For the first few years after I moved to Seattle in the early 2000s, one of the fixtures of my neighborhood was a senior pothead who liked to be called--I am absolutely not kidding--"Griz"; not "Grizzly," definitely not "Gordon." Just the one syllable. Griz posed as master dropout, claimed to have had no permanent address from his teens to his fifties. "Of no fixed abode" he'd say self-consciously, drawing out and having fun with the cliché. Griz seemed as incapable of a bad mood as he was of working, obligations, or lasting relationships, or saying anything that you could completely believe.

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