Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light

I was sitting about thirty yards away from where I am now. It was about a year ago, late April/early May 2007, in Monk and Stef's old apartment. I was visiting for a week, and said to myself "What the hell, I might as well buy a Flickr account."

A year later, a year into my 2-year subscription, I'm glad I did.

Ken, Laura, and I migrated to the Fremont Solstice Fair this year, a time-honored event where Seattle's hippiest, dippiest relics of free love and liberalism emerge from their hacky sack circles in order to celebrate the longest day of the year. Without fail, this involves bodypaint, overt hostility to the government, and marijuana. A regular occurrence at the event for the last eight years or so has been the naked bicyclists, who obviously enough are bicyclists that are, at best, wearing clever displays of paint on their skin.

It was awesome.

Flagrant disregard for public indecency laws aside, the fair was quite entertaining, and I only wish I'd have spent more time at some of the other venues. There was a parade predominantly containing clothed people, music, food, and tons of artwork that I missed. We walked to Gasworks Park where, once again, I took a panorama shot of the crowds. The whole set is up on Flickr and is about 68 MB is size. That Pro account is comin' in handy, I tell ya.

There are also plenty of other great sets for your perusal.

These two girls all but refused to put clothing on after the bike ride was over. Not even Speedo-wearing Batman could stop them. It's also interesting to note that this completely naked silver girl was quite popular, probably because there was a completely naked silver guy walking around with "Y2K" sunglasses on. I can only hope they coordinated, but I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't.

It was overcast today, and the clouds looked like they might rain for most of the morning, but I was foolish and opted not to apply my sunblock. Five hours of being outdoors later, I look like George Hamilton from the neck up. Oh well. I'm sure the bicyclists have it worse than I do right now.