Dear Seattle, Thanks for your support, your generosity, your immense beauty, your challenges, your small town-ness, your city-ness, your delicious things, your altruism, your DIY-ness, your collaborative nature, your history (especially that one moment where you hit pause on globalization). Thank you for your loyalty, your regional pride, yes, even for your passive aggressiveness, your big fish in small pondness, your stand behind your man-ness, your clusterfucking participation in designing mass transit, your beautiful new bike lanes, your familiar faces, your making me feel welcome and loved, your pretending you don't know/see/recognize people you know/see/recognize, your hard to get to know-ness, your hard to forget hills, your woman-run, woman-made, kick ass dance scene, your public radio, your film and music mafia, your pot-buying city attorney, your somewhat futile anarchist marches every friday night, your bike polo and dodge ball, your tear it all down and build new shit-ness, your tougher than nails arts organizations, your young radicals turned middle-aged capitalists, your new minimum wage that might not buy a cup of coffee when it takes effect, your enthusiasm for making Seattle Center cool, your ability to balance a budget spent on dogs vs tattoos. thank you for veri et recti amici, thank you for cherdonna and lou, thank you for slender means society, dead science and parenthetical girls, and double dutch empire, thank you for introducing me to Adam Sekuler(!) thank you for marine wildlife, thank you for the ferris wheel. Thank you Seattle. I do love you. Thank you for letting me try things and succeed (VERA) and try things and fail (AMP). Thank you for being a place for people to think we have original ideas when in fact its just that we are kind of isolated and don't always pay attention to history. Thanks for being participatory. Thanks for winning the super bowl. Thanks for having fights about stadiums and arenas. Thanks for keeping us on our toes with a triple threat of annihilation by earthquake/volcano/tsunami Thanks for showing up to dance class. Thanks for not showing up to dance class. Thanks for sticking to wearing all black and still sporting a chain wallet every now and then. Thanks for keeping the central co-op alive and letting it be ok to go to Trader Joes next door. Thanks for 90-something year old landlords that aren't aware of current rental rates in the neighborhood. Thank you for fighting the good fight most of the time. I have moved away four times in 16 years and keep coming back to what I love and get driven crazy by. It's a beautiful alchemy of nature, the pioneer spirit and genuinely wanting to make the neighborhood, city, state, world a better place but having some severe limitations/homogenous-ness. What to do but keep at it? I will miss you so. Please come visit me in Champaign Urbana, IL. I will be pursuing an MFA in Dance at the University of Illinois and trying to make it through the entire volume of Infinite Jest. No doubt, I will miss your particular ways that are so ingrained in me I don't even notice until I'm somewhere else and find myself having a hard time breathing-- a fish out of northwest waters. I wish you the best. . . that in all your changing, some essence of you always stays the same, that those developers don't fucking touch chungees, the crescent, the hideout, or shorty's, that they leave Velocity alone and don't build more jails. With all my heart, shannon
