A Visit to Everyday Music

Dear Diary,

I don't actually know what other left-of-center blogs around Seattle - do you ever talk with them, dear Diary? - are saying about Everyday Music, whose Seattle store closed last weekend, but I doubt it's very complimentary.  The store's owner made it very plain, in words published in news stories and also in the way the store looked to its end, that he vehemently disapproved of the occupation of Cal Anderson Park.

But it's where I acquired most of the albums I've bought in Seattle, and it's where I was hoping to re-build my classical music collection in the years ahead, after most of that collection got sold out from under me where I'd stored it in Milwaukee.

I grew up in Milwaukee, as I think I've told you before, dear Diary, and spent my whole life there until moving to Chicago in 1988, except for two school years in Chicago for college (in the second of which, as I'm sure I've told you, I played ultimate frisbee on the Midway).  In Chicago I built a classical music collection of about 200 albums that had been sold in estate sales to a guy I met who ran a stall in a giant non-charity thrift shop; he sold these LPs for $2 until he made his money back, then the rest for $1.50, and I bought hundreds of those $1.50 albums, mostly classical but also, for example, all my Bonnie Koloc and Jane Olivor albums (so that I still confuse these very different singers), and probably some actual rock (not that much of that was getting into estate sales in the mid-1990s, but those weren't this guy's only source).

Chicago is where I was first homeless, though not on the streets but couch-surfing, and is where I first lived in an SRO.  I left that SRO in 1998 to return to Milwaukee.

I fit in there no more than I ever had (and even moved to Madison for a while, which became the first place I actually did live on the streets), and there were hard feelings over how things following my mother's death were handled, so in 2006 I left Milwaukee for Seattle to take database classes.  I left all my furniture, most of my classical LPs (now augmented by inheriting most of my mother's collection), and a lot of other stuff in a storage unit.

Here I've been poor most of the time; the money from the GoFundMe is the most I've had at once since I came here.  So I didn't actually get to take the classes I'd come here for until getting into an argument with a boss who needed me gave me leverage, and then while I was taking them the Great Recession struck, closing both the employers I'd relied on, leaving me on unemployment until that ran out, and then homeless.  Three and a half years after that, in March 2016, my Milwaukee storage unit was sold, for a bit more than the price of three of those LPs.  I usually refer to this event as a theft.

When I was interviewed last year by the Seattle Times, I described three projects that were keeping me busy during the lockdowns:  one involving music, one involving books, and you, dear Diary.  I ran out of money to continue the book project not long after.  In February, at the motel paid for by the GoFundMe, the second one, I undertook another massive project - studying math again so I could complete my degree - and made the music project much more complicated by trying to integrate classical music into it.  In March, once housed, I started trying to empty my storage unit here, which had nearly doubled its price in the years I'd been in it, and was going for substantially more than twice as much as a different unit of the same size would cost now.

I'm well aware, dear Diary, that you're the reason I'm now housed, but all these projects have been at a standstill for weeks now while I've poured pages into you.  I managed to get my LPs out, and thus for the first time catalogued the damage to my collection.  So with Everyday Music closing, I hoped at least to buy what I could before it was too late.  But I had too many posts to write, too much evidence that I needed to switch directions ...  And so I finally got there only one week ago, last Saturday, to buy four more classical releases as LPs, and about ten popular ones I'd also left in Milwaukee, this time as CDs.  I couldn't justify spending still longer on the classical section on their next-to-last day, and there was a line waiting to get in when I finally left.

So.  I will go to the last twenty parks for the current assessment of the Durkan Drought.  Here are a couple of reasons I have to, photos taken at Cal Anderson Park as I walked from Everyday Music back to the light rail:

Why is Cal Anderson Park deserving of running drinking water when hardly any park in North Seattle is?  As part of trying to answer that question, I will also finish a project for which I need to stay up all night three times.  And then I'll go back to touring city properties at my leisure, at most one region, of the eight that remain, per week.  I'm not trying to make you feel guilty, dear Diary, but more I cannot do, not unless I want to go back to being homeless.

The bus pass I've been using mostly for you, dear Diary, was meant to help me empty my storage unit.  I will have to buy another next month, and pay another month of the highway robbery rent on the unit, to empty it now.   And I'll also need to start job-hunting next month, instead of this one...

So I'm going to have to cross a line I'd hoped never to cross in you, dear Diary, and ask for money.  No, not from you.  But if any of the few people who read you, dear Diary, want these things done, it would help greatly if they would pay the $192 storage rent and $54 bus pass for next month.  Not, thank you, more.  The address is linked above.  I'm sorry.

Tomorrow I hike again.