There is no way to find the right tone for this. Your ecstatic rebellion or sweet relief has no time for muse-y newspaper columns. This is a letter to the future: By the time you are reading this, we will all know whether an Osama Bin Laden impersonator was captured over Halloween, Karl Rove accused Teresa Heinz Kerry of child molestation, gunfire erupted at Florida polling places, we all drank and danced until the dawn of the Third, or spent the wee hours in lockup for hurling a garbage can through the windows of the Federal Building. In this week, my week, futurenauts, the world hangs in the balance and nature itself doesn't feel right. Even the moon seems to wait.

I have just moved into one of the Belltown Cottages, and will serve there for the next year as one of the Hugo Huts Writers-In-Residence, a sweet gig. If you want to talk poetry, it's my job to do that, email me at belltownpoet@hugohouse.org.

Belltown both is and is not what I expected. The noise down here, close to the water, is the biggest surprise; the trains, the background hum, I suppose, of all those boilers and air conditioners, the shrieking, and the tail end of the Viaduct roar (more on that later). For all the folks who apparently live here, I don't feel like I m seeing them on the street. The radical revamping of the Frontier Room is a microcosm of the general takeover by the bridge-and-bridge crowd. The deaths of various penny universities have left a vacuum, but life moves into new things. I'm very fond of the Elbasha Cafe at Western and Wall, a place I didn't even know existed until I moved in around the block friendly, unpretentious, neighborhoody. Second Avenue's northern stretch feels glossy and cold. Personally I think it would have warmed up with a monorail running up it, but no, you insisted on Fifth. Instead of 25,000 new residents downtown in the next 20 years, as projected, I think we need 100,000. If you re gonna have the chaos and the proximity of lots of people and no yard (well, I have a yard), you should be able to buy groceries halfway up your block. I'm still searching for a cozy place to drink, and yes, I accept payola.

So, the Viaduct. It s getting snuck past us in this "frenzied election cycle" (oh, yeah, GET FORKED, MARTIN SELIG) but plans are being made for the replacement of the elevated portion of Highway 99. I've been active on this issue with a group called the People's Waterfront Coalition, but before I start preaching, here are the facts: The Viaduct is damaged and will come down. Engineers say hopes for a retrofit are in vain. The state transportation department (WSDOT) is conducting a public process which has narrowed its options down to two: an elevated, and a tunneled replacement for the highway. What they didn't examine was the possibility the highway might not need to be replaced. This was the finding of research done by the city's DOT to prepare an emergency plan in case of the sudden "failure" of the facility. WSDOT's two proposals cost billions, and take up to ten years. Seattle DOT officials easily admit of businesses in the area, "the strong will survive, the marginal won t." What independent business isn't marginal? WSDOT ignored the Seattle DOT findings from the start (and SDOT sat on them to avoid a fuss) and is calming the neighbors by suggesting that not keeping traffic flowing on 99 during construction could allow the project time to be cut in half. But if we can live five years without the highway, that means we can live without it for good. There s lots more to this: the fact of how little freight the viaduct actually carries and how much cheaper it would be to designate a dedicated freight-way, the benefits of opening up our waterfront, fighting sprawl and bringing more residents downtown, and the whole bogus logic of highway planners' dedication to expanding highway capacity (worked for Atlanta and L.A., huh?). See peopleswaterfront.org for that stuff. The City Council is taking public input now to decide on city policy. Go to the PWC website now, (a decision will be made in the next couple of weeks) use the links to look at WSDOT's plan, PWC s alternative, and to tell the mayor and council members what you want for this neighborhood. Whatever happened last week, there is much to do now, in all spheres. The great work begins.