So you're alone and confused. But if you're anything like me, I know why you came here, and not in the specific, 4:12, waterfront way-but in general, here, early 'aughts, Greater Metropolitain SeaTac Region. I mean, I don't know why you're here, really, but if you're like me-and I think you are-it has something to do with... art. No, wait... it has something to do with Art. Either that, or making money with computers; but honestly, no one cares about that. Enjoy your house on Bainbridge and your carpal tunnel syndrome.

Back to Art. As things turn out, it's still around. Quick: what do you do on the first Thursday of every month after coming home from work and before passing out in front of the TV? If you're like me, the answer is: "Forget to go down to the art walk." If you want to know what the answer to the question "What are you going to do next month after coming home from work and before passing out in front of the TV?," flip the to end of this article.

So the art walk, like so many of the other enriching and vibrant activities that make Seattle one of best places in the world, is easy to miss. But this time, things were different. I went down to the Heaven nightclub to check out ReGrowth, a pack of young artists who bring it with a kind of surreal, street based, diffuse style that made me think if I met them, I might be able to one day tell my friends I knew them back when they were doing the art walk at Heaven Nighclub.

Heaven is, appropriately enough, located just below street level at Second and Washington, the kind of dimly-lit, cavernous spot where you'd expect to find art and similarly objectionable activities.

Cameron Nagashima and Taj Williams are seated in these throne-like chairs that seem to grow out of the wall, behind a display of their work propped on easels, mounted on the wall, and hung from string, prayer-flag style. They work in multiple media, but today it's mostly paintings and photos on display; lush, swirling paintings of trees intertwined with buildings, washing into oceans or rising from the earth to become a kind of techno-vegetable hand reaching for the sky. Photo work of tattoos and spray paint cans with eyes and mouths, watching, smiling, shouting mutely.

There's background noise, but not the usual art party stuff. People seem to be talking things I can recognize as relating to life on this planet. An amazingly beautiful girl in fishnet stockings and metallic eye shadow approaches the ReGrowth space and strikes up a conversation with Cameron, and I seriously reconsider my personal prohibition against writing "I saw U" classifieds. I overhear someone say "You've got to check out this bag of the purple sticky I just got." A kid from Kansas City(!) swings over and asks directions to an art gallery no one has ever heard of, and then tells Cam and Taj that ReGrowth's work is the best work in the gallery. I tend to agree-and that's not to disparage the other stuff. And come on-the kid's from Kansas City. Is there anyone more trustworthy than someone who is lost and is from Kansas City?

So what's ReGrowth? Ask Cameron and you'll get the story of a post-apocalyptic vision of the world, post-humanity; crumbling buildings, cracking cement, overgrown with trees, vines, plants. The curve of the West Seattle Bridge becoming the crest of a hill, covered in wild tangles of green. "After a nuclear war, an ice age... dirt collects, and that's what allows trees, plants, anything... to grow," he says.

ReGrowth's central metaphor: the life force that returns to reclaim all that's been modified or destroyed by culture. The work that Cameron has on display tonight largely follows that theme literally; trees become buildings, wash out into broad landscapes. Taj's photographs and paintings are focused more on street art: graffiti style shapes and spray paint cans that speak; a kind of regrowth more related to the human voice than the natural world. "It's starting something new, coming out of our past, but starting something new together," explains Taj.

I've got one sly question for these guys: does street art lose its teeth when it makes it into the gallery? It's the kind of question you're supposed to ask artists; I'm trying to talk their language. But they don't want to, or won't, fling the terminology back at me. This is the point where it's confirmed for me that ReGrowth is about something real, and not just another art-movement-trying-to-be-an-art-movement.

"There's so many different kinds of street artists," explains Taj. "It started on the streets."

"But [street art appearing in galleries] is kind of part of the evolution, or regrowth of the world," Cameron finishes.

So I scratch the theory question. People like me... people like us, see... we were trained to ask these questions. In the po-po-po-po-mo academic world, it didn't matter so much what anyone felt; feelings were secondary to dialectic. Humanity took a backseat to irony, to second-guessing; the golden calf of cleverness.

Ask anyone who took a writing class in the mid-'90s. Better yet, ask anyone who got rejected from an MFA program in the mid-'90s. The main thing was not to say something, but to say something about saying something. And you know what I just realized/have been silently brooding over for the past ten years? We were some really insecure kids who got shunted along for the ride by a bunch of insecure professorial types. We got conned into saying nothing out of the fear of saying something that didn't make sense or wouldn't fly with a publisher or that someone already said.

And this is the thing: As post-apocalyptic as it sounds, ReGrowth is about humanity. With all that Ernest Becker said about the Death Anxiety Complex causing all of the basic problems of the world, he also encouraged us to confront death, to examine it head-on, with as much fearlessness as possible. And maybe that's why ReGrowth feels real to me... it's about "nature taking over" in a way that's deeper than just the usual anarchist kid dandelions-growing-through-the-cracks-in-the-pavement kind of thing. It's about allowing human "nature;" that is, thought, feeling, and all of that other stuff that's always formed the basis of what makes us, as subjective beings, to grow out from the pavement, glass, and steel of economics and politics that have been come up around them.