Yeah, sleepless in Seattle -- that's me. I've been down the yellow brick road to the Emerald City. I've latched onto the mass cultural riffs and felt the foggy ambivalence of living in Seattle. It was home, it was a place, it was something more. You can despise the Pacific Northwest, you can rail against the sequoias, you can even despise the color green and still be deeply in love with Seattle.

It's a decent sized city. It's not New York, but it doesn't have to be. I was in Seattle when it was on the cusp of emerging from it's Northwestern slumber. The Nineties had just begun and there was no sense that anything particularity interesting or ground-shaking was going to happen -- other than the occasional trembles. I was on the cusp.

Almost penniless, I was hold up in a cozy Seattle hotel, though it should be noted all Seattle hotels are cozy, and I was dead-set on staying. Why? I couldn't tell you. In fact, had you known me before, you would have known I despise the rain and I couldn't abide a gray day. Had you known me before, you would have thought the last place I would spend a decade of my life was the Emerald City.

But something was in the proverbial air. Something was building, like the tsunami that will engulf this city, and it was about to crest. The coffee house scene was well-entrenched before Schultz got the ticket and spun Starbucks into the empire it is now. It was the Arabica aroma of reading, of knowing, of discovering. The smell of coffee beans and books are forever entwined.

I did the usual early twenties jobs that early twenty-somethings do. I was hungry, and I was bored and I was curious. Seattle blossomed in fits and stops. It wasn't until the first, opening chords of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" that I would only know in retrospect that the swell had crested, and the rest of the world was about to inundated with something...new.


These days, reserving a room in a lovely Seattle hotel is as easy as a mouse click. Click away.