The Seattle Seahawks just beat the New Orleans Saints, last year’s Superbowl Champions, in a hard-fought playoff battle. I’m not so totally engrossed in writing fiction that I couldn’t come up for air and take in some prime time football. Given how well the Hawks handled the Saints, you have to wonder how the sports-pundits ever came up with the notion of giving the Saints an 11-point advantage in predicting the outcome.
I sometimes get to thinking that every pundit east of the Mississippi has his or her head where the sun don’t shine. Have they heard of Seattle? No really.
Sure, they might sip their Starbucks coffee while flying in a Boeing 747 and typing some notes in Microsoft Word on their PC, but what’s that got to do with Seattle?
Now, I don’t mean to be a Seattle Chauvinist, but this town’s got a lot more going on than most of the US realizes. Maybe it’s just as well. We’ll keep it quiet. Why make the rest of the country aware that Jimi Hendrix was born here, that Ray Charles worked out his blues chops here, Grunge music was born here, and on and on.
I think it has something to do with the collision of high tech with nature hereabouts. We have space and cyberspace pioneering companies and uncut old growth forests that still haven’t been fully explored all within a hundred miles or so of the epicenter of this place where the Duwamish River meets the sea. The what river? you say.
I’m happy to let that recognition remain elusive. Who wants a mass of hangers on to start coming around and stealing our chops? For my part, I’ll just keep on grinding out science fiction and mystery stories, waiting on the day, not so much when I’m discovered by the East-Coast powers that be, but rather when I find my path to popularity the way those others did, just by being part of the stream of innovation that seems to run stronger here than anywhere else on earth.
In the meantime: GO SEAHAWKS!!!
And so we see that civic pride only goes so far. I guess it’s hard to catch a football when it’s snowy.