The Westovar(ian)

3.03.2011

1

There's a man who rides the 74 whom I would really like to paint. There are three seats that face sideways at the front of the bus, and he stretches out on them, puts his cap down over his face, and takes a nap for our traverse from the Valley to Spokane. I was about to sneak a picture of him on my phone when we stopped.

Three blind people boarded the bus. The first was a black man with a long white cane. He had a narrow chin and long nose. He had chiseled features and reminded me of a pharaoh.

He waved his cane back and forth, checked for people's feet, and promptly sat on my man with the cap.

The three blind people then sat on the three seats across from the no-longer-sleeping man who was looking at them with a kind of wonder.

The girl next to the pharaoh was pale and had brown hair loosely pulled into a French braid down her back. The two leaned close into one another to talk, and I realized eventually that they were holding hands.

My sleeping man has brown eyes, I found out. And the two of us stared at the blind couple. The man kept combing a hand through his hair, and from the way they spoke it didn't look like it could have been above a murmur. It surprises me how much affection I see at the Plaza or on the bus, between people who are not conventionally attractive -- they are heavy or dirty or simply funny lookin. But this was the first time it felt like I was watching a couple where appearance actually didn't matter. And I've never seen intimacy more transparently.

2

Last night Kris and I went to the Swamp Tavern to play some pool. We got Pike Tandem and PBR and I set down to get my ass kicked. It was a Wednesday night so the place was pretty empty. There were a couple of folks up at the bar and a pair of men sitting at a table next to ours. One was sitting on a high chair, his arm rested on his table. His hair was dark and straight and his face was sort of feline, if you can picture that. The other man was standing. He was balding on top and his beard was grizzled. He wore a puffy vest. They stood close to one another as they talked.

They were close enough to us to occasionally get in the way of lining up a shot. Once in a while they would interject something into our conversation.

It was hard not to overhear them as I was busy not hitting balls in pockets. For the length of one of our games they talked strictly of dogs sniffing other dogs' asses. They discussed what they, the dogs, were saying, really. And they told stories of dog-ass-sniffing encounters they had seen recently.

They eventually called the evening finished and good and left that green-lit bar. When not long afterwards some more characters showed up. They played pool at the table next to us, and one guy was wearing a navy blue shirt with a picture of a dog sniffing another dog in the pooper. The caption: Do I know you?

Incredible.