every night. Ditto the MacBook, apparently.

Anyway. The diagnostics confirmed the AirPods were damaged, and they replaced them for me at no charge. That alone made having AppleCare worth it to me, although for that device I only got a couple of years of coverage. I bought the things last fall, though, so there's still some time. The phone battery was a different story—oh, I guess you could say I learned three things at the Apple Store today, because the third one is that they'll only replace the phone battery if it is degraded to 79% of original capacity. Mine is only down to 89%.

The guy looked at my battery usage history to see if he could figure out what was making the battery drain so quickly, and he could not find anything major that jumped out—although he could tell that I use the Facebook app a lot. That was nothing compared to what we knew was the reason my battery drained so quickly today, though: it was because I spent a couple of hours taking photos, and in particular, video. My camera app is also set to take Live Photos, and it only occurs to me now that that's probably also a big contributing factor, as it basically means every photo I take is a two-second video. I won't stop using that feature, though, it has come in wildly useful for months now. The wedding video I made for Gabriel and Lea would not have been at all the same without it.

Laney waited outside most of the time I was in the Apple Store, which wasn't a super long time. She got herself a coffee at another place at U Village, and then was delighted by the public space outside that new Apple Store they expanded into back in 2018. She was sitting on one of the wooden lounge chairs and even invited me to sit with her for a few minutes before we got up to head back home again—winding up on a "U District Station Express" bus that goes straight from that stop on 25th, curving around the south end of the UW campus and up to U District Light Rail Station. Why it doesn't just go straight down 25th to University of Washington Station by Husky Stadium, neither of us could figure out.

But, whatever. This was Laney's first time stepping onto the actual platform and seeing the awesome public art at U District Station, so there's that. And even thought the downtown stations are closed this weekend, we were able to take Light Rail from there, past University of Washington Station and then on to what temporarily ends at Capitol Hill Station. We parted ways there, Laney insisting she could carry both of her chairs home from there (I tried to walk her home so I could carry one of them for her, but she insisted I didn't need to), and then I walked home and set about processing and uploading my photos.

[posted 11:07 pm]

Fremont Solstice Parade and Fair 2026

Fremont Solstice Parade 2024