I’m All Lost In, #133: Chang-Rae Lee; “Goodnight Baby;” “You Really Got a Hold on Me.” (Plus the Week in X>Y)

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#133

This Week in X > (is greater than) Y

Armistice Coffee, follow-up visit a week later on 5/2/26

Taking the Bus to the Light Rail Home from Green Lake > Driving Home from Green Lake After having lunch at Restaurant Christine on N. 56th St. in Green Lake last Saturday afternoon, I took the #62 bus to the closest light rail station, the Roosevelt stop (a nine-minute route), so I could jump on the train and head home to Capitol Hill. My plan for the rest of the day was to write at a coffeeshop in my neighborhood. Rather heading down the stairs to the train though, I decided to see if there were any promising coffeeshop options in Roosevelt. A quick search on my phone listed a few, including one called Armistice. And I noticed it was open until 10pm. It was only 1 o’clock, but wanting to support a business with humanist business hours, I walked the three blocks there; it’s at Roosevelt Way NE and NE 68th. Enclosed in large, wrap-around windows and swaying street trees, Armistice is a roomy industrial-style coffeeshop with lots of nooks and seating. There’s a wine bar and outdoor patio seating too.

I never would have discovered this oasis if I’d been locked in the myopic trajectory of a car. I settled in for the rest of the afternoon.

Mementos Tucked inside a Valuable Old Book > The Book (in this case, a signed, 1930 second edition of Robert Frost’s Collected Poems with a personalized inscription worth ~$5000) Precious keepsakes tucked inside an antique book are like ads in old magazines. Both have more time-machine superpowers than the book or the magazine itself .

4/24/26

My friend Dan recently gave me a belated gift for officiating his wedding last year [I’m All Lost In, #112, 12/7/25]: A signed, 1930 second-edition hardcover copy of American poetry icon Robert Frost’s collected poems.

Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. 

Yes. That Robert Frost. Pg. 275.

Dan’s grandfather was a young English professor who traveled in the same Boston-area academic circles as the older Frost. Along with Frost’s bold signature on the title page, there’s also an inscription to Dan’s granddad penned in deep black: “We have ideas yet that we haven’t tried.” It’s the concluding line of Frost’s own 1928 poem “Riders.”

The 96-year-old book, published by Henry Holt & Co, is timeworn but also in excellent condition. Some of the pages are still uncut. The internet says it could be worth as much as $7,000 and least $700. It’s when I gently thumbed through the musty tome, though, that my breath caught. I found three artifacts tucked inside halfway through on pg. 161 like pressed flowers. It was a trio of early 1930s New Yorker clippings still intact and showing little signs of fading. All three were poems by an American poet named Frances Frost.

No relation to Robert, Frances was a popular poet at the time herself and appears to have had plenty of poems published in the New Yorker in the early 1930s; she had been a student at Middlebury College along with Dan’s grandfather in the mid-1920s when Robert Frost was a professor there.

Beneath one of Frances’ poems, “First Snow in the Hills” (published in the November 14, 1931 New Yorker with a snippet of a theater review on the flip side), there’s a handwritten note. Someone, perhaps Dan’s grandfather, wrote: “This sounds like Robert rather than Frances?”

Fair.

In the woods the chipmunk moves like a pattern of shadow
Toward his hour of sleep; mountainward and alone,
Charging the flying dusk, the doe is blown;
And through frosted leaves, the youngest gray squirrels go
Explaining to one another about the snow.

New South Lake Union > Old South Lake Union The sad news that Seattle’s Best Karaoke (SBK), the no-frills karaoke spot at the border-edge of Downtown, Capitol Hill, and South Lake Union is closing after 30 years because the landlord capriciously terminated  the month-to-month lease stirs up memories, reflection, and politics. But hold the knee-jerk indictments of corporate colonization.

Yes, the sterile Amazon neighborhood needs an indie bookstore, an arts space, a live-music venue, a vintage shop, late-night food options, and certainly SBK. But this formerly too-quiet no-man’s land of parking lots, clandestine office spaces, warehouses, and industrial mashups, plus a convenience store, always needed those things. Moreover, it’s now given way to a busy, mixed-use housing and international tech district for a young, largely nonwhite workforce. With parks, an arts college, food trucks, pizza places, sexy restaurants like Paju [I’m All Lost In, #87, 6/14/25], and the city’s hippest EDM queer bar, Kremwerk, I find myself in SLU more often than I did when SBK (and Re-Bar) were the only attractions. Dare I say Kremwerk—which I have a poem about in my second book—is more radical than the old Re-Bar.

Footnote, though: Does anyone remember the prescient Consolidated Works art gallery and performance space at 410 Terry Ave. where Amazon headquarters are now?

This Week’s Obsessions

1) On Such a Full Sea by Chang-Rae Lee

I picked up Chang-Rae Lee’s 2014 novel On Such a Full Sea when sci-fi writer Chloe Gong published her list of cyberpunk must-reads in the NYT last November [I’m All Lost In, #110, 11/22/25.] But I was quickly bored by the aquatic rather than cybernetic narrative; the protagonist, an agile young woman named Fan, is a skilled tank diver in a fish harvesting colony.

Fortuitously, I picked the book back up this week and read on. Fan, as the remainder of chapter one explains, is a quiet apostate who has become legendary for abruptly leaving the sheltered company town to search for her mysteriously excommunicated and banished boyfriend, Reg. The world beyond Fan’s anodyne and efficient colony is one of ad-hoc, post-Wal-Mart America “open counties” and sequestered, elite “charter villages.”

Admittedly, I was still only reading along absentmindedly. But then the narrator, who plays the part of an epic bard, ends chapter one with this delicate mic drop: “Why before leaving she had to poison some of the tanks is not fathomable.” This jarring line in an otherwise chatty prologue alerted me that Lee was a devious writer with a story to tell.

On Such a Full Sea is turning out to be more post-apocalyptic than cyberpunk, and so far, more Greek myth than novel. “So Fan went this way,” chapter four beings after she slips past the gate. “Instead of heading north or south on the main coastal tollway she veered westward, onto the olden roads…”

A bit like young Oedipus being found abandoned and near-death by a local shepherd, Fan is rescued at the beginning of her new life on the side of the road by a bearded and gruff, but curiously gentle, open county prepper whose “nose looked like it had been broken multiple times.”

And so Lee’s futurist mythology begins.

2) Goodnight Baby by the Butterflys

Myrna and Mary were originally in the Crystals

I consider myself well-versed in early-1960s girl-group pop [I’m All Lost In, #15, 1/25/24.] But I had never heard of the Butterflys from Bed-Stuyvesant, indie-label mates at Red Bird with fellow real-life teenagers: the Shangri-Las, Queens, New York’s seismic juvie-hall hitmakers, (Leader of the Pack, Walking in the Sand, Give Him a Great Big Kiss.)

Originally called The Buttons, The Butterflys’ story is one of fits and starts. And it overlaps with the story of more famous Crystals (He’s a Rebel, Then He Kissed Me, Da-Do-Ron-Ron.)

The Butterflys’ only hit (in air quotes) was their 1964 debut single Goodnight Baby. Written by Brill Building genius Ellie Greenwich and including the important lyrics “One kiss can lead to another/And baby, you know they always do,” it comes with a lightly sinking, nearly-spoken-word iambic verse over a big beat, quiet brushes, and “shoop-shoops” and “ooooohs.”

I'll be standin' there by my window
Watchin' you 'til you're outta sight
Then I'll lay my head on my pillow
And dream about the things we did tonight

The teen-opera angst builds into the chorus with the lines: “Better go home now/Please think of me when you turn out the light.”

I went public with my obsession on the #8 bus late Monday night when I cued up the Butterflys on my iPhone speaker to disrupt a tense standoff at the front of the bus.

3) Playing You Really Got a Hold On Me on Piano

Speaking of early 1960s pop. I’m also obsessed with the Motown standard You Really Got a Hold On Me, Smokey Robinson & the Miracles 1962 smash and Motown’s debut single. As I seem to regularly [I’m All Lost In, #27, 4/19/24], I re-learned this pop blues song in A on piano this week reveling in Robinson’s meaningful inversions.