Meet the New Wes

Real Change is not a cult. New recruits are NOT brainwashed immediately, the same night they join, so that they become zombie clones of, say, me. Sometimes I think this is a pity, because zombie clones are fun to tease and make great playthings. Also, if everyone in the office were a zombie clone of me, I wouldn’t hear so many complaints about my garlic breath.

Still, though the office does NOT consist of zombie clones of me, or whoever, people who work here seem to be in remarkable agreement on one matter: if there is anybody at Real Change who could become the next internet equivalent of the chubby-lightsaber-wielding Star Wars Kid, it’s me. They all have faith in my potential to become famous for fifteen minutes by acting unbelievably weird in public. “You do it around here,” the reasoning begins. It continues with nitpicks about past behavior and my past choices of beverages.

For the record I have sworn off malt liquor entirely, and I don’t see why everyone has to keep bringing up the Bad Art Show post-party of 1997. I wasn’t the only one who said “I love you, Man, you’re aweshum” to the cat that night.

All this including the cat bring me to this point: I am currently engrossed in updating my “internet presence.” As a result I am totally distracted from most of the usual things I obsess about. I am not thinking about the war. I am not thinking about homelessness. I am not thinking about how to save the planet. I am thinking, how can I get the Real Change cat, Sidney Vicious, to do something adorable on video, so I can upload the result to one of my three new blogs, just so the billions of people in the world who will not look at any of my three blogs, ever, will have something to miss.

I just lied slightly. I AM thinking about homelessness a little. That’s because I’m trying to get stuff I’ve written in the past neatly loaded on one of these blog thingies, including an article I wrote in 1996 entitled, “So - You're About to Become Homeless.... or How to Hit the Street Feet-First Not Face-First.” This was the piece that tried to offer advice to people poised upon becoming homeless for the first time, while at the same time helping others understand how much of a pain homelessness is.

The trouble is, the article is totally out of date. For example, it turns out that the cutting edge homeless person no longer bothers with cheap voicemail, when he/she can score a cheap cell phone that has Internet browsing with email, music playback, a personal organizer, a camera, a camcorder, games, radio, and wakes up everybody in the shelter when it rings Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries at 3 AM.

The article mentions “Walkmen.” That’s Old Man Speak for “iPods and the like.” There’s a discussion of the relative merits of backpacks and shopping carts, but not one word about rolling suitcases!

The original article hinted that you could find storage spaces that weren’t actually intended for homeless peoples’ use. Those places still exist, but even to hint that anyone avail themselves of them would be inappropriate now. You can all forget about hiding bags in unconventional places, unless you like the little plastic handcuffs and answering loud angry questions for 17 hours.

The 1996 article makes me laugh when I read how it advises readers to look up crisis information on the internet. It says use a library computer to telnet to it. It’s like giving someone two sticks when they ask for a light. Ha! No, you don’t do that. Instead, you go to www2.ci.seattle.wa.us/crisisclinic/ in your “browser,” and then you “navigate” to the information you want.

And, if you want to miss seeing Sidney Cuteness Vicious, continue to NOT set your browser to the one of my new blogs that’s at www.wesrunoff.blogspot.com and find the February 8 entry.