Duff McKagan’s column runs every Thursday on Reverb. He writes about what music is circulating through his space every Monday.This town of ours is really quite an independent and almost sovereign-seeming mini-Gotham if you see it like I do. I reside in the Northwest but have spent the lion’s share of my life traveling. I have also spent much of that time working out of Los Angeles. My point is, I get to witness Seattle and this region in fits and starts – always relishing my time here because it is often short.When I come home, it is always with my wife and two daughters. My wife starts going on the computer weeks before our trips and always finds really cool stuff to do. Parades, rodeos, hikes, festivals, music events, horseback riding, camping trips, cooking classes, and whatever else. If we actually DID all of the things that she plans, however, the McKagan family would just be a blur of movement. Her “activity eyes” are really big! She has a damn filing cabinet just for this stuff!But her heart is huge and just wants us to enjoy and experience great things together… to have shared memories of a kick-ass life. In fact, the wife and I just got off the ol’ Columbia River on a paddle boat…not a big Mississippi River-style paddle boat, no, the kind with the peddles. I guess it’s called a peddle boat? Sorry, I digress.As we all know, it has been unseasonably rainy and cold in Seattle lately. The weather doesn’t, however, seem to have any effect on summertime plans up here. Case in point: the Fremont Solstice Parade last Saturday. For those of you who want a real taste of liberal Seattle, then this is the event for you. This is the second time I have gone with my family. It really isn’t the typical parade and only adheres to what we know as a parade in that there IS a parade “route.”The Solstice Parade always starts with a few hundred naked bike riders (of course!). The rest of the parade is a mish-mash of gay and lesbian drill teams, trash-bag drill teams, paraders dressed as trees wanting hugs, paraders dressed as pot leaves, and punk-rockish marching bands. A lot of it may appear completely random, and it is. We saw a man and a women pushing their child in a bathtub with bike wheels. Now THAT was random! But the general mood and point of the parade is a sort of clean environment, be who you wanna be, legalize pot thing. There are tons of cops there – and there are also tons of people smoking weed and walking around naked. It’s the one time that you can do anything you want (without violence) in front of the police without getting arrested, I guess.People are seriously socially outward up in these parts too, which I completely dig and am wholly into. I am a talker and am naturally curious about others. Some would say that is mostly because I am from a big family and that all of my siblings and myself were forced by sheer numbers to socialize. I would argue that it is because I am from Seattle. In the last 6 days in Seattle, I have learned more from strangers on the street about themselves than I have learned about my next-door neighbors in Los Angeles in the last 5 years. I found out from a fella that gout is from eating too-rich foods and that black cherry juice will help the affliction.I found out exactly when and in what weather to best fish for rainbow trout in the Alpine Lakes region of the north Cascades.I learned where Mariners pitcher Ryan Rowland-Smith’s parents live in Australia. And where HE lives in Seattle. (I sat next to his parents at a game on Friday. While yes, they are not from Seattle, they ARE from Australia, probably the friendliest place on earth next to Seattle. I told them not to tell anyone else where their son lives though!).I discovered that a guy in Fremont went to jail for pot possession for 4 years. He told me he has never harmed a soul nor even sold weed.I also found out that a guy wearing a suit of dirty plastic grocery bags, yelling “Don’t use me! I can’t recycle!” has more of a positive effect on my daughters, as far as the environment goes, than anything that they have learned thus far in school.If you have nothing to do this Friday, check out ‘Wine, Women, and Song’ at the Palace Ballroom. It’s a gig celebrating and featuring Seattle-area chicks who rock (Star Anna and Kim Virant anyone?), and Northwest women wine-makers. It is another great Deborah Heesch production (she has done both of the Patsy Cline things over the last year, AND the Hootenanny for Haiti at the Showbox). It is sure to be a class act.