Seattle Ain't Bullshittin'
Reflections on a week in the Emerald City
I was in Seattle this week, just two weeks late to attend the annual Twin Peaks festival. I could have seen all my Twin Peaks friends there and met Kyle McLachlan at the festival marquee this year. It's a bummer about missing that, but the weather in Seattle this week was relatively pleasant, and the people are always kind to me there.
Most of my time was spent at a work conference. You all know me here on Substack as an author of compelling essays and provocative DIY bedroom music, with the occasional short story. But in my day job, I am a high-performing technology software solutions engineer, responsible for millions of dollars in closed sales every year. I don’t write much about that part of my life because it requires a different mindset and expression than this Substack Minton. What you see from me on this platform is more than a hobby; Substack isn't what pays my mortgage or buys all my records, but it's my craft, if you can dig it.
And though work took up most of my time this week, I did enjoy some play. I got out for a few hours to visit the Seattle Museum of Popular Culture (MoPop) and the Nirvana exhibit, which started in 2000 and has been touring worldwide for most of that time. The museum even produced a book based on all the interviews and asset acquisitions over the years. The last time I visited this museum, the exhibit was on tour in South America, but there was a killer David Bowie exhibit in its place, so everything equals out at MoPop.
The Nirvana exhibit was incredible, though it left me feeling sad. Kurt Cobain was only 27 years old when he put that shotgun to his head. He didn’t know a goddamned thing about being a good Dad or a husband because doing both of those roles right means you stay and work through the pain. Working through pain as an artist is much easier because you can abstract away from it through creativity. Nirvana was a band for seven years. Doctors go to school for longer than that to master their craft. And when I think about what Dave Grohl has done since Kurt Cobain’s suicide, it makes me sad for what could have been if the latter were a functional human being and not just an artist.
Our lives are our art. I’ve written it as a song lyric. But for some, that art isn’t enough to sustain a life, making me sad. Initially, I would write a longer essay about each image I photographed in the museum. Instead, I just published a compilation of photos (below) and wrote a short story that included the memory of when I found out Kurt Cobain killed himself. I was driving back to the burbs from my Fraternity house in Cincinnati. I cried almost the whole way home because something more than a man had just died in my generation.
