One can safely assume that Seattle now has too many French restaurants. Even a few years ago, after clear weather, you couldn't see smog for three days; now you can see it after one day. Eddie Bauer was once the brand name of choice, even for downtown businessmen; Tiffany's and Cartier are now in Pacific Place, Neiman-Marcus in the Westlake Center. Everyone downtown seems to be wearing designer eyewear, Italian shoes, expensive leather coats. Late-model SUVs ("I'm in touch with nature") and Volvos ("I'm intellectual") are ubiquitous, though very few Mercedes or BMWs, at least in the neighborhoods where I drive. A friend who was a successful potter was forced to give up his studio when the rent doubled, so he's now remodeling houses for millionaires half his age.

There are now 60,000 millionaires (one-third of whom are Microsoft employees or former employees) living in the Seattle area. A friend's former student, who received his MFA degree at Eastern Washington University several years ago, was divorced and destitute; his temp agency assigned him to the warehouse at Amazon (Jeff Bezos' garage). He's now worth $10 million. Walking down the street in Pioneer Square, he hands out $10 bills to beggars. I feel the money as a gilded blimp hovering over the city; it's the shadow passing across all activity, all conversation -- when you got in, when you can divest, when the IPO is, what stock is the next next next ...

The bidding for the house around the corner in my shabby-genteel neighborhood was between an Amazon couple and a Microsoft couple; it started at $509K and finished a week later at $550K, cash. The house I "own" is now worth more than twice what I bought it for in 1991. Things have changed since the Justice Department asked Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson to split Microsoft into two companies, but not that much. Now, houses that would have sold in days are staying on the market for a month. A sign of the Seattle economic collapse to come? All of Seattle may be in denial, but nobody here seems to think so. A former Microsoft employee who now works for Amazon said, "Anxiety about Microsoft is bogus. The case is affecting no one, not even Microsoft employees; they're convinced the judge's decision will be overturned. Sure, cyberfolks here have worries -- about the stock market in general, about venture-capital streams drying up, about employee retention. But Microsoft? Nah. That's the stablest thing around, no matter what shape it takes. It's old guard by now, like a rock."

Being a writer in image-addicted America makes me feel at times somewhat marginal; being a writer in cyber-sick Seattle often makes me feel absolutely beside the point. I was born in a suburb of Los Angeles, grew up in a suburb of San Francisco, went to college in Providence, R.I., and graduate school in Iowa City, Iowa, lived for a few years in New York, spent an alarming portion of my 20s sequestered in artists' colonies and taught at a small school in a tiny hamlet in upstate New York for three years. So when I moved to Seattle in 1988 to take a teaching job in the creative writing program at the University of Washington, I thought of Seattle not as an idyll but as a real city. A small city but a real city, nonetheless. It's now even less of an idyll and more of a city, which, to me, is a good thing.

Publicly, I condescended to Seattle, repeated the jokes ("When it's 11 p.m. in New York, it's 1972 in Seattle"), but privately I rather liked the containable snugness of Seattle. Publicly, I said it didn't matter anymore where one lived, but privately (and quite unconsciously) I must have registered the remoteness of my new address, for in the last decade I've gone from writing mostly novels and short stories to writing mostly nonfiction books and personal essays.

It was as if, upon arriving here, I no longer entirely trusted the life I lived on a daily level -- the material of fiction, at least the sort of autobiographical fiction I was writing -- to be of sufficient interest to people living east of the Cascades. So my work became saturated with overtly public, nationwide topics such as the psychodynamics of mass media, our love-hate relationship with celebrity, the racial subtext of professional basketball, etc.

This remoteness is a crucial part of the answer to the question people so often ask, "Why Seattle?" -- i.e., how could such a sleepy fishing village become home to so many world-conquering companies? It's quite striking to me how many of the most successful businesses here -- Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon, McCaw Cellular, PacTar (Peterbilt trucks), UPS (which began in Seattle as a cooperative) -- have created products that have the specific effect of shrinking the distance between Seattle and the rest of the country. The very remoteness of Seattle engenders the need, which creates the imagination to fill the need. (There's a proverb about this.) This doesn't happen if you're living in Montclair, N.J., where you think you're living in or near the center of the universe. "The locus of innovation has shifted westward in the United States," as the chairman of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art recently said. Or as my friend Joel likes to say, "The silicon chip wasn't invented in New York; it couldn't have been."

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