A Guide for newcomers, tourists, longtime residents, or really anyone wondering how things got to be the way they are.
Making sense of the place you live is an essential step if you want to change it. In this regard, making sense of a place is a kind of activism. In exchange for your trust, I’ll be mostly giving you a straight history, but if you know me, you know I can’t just let local absurdity, accidental poetry, or inadvertent humor go by without joining in the fun. So, there’s going to be some of that. I’ll match your trust with my own and trust you’ll be able to tell when I’m employing a little color, exaggeration, or hyperbole to help reveal a deeper truth.
When you’re done reading, there will still be parts of Olympia that won’t make sense to you. You may even be more confused than when you started. That’s okay. Olympia may never make sense to you, or anyone else. Making sense of Olympia is an ongoing process. This is not a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are not products of my imagination. Resemblance to actual events, locales and persons, living or dead, is entirely intentional.
–DSW