Just last month, I commented in the article Mass Transit Blues that, during national network news TV broadcasts, any mention of my home town, Seattle, was always immediately followed with the phrase "in Washington State," as if the rest of America could not be expected to remember where Seattle was. Far from being annoyed by this, I've actually enjoyed this fog of obscurity that has clung like cappuccino froth over Puget Sound (I even revel in the fact that Seattle's own Microsoft Word's SpellCheck keeps trying to turn 'Puget Sound' into 'Peugeot Sound'). Well, the quiet, intimate little party is over: we've hit the big time, as in:

after scenes of peaceful demonstrations gone bad during the recent WTO conference were beamed not just to the rest of America, but to the world (complete with scenes of a Starbucks being trashed and looted by black-clad so-called anarchists, and a guy in my neighborhood being kicked in the crotch by a black-clad riot cop, just how many around the world have seen that kick? Hey, bud, we ALL feel your pain!)

after a suspected Algerian terrorist was arrested with 100 pounds of explosives and timing devices crossing the border from Canada into the US at Port Angeles (which I'm sure almost no one had ever heard of, but it's closer to Seattle than to anything else of note)

after Seattle was named by federal agencies as one of three cities possibly targeted for international terrorist attacks (along with New York City and Washington, DC. rather elite company! Hey, LA: Nyah-nyah-nyah-NYAH-NYAH!)

Add the fact that Chairman Bill Clinton has found Seattle important enough to visit nine times during his reign.

Throw in the globally prominent Boeing and Microsoft (the latter the brainchild of the other Bill), both headquartered in the neighborhood.

And then there are the booming others in Seattle: Amazon.com, Starbucks, Costco, REI, Nordstrom.

I noticed when the terrorist story broke: when Dan Rather said "Seattle" you no longer got a map. The rest of the country - and the world - knows where it is, and is not going to forget any time soon.

The loss of obscurity both saddens and elates me: it saddens me that Seattle will no longer be the comfortable, quiet backwater where it supposedly rains all the time (one of our most reliable and effective defenses). Seattle is becoming a major metropolis, with all the unavoidable evils that come with the territory. Our freeway traffic is now ranked as the third worst in the nation. Our national "livability" ratings are slipping. We're now a potential target for international terrorists. Hell, if the Cold War started up again, we'd doubtlessly be right up there on the list of most-favored targets by the other guys. We've accumulated an army of loud, aggressive panhandling hustlers who feed off the guilt of the Gore-Tex-clad wealthy. Seattle has shown up in so many movies that it's no longer amusing to find the streets leading to your home barricaded by film crews, and such things hardly get a line in the local newspaper (recently, scenes for an upcoming Stallone movie, slated to be shot on downtown Seattle streets, ended up being shot in Tacoma because of the WTO hubbub (See? We've become so jaded that riots have been downgraded to a mere 'hubbub'), and nobody noticed, or cared).

The sole reason that this loss of obscurity gladdens me is that it might translate into additional readers for this magazine: we're from here, which means... well, nothing. But we're experts on it!

But in the meantime, more and more locals (Seattlites, we've been called for years) will be trying to GET LOST, some even to STAY LOST, in the face of all this new-found notoriety. And with more people arriving here to work and to clutter our fine streets, it may well become all the harder to truly GET LOST. It will also become all the more necessary to GET LOST to regain one's sense of direction (quote me on that one, please!).

For good or ill, Seattle is no longer anonymous, and no longer obscure.