Link

On a related note, there is one character amongst the Broadway denizens that is, in fact, Link from the Legend of Zelda. Broadway, Seattle, has its share of lunatics, streetkids, aging drunken Natives, and dragqueens. On any given afternoon, making their way with backpacks and assorted bags- an old crazy man with grey hair walks with his son, aka Link, an elf. Not in the diminutive sense, an Elf that stands six-feet and wears his 250 lbs. clumsily.
I first heard of Link from The Stranger, the actual newspaper of this city. I've come across a handful of references to this local character in the columns. Link wears a green elf cap, with green vest and full-on Zelda attire. It looks childish, but he is in his late teens. The story, apparently, is that his father convinced him from an early age that he is, in all actuality, an Elf, an immortal. Ofcourse, any kid would love to hear that from his father- so he obviously took to the idea. For example, a friend overheard this on the bus:
LINK (visibly dismayed at another passenger's obnoxious behavior): These mortals, my word.
BLACK WOMAN (to Link's father): SIR, I think its WRONG that you raise your son to think he's an ELF!
FATHER (not interested in confrontation, leans back to his son, with his grubby hand over his mouth, and loudly):Don't listen to these mortals.
Case in point, I am living in Zelda.

CD

Now walking down 21st Ave, heading south through the Central District. The sun is shining and Im feeling a bit tanned and stoned, smirking at my surroundings.
So I come across a smiling midget, nearby a park where a huge Hispanic family-barbecue rambas. He is on the corner, waist deep in grass clippings, hard at yardwork. He perks up, "Hi!". I smile a hows-it-goin, and he replies, "Really Busy." So I say, "Looks it.", and walk on. Why do I feel like I'm in Zelda? Who are these quizical midgets I keep running across?

Pretext

Walking all the way down Spring St., toward Lake Washington*- here, Seattle. It is summer, but there is no Summer St., Spring suffices. I walk through Madrona in the sun, past mansions, over a rickety wooden pedestrian bridge that crosses the Madrona Ravine. I am twenty-four and of no consequence. My thoughts are mercurial vapor, drifting clouds of "aspect psychology* and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the car I drove in to day-care- those small years of my young life, that black chick that broke my heart on foreign soil, those dreamless morbid days of my return home a few years back, Che Guevara and his motorbike, and that dream I had last night about having a stomach of maggots that came up through my abdomen like popped zits, ach".
I find the beach of the Monarch Butterfly, somewhere in Madrona, along a cove of the lake. There, a thicket of bamboo sways in the breeze, and a dozen butterflies mate in the sand, wings fluttering by my squinted eyes. I feel like I am a creature in the early stages of sentience- just a creature like all the rest.