Today I went to register our Honda and receive WA plates, etc. It was something I had to do because the plates expired yesterday and the car is in my name. I went expecting to pay $30 bucks and I ended up forking over $306!! Apparently there is this Monorail Tax, and since my car is nice and new my tax was huge. I’m all for the monorail, I voted for it back in 1998, but OMIGOD! I was shocked. I thought I was going to be paying 30 bucks, and whoa…damn. I said, “Wait, this wasn’t on the website!” And now I know why: We should have registered the car in a different WA based city and the tax wouldn’t have been applied. I should have used my parent’s Vancouver address! Why, God why! Well, now I’m warning all y’all who plan on moving here, do not register your cars in Seattle…you will be severely burned. While waiting in line I also read an article about how if you buy a used car from an individual instead of a used car lot, they will tax you on the percentage the car is worth versus how much you actually paid for the vehicle. So if you paid $800 for a ‘88 Skylark, but the car’s value is really $4,000, hello, you’re gonna pay something like $450 for registration. I think this is to weed out the common occurrence of lowballing the actual amount of money that was exchanged. I know when I bought my first crappy car, we wrote on the title that I bought it for next to nothing so I could avoid a heavy tax. Now, the state has found a way to nix this behavior. I suppose the advantages are clean streets, well kept parks, and (one day) a monorail…but still, damn, I’m still smarting.
Taking the bus from work, to the U District for licensing, and than to my house took….2 and a half hours. That’s a lot of waiting around. I consoled myself by listening to NPR on my Walkman (that’s right, I play it ol’ skoo), until my batteries gave out. Than I was enchanted by a blind man sitting with his (unblind) four year old daughter. She was crawling all over the seat next to him, talking to him, telling him about her day. At one point she held his cane, which was folded up in her lap. He kept touching her face as a way to calm her down and I realized he had no other way to see how beautiful she was. It was a nice moment. They finally exited the bus, and all the passengers on my bus watched this blind man and his little girl wait at the crosswalk at a busy intersection. She was holding his hand, and when the pedestrian crosswalk lit up, she sprung from the sidewalk and pulled him forward. The whole bus watched, as if vicariously guiding them across the busy street and out of harms way.
Speaking of bus rides, some guy was BEAT BOXING on the bus the other day, that’s right, loud and clear: “Boom-chee, batta-boom, chee,” He was even making little squeaky squeak noises like he was mixing a couple of records on a turn table. This was not some guy quietly vibing his music with headphones, this was a confident fellow who wanted the whole bus to know how talented he was with his vocal rhythms. It was funny until it became annoying. I went down fantasy lane: What if I turned to him and said: “Sir, could you please stop that?” Or better yet, “Hey, shut-up, ok? Nobody wants to hear you.” What would he do? Kill me? Grow even louder to antagonize me? I amused myself with this until finally he got off the bus and we were all spared.