I’m All Lost In, #82: Finding a new hoodie; digging the new Capitol Hill; and working in Sharepoint, aka Shitpoint.

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#82

Back in the 2010s, whenever I’d write (what turned out to be) a prescient item in PubliCola’s persnickety “Morning Fizz” column, or whenever we broke news there, I’d hype it on social media by crowing: Learn to Trust the Fizz.

Well, Learn to Trust I’m All Lost In…

Back in October, when I read poet Marie Howe for the first time (her New and Selected Poems, 2024), I was floored and tagged her as one of my obsessions that week raving about her “masterful” poetry.

This past week, Howe’s New and Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

A snippet from my October post: “Howe’s talent lies in describing discrete POVs and then putting them back together again in a new way that seems to connote God.”

Another I’m All Lost In favorite, Blondie, also came up big this week; at least in my own private narrative. First, on Saturday night, the drummer for a band on the bill at Baba Yaga (the Sasha Bell Band from Montana) sounded exactly like Blondie’s big beat, crash and boom drummer Clem Burke. (RIP last month, sadly.) It was glorious, and we were awestruck, marvelling at the doppelganger sound. But this guy looked to be in his late 20s or early 30s, so who knows how he managed to channel so precisely Mr. Burke’s garage beat BPMs.

In other perseverating on Blondie news: I started learning a Blondie tune on piano this week. It’s another one of Blondie’s Catherine Deneuve-as-early 1960s-Parisian-teen-who-now-takes-the-stage-at-a-punk-club songs: “Slow Motion.”

The boy in the back on his second attack/
Wants his baby back (wants his baby back)/
What's all that commotion that you hear?

That’s it for this week’s goods of the order. Onto this week’s obsessions.

1) Why Can’t I Find a Good Hoodie?

My Palm Springs hoodie is not on brand: I’m neither an elderly golfer, nor a California property owner, nor a Burning Man techie. But the insistent “Authentic/Palm Springs, CA/USA/Desert Oasis” logo aside, this easy hoodie has been my comfortable and casually flattering go-to fit ever since XDX bought it for me two years ago; we were at the Palm Springs airport where I was shivering as we waited for our flight back to Seattle from Joshua Tree.

My ongoing chagrin with the gross yuppie messaging has finally prompted me to get a different hoodie. But after visiting several neighborhood shops—Crossroads Trading, Magpie Thrift, Creature Consignment; as well as Bon Voyage Vintage near work—I’m still stuck with this odd sartorial staple. All the hoodies I found this week were either baggy and awkward fits, besmirched with overly complicated aesthetics, or came with off-key logos themselves. The plain, sturdy front zipper and casual hoodie ideal, neither misleadingly youthful nor senior center friendly, seems to be more of a shopping Holy Grail than I’d realized.

Do I need to abandon my dream of scoring one secondhand?; people likely hang on to the excellent hoodies rather than casting them off. Do I need to embrace adulthood and pony up at J Crew online rather than sticking with my idealistic plan to hit Goodwill this weekend?

Cal Anderson skate park off Pine St. commandeered by death metal, 5/3/25

2) No, Capitol Hill Was Not Cooler “Back in the Day.”

Call it St. Mark’s Place Syndrome, which writer Ada Calhoun nailed in her great 2015 book St. Mark’s is Dead, an in-depth history of the storied Greenwich Village bohemian drag which also spoofed every generation’s perennial sense of horror that the city’s heyday enclave is not as cool as it was back in their day.

I wrote about Seattle’s version of this Gen X delusion, call it Capitol Hill Syndrome (or Grunge Delusion) back in 2021, arguing by the numbers that Capitol Hill is more diverse today, busier, and just as youth-centric as ever. There may be fewer artists living on Capitol Hill today (though I haven’t seen anyone prove this pervasive theory), but I’d argue there are certainly more venues here for artists to actually show work or gig. Yes, Capitol Hill is more expensive than it used to be, but so is the entire city.

It’s also more green and sustainable than it used to be. Not only does Capitol Hill now have a separate bike lane and a light rail station, which it didn’t “back in the day,” but the Capitol Hill Station is the second busiest station in the system with 9,100 daily riders during the week.

I’ve lived on Capitol Hill for more than 25 years, and I can tell you it was so white and predictable in the 1990s and early 2000s that if a white Capitol Hill hipster saw a group of POC kids on The Drag, they’d start to wonder if there was a hip hop show going on. I should qualify that: if anything was going on in the first place. For the record, weeknights on Capitol Hill were a bust 20 years ago. And the weekends weren’t reliable either. (An anecdote: I distinctly remember strolling through the sparsely attended Capitol Hill Block Party circa 2002 when it looked as lonely as closing time at a farmer’s market.)

As spring begins in earnest this year, I’m struck by Capitol Hill’s diversity and electricity and reminded once again how things have changed for the better and cooler. Strolling among the crowd during May’s 8:45pm gloaming this past Saturday, it was impossible not to take note of all the POC faces crisscrossing the groovy corridor. Groups of cavorting 20-somethings were cruising from the jam-packed 20,000 square foot bookstore (which didn’t used to exist on the Hill) to the unwieldy food truck lines (tacos, hot dogs, shawarma); or shambling from the noisy dive bars and clubs to the glittering string-lit restaurants and epic, de facto party scenes at the slices or Hot Chicken place (open until 4 am). I for one followed the crowds to watch the death metal band that, fronted by a Latino singer and an Asian guitarist, had set up in the skate park.

I memorialized the action with a tipsy post on Bluesky directed at the figurehead of my generation’s calcified gatekeeping:

A few nights later, after Wendy’s Stealing Clothes and I caught a crowded Wednesday night show at Neumos, we landed at Bimbo’s, a boozy, Mexican-comfort-food Capitol Hill institution (still very much there) that used to be more Edward Hopper Nighthawks than today’s Hieronymus Bosch orgy. Again, hard not to notice and love: As white middle-agers we were in the minority.

If, as my curmudgeonly indie rock generation has it, Capitol Hill is dead, I say: Long live Capitol Hill.

3) Sharepoint Ate My Homework

In a follow-up to last year’s 2 Line debut, Sound Transit, the regional transit agency where I work, is opening two new light rail stations on the Eastside suburbs this weekend. This means I’ve been busy writing remarks all week for Sound Transit leaders who will be speaking at the Downtown Redmond ribbon cutting.

Growing the 2 Line on the Eastside to 10 stations and 10 miles today with a 3.4-mile addition that represents a 50% expansion will give folks living both to the east and west direct, fast, easy access to Microsoft. …  

…quick access to Downtown Redmond’s vibrant and visionary downtown.  

…reliable access to concerts and recreation at Marymoor Park. 

….and seamless access to our great trails: EastRail, the East Lake Sammamish Trail, or the Bear Creek Trail.

It also means I’ve been relying on Sharepoint, Microsoft’s Word doc management platform.

Predictably, fiasco struck on Thursday morning. Trying to do rewrites while tiptoeing around Sharepoint’s manic track changes pop-up windows, ornery formatting protocols, and Exorcist III-possessed cursor, induced my own solo clusterfuck. With my colleagues similarly paralyzed in their own Sharepoint hell, important changes were lost and errant versions were en route to the Exec Team.

“Everyone, pens down,” my wise boss said reining in our increasingly haywire Teams chat. Her Zen temperament is the only antidote to the inevitable bedlam of Sharepoint, or Shitpoint as I’ve referred to the frustrating program for years now.

As I wrote speeches about ferrying thousands of new riders to the Microsoft campus, I fantasized about directing all of them straight to the Sharepoint department.