My most immediate physical space is this apartment. It encompasses the one large room where I sit now at the computer, a kitchen with a dining area, a bathroom, and a large walk-in closet. I've lived within this unit in this building for about 15 or 16 years. The exact time escapes me now, but suffice it to say it's been a long time.

This computer with its large 20-inch screen is on a desk in one corner of the large room. To my right as I face the screen is a bank of three windows that offer a sweeping view of Seattle's Queen Anne Hill. Not much has changed within this unit, but much has changed in that space outside, beyond those three windows. Part of the sweep of Queen Anne is now obscured by a dark, aggressive condo high-rise that sprouted just a few blocks north. That building forced me finally to get basic cable for my TV since it obscures two of the TV towers on the hill beyond. I can still clearly see the KING/KONG tower on the right side of the hill. The KOMO tower is barely visible from some angles in the room, but not visible from the spot where my TV antenna was located. KIRO's tower is hidden completely.

Trying to pull TV for free in a hilly urban environment like Seattle is always a challenge. The antenna-powered TV becomes a window on with signifcant views and view blockages. One must be aware of the physical location of the signal, moving the local antenna to catch those darn, tricky waves. KCPQ, the local Fox affiliate, was one of the more challenging. Their tower, I was forced to discover, is across Elliot Bay somewhere on the Kitsap Pennisula near Bremerton. That puts many of the downtown high-rises between my antenna and their tower. I mostly just gave up on watching that channel rather than trying to adjust out the shadows and ghosts -- at least until a hotel tower rose downtown. The new tower, a Hyatt hotel, is located is on the northwest corner of my view, to my left as I look out. That hotel tower rose a year or so before the condo tower that's dead-center in the view. And although it seems to have little relation to any of the TV towers, my reception of KCPQ improved significantly as the building grew. When it was completed, I could actually watch a football game of FOX and read the graphics for the first time.

But that's all in the past. I now depend on a TV view coming through a wire into my apartment.

My small TV sits in a shelf below the triple-bank of windows. As I watched it in the evening, the steady blinking of the three towers on QA could be seen through the rabbit-ears in front of my window. On the left side of that expansive view, where Queen Anne Hill begins to dip toward the bay, was the most significant feature of it all -- the Space Needle. I moved into this unit because of that view.

The Space Needle is monumental. It was concieved and built as a symbol for the city by a group of folks who wanted to make the grand gesture for a place they loved. But it was and is a commercial monument, privately owned as a for-profit enterprise. It's a restaurant on big stilts. But its real saving grace is that it's just plain silly. Its inspiration is 1950's B-movie flying saucers, after all. The point of this monument is more to amuse than to inspire. It's all a well-concieved joke.

Fortunately, the owners of the Needle and the city itself has always seemed to understand the joke. The monument is often dolled up in various ways to emphasize its humor. Lights and various blow-up dolls get attached to the thing at different times in ways that remind us all that this monument is supposed to be amusing. That's never more obvious than at New Year's when, in recent years, ever-more elaborate fireworks displays are attached to the tower, allowing us to see it explode in intriguingly displays of pyro-pornography.

That bit of urban jokesterism was always there on the left side of my view. As I watched the physically-captured images from my antenna, I could look up and through the windows to see the last rays of sunset fire the Needle's white stilts in a wash of orange. At dusk every evening of every season, the disk of the Needle would begin to twinkle. The intensity of the twinkling reflected both the weather of the day and the ebb and flow of the tourist season. It would last only as long as the dying rays of the day. That twinkling was one of the more intriguing aspects of the Needle because it was accidental. It came from the useless flash guns of dozens of tourist cameras, attempting to get a shot of the city below and beyond them. And it happened every day. In every season. At dusk.

Happened. It probably still happens, but I can no longer see it.

Like those broadcast views on TV, the physical view of the Space Needle is now blotted out from my windows. In its place is the muscular mass of a new building -- a building that is as earnest as the Needle is frivolous. What I see now through my windows in the exact spot where the Space Needle used to be is a new federal court house. This is a broad-shouldered affair with jutting concrete shoulders. There seems to be some attempt to mitigate its seriousness by placing a kind of jaunty baseball cap on the building's head, but that just comes across as silly, like a politician donning a cap for a campaign crowd.

From my view, this building precisely blots out the Space Needle. The building's central elevator shaft covers the Needle entirely. The baseball cap on top blots out the disk of the Needle's restaurant. All that's left of the Needle from my view is the metal spire at its peak. That's all I can now see of it, flashing plaintifly to remind me that's it's still back there, just beyond my view.

Losing that view has been painful. What I see through these windows is now more mundane because I've lost that daily joke of the space ship hovering out there on the horizon.