everett

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I spent the first part of my childhood in the house above in Everett, WA. It's on a gravel road and I still drive by it at least once each time I visit home. While my mom's mom was still alive, we'd make appearances at church every weekend (plus sunday school, though minus my dad who is a vocal anti-religionist) and afterwards we do a driving tour around the nice parts of town, always the same route around Rucker Hill. Gloomy Sundays around the port, eating church donuts. We'd wind around small lanes looking at the views of the sound and the fancy houses. These big houses grew into a sort of lore amongst me and my brother and my cousins and it was jarring to discover in high school that one of my basketball teammates actually lived in one. A highlight for me as a tiny kid was this stone drinking fountain and bench on the residential sidewalk

When I was in college me and my girlfriend watched all of the twins peaks available to us at the time. Which was a lot because we had Scarecrow video nearby so both versions of the pilot, both seasons, and fire walk with me were at hand. It was a very intense relationship and this gave the show a heightened quality. We broke up and a few years later I was in Oulu Finland at this heavymetal bar called Hevimesta (Hevi comes from the English heavy, mesta comes from the Russian место meaning 'place'). I took a picture of their downstairs cash register:

I'm usually basically agog at the nature of reality and how the fabric of existence feels against me, and these are thoughts that Twin Peaks explores too in its own way. That's fun as far as that goes and I enjoy the TV episodes and the movie. But it also does fuck with my sense of reality seeing not just snoqualmie falls but streets of my hometown in that universe. Laura Palmer's house is right along the route we would take after church. This is a screenshot from Fire Walk with Me. You can hardly see the motorcycle peeling around the corner and maybe make out the drinking fountain

Buildings play such a prominent role in the story, lodges and also residential homes. So it especially makes me feel weird when they're inside Laura's house and all I do is focus on the familiar lights of the port outside twinkling in the darkness through the window