There was once a man named Harry,
called the Seattlewolf. He went on two legs, wore clothes, recycled, drove a
Prius and was a human being. Nevertheless, he was in reality a wolf of Seattle.
He had learned a lot of what clever people learn. What he had not learned was
to find contentment in himself. The cause of this apparently was that at the
bottom of his heart he knew (or thought he knew) that he was not a man but a
Seattlewolf. Clever men might argue the point of whether he was really a wolf
or whether he had just learned to drive in Boston and liked to question
authority rather than simply leaping to obey it.
And so the Seattlewolf had two
natures, a human and a wolfish one. This was his fate and it may well be that
it was not an exceptional one. There must be many people who have a bit of the
dog or the eel or the sea urchin in them without experiencing any extraordinary
difficulties on that account. In some cases, having the nature of a sea urchin
can help deal with things like life in a cube farm. In Harry’s case, however,
the wolf and the Seattleite did not go the same way together but were
inconstant and deadly enmity. When there are two who are in one blood and one
soul then life fares ill.
Now with our Seattlewolf it was
so, that in his conscious life he lived sometimes as a wolf and sometimes as a
Seattleite. For example if Harry paused to worry about the oppression
experienced by the dwarves in Latvia or waited a couple extra turns for other
drivers to go ahead at a 4 way stop, his “No, you go first” wave was followed
by the wolf baring its teeth and laughing at him. At the same time, at times
when Harry was overcome by frustration and passed a fast lane camper hard
enough to make their ears bleed, the Seattleite in him chided him and
considered switching to decaf mochas or chai.
It still remains to elucidate the
Seattlewolf in relation to Seattle’s infamous fast lane campers. To take his
own view of the matter, the Seattlewolf stood outside of convention and when in
his car, was primarily dedicated to getting from Point A to Point B as quickly
as possible. Besides this, he was secretly attracted to the world of mellow,
calm drivers, to their lack of stress and healthy blood pressure. Now what we
call the Seattle driver is a type of person who is always striving for balance
and complete safety from risk. What the Seattle driver strives for in the main
is to have all lanes of every road moving at exactly the same speed so that
everybody crosses the finish line at the same time: the fast, the slow, the
brave, the timid, the skilled driver and the hapless spazz.
Seattleites seem to thrive on
being scolded and the Seattle driver seems to rejoice at being scolded by ads
sponsored by the Washington Traffic Safety Commission, an agency which seems to
specialize in producing inane safety ads with juvenile tag lines such as “Click
it or ticket” and “Drive hammered, get nailed”. Perhaps it is staffed by the
children of the geniuses of the 1950s “Duck and cover” atomic bomb safeguards.
In any case, Seattleites seem to think funding it much more important than
ephemera such as bridge repair.
Harry, on the other hand, always
snarls and turns off the radio when Washington Traffic Safety ads are aired. He
knows that speed limits around Seattle are determined by taking freshly lobotomized
10 year olds around in cars and setting speed limits 10 mph lower than speeds
at which they can safely operate a car in that location. What he finds
astounding is that so many drivers still insist on driving 5-10 mph under those
speed limits.
How can the Seattle driver
survive in a world in which getting from point A to point B may even be a job
requirement and yet most drivers seem to have the goal of doing everything but
that? The answer goes: because of the Seattlewolves. Because it’s hard to say “Well,
I just couldn’t help it, everyone was going slow” when you see someone going
faster and actually getting someplace ahead of you. One fallback of the
determined Seattle driver is to point at the person ahead of them and say “He
was going 20 mph faster and we’re both here now!” To which the Seattlewolf
driver would reply, “Yes, but I had more fun.”
