Prognosticating Pioneer Square

By the Adjusted Lunar Calendar that no one around here uses anymore except passively, as when they allow themselves to be told when Easter is, it’s one day short of six years since my great triumph of prognostication. If you missed me gloating about it, it happened the night of Fat Tuesday, 2001. Anitra “She Who Drinks of My Whine” Freeman is my unimpeachable witness that sometime around 11:30 that night I told her we would be tear-gassed before the night was done. And we were! At 2 a.m.! I was never so proud!

Of course it would have been more impressive if I had predicted that before a half day would elapse an earthquake would bounce our bed two feet sideways out from under us. Or that in my quest to confirm the likelihood of our tear-gassing I would witness the beginning of the Mardi Gras brawl that included an infamous murder. But we prognosticators, people like me and my homies Nostradamus, and Jeanne Dixon, and Edgar Cayce, take all the credit we can get.

Now it’s almost six years later. I am writing this early in the morning of the Monday before the Tuesday of the Fat of 2007. Why don’t I prognosticate about this year’s Fat Tuesday and Ash Wednesday? Let’s see if I can be right about some of it again. Anitra and I still live in subsidized housing at Third and S. Washington, in the Pioneer Square District, so it’s still plausible that we could be tear-gassed. But is that what my crystal ball says?

For one thing, I see horses. The horses have men on the top. The men are wearing silly cap/helmet thingies like polo players wear. I’m looking deeper now, and yes, those are uniformed mounted policemen on those horses. I’m not using my crystal ball, though. I’m using my memory. I saw them out the window Saturday night.

I was awakened at about 2 a.m. by a screaming mob and horseshoes striking pavement. I peeked out the window and saw two mounted police chasing people up and down Washington St. As I kept watching for the next half-hour, I eventually saw that at least six mounted police took part in crowd control, along with maybe six additional police officers who arrived in police cars. Plus a slew of bicycle cops who managed to get there at the tail end of all the excitement, by pedaling their little legs off. Mind you, that’s all just what I could see on Washington Street between Third and Fourth. I don’t know what was going on elsewhere in the area.

Another thing I saw Saturday night was a man being arrested who was wearing what Anitra referred to as a tank top, and what I always called a sleeveless undershirt. He brought to mind Marlon Brando in A Street Car Named Desire, except that he looked like the later, fat Brando.

“No wonder he’s being arrested. Who wears sleeveless undershirts in Seattle in February? There’s his problem. Does he even know what latitude this is? Does he know how big his belly is? Anyone that clueless is asking to be arrested,” I thought.

So here’s my Prognostication. This Fat Tuesday, clueless men and women will pretend that Seattle is subtropical. A paunchy man in a tank top, or a sleeveless undershirt, will get into a fight with another man. Kerlikowske, still hurting from his failure to prevent bloodshed in 2001, will send in men on horseback. We will NOT be tear-gassed, because they don’t have gas masks for the horses, and we know that the police in this city love their horses in a way they will never love its residents.

I predict that there will NOT be a major earthquake in Seattle on this Ash Wednesday morning. Instead, large numbers of people will wake up to news that Britney Spears got wasted the night before and as a result all the rest of us got our brains pierced.

Mornings Happen

Recently I had what I would call a Fran Lebowitz Moment. I was minding my own business, getting by, when it suddenly dawned on me how certain other people are nuts.

I suddenly feel an obligation from out of nowhere to become more specific. I will yield to this sense of obligation: morning people. Morning people are nuts. This we knew already. But now I realize precisely how they are nuts. Such a realization is valuable to me. Among other things, it helps make life more interesting for me. At least, more interesting than being dead would be.

Morning people are nuts because they have an insatiable need for useless experiences and information. To a sane person, for example, dawn is a time of day to sleep through. But to a morning person dawn is a time for wondrous observations, insights and discoveries: "Look, wow, its another sunrise!" "Hey everybody! It's morning!" "The Earth is turning to face the sun again!" "Look, the sky is becoming light -- just like it did the last trillion times this happened!"

I didn't arrive at this realization all at once. It began one day when I was forced to be up at the ungodly hour of 9 in the ungodly AM. Maybe I had to go to some stupid ungodly committee meeting that morning. So that the morning wouldn't be a total waste, I turned on the radio and happened to catch a local call-in show, one obviously geared to the morning people audience, on big trees.

When I say it was obviously geared to morning people, I mean it is obvious to me now. Now I see the signs. Suppose sane people had been the audience. Then the program might have told us something useful concerning big trees, such as that you can get in out of the rain by means of them. But no, this program was not about conveying useful information. This program was about big trees. That there ARE big trees. I mean, that some trees are little, and that other trees are bigger. That some trees are biggest.

The show consisted of the local radio guy, I'll call him Steve, interviewing a Big Tree Expert, I'll call him Raoul (I forgot to take down their names, so sue me, I'm too sane.) Steve would say things like, "So I guess you've found some really big trees, haven't you, Raoul?" And then Raoul would say things like, "Once I was in British Columbia, near Vancouver, and I saw a really big one, Steve." And then people would call in, I swear they were all morning people, and they would say things like, "I saw a big tree once, you know the one I mean? It was in California." And Raoul would answer with, "Maybe you're talking about the big one I know of there. It's really big." And the listener would say, "Yeah, that's the one, it was big all right. Awesome!"

Since hearing that program I have been alert to that sort of phenomena. I have noticed that such things occur to the greatest extent in the mornings and that morning people are usually involved. For example, it was morning people who first announced at the end of February that it had been a year since last year's Mardi Gras celebration. In effect, they were telling us all that calendars could be relied upon to that degree, a fact that was probably familiar to the ancients even prior to the invention of Tuesdays.

In the last few days since the vernal equinox, morning people have blitzed the media with the Earth-shaking news that baseball will continue this year. That's right everybody, hop out of bed, you will want to be wide awake for this -- last year's season did not end baseball! They've decided to have another go at it! Isn't that just incredible?! And look! The days are getting longer!

Knowing what I now know, I can identify morning people at all hours of the day. Let's say it's 5 PM and the person I'm talking to suddenly gushes all over me about the fact that it's the 21st Century now. That would be a morning person.

Knowing that could be useful. I could recommend that person to take my place on some ungodly Real Change committee, for instance. My new motto: "Throw the morning people to the morning lions!" (Does not necessarily supercede pre-existing mottos.)

My Very Successful Prognostication

I'll confess, I'm not a terribly physical kind of guy. I'm not into rough competitive sports like baseball or rugby or marbles. I don't object to sports altogether, but I prefer the solitary sports, sports in which it's just me competing against myself.

My favorite of those is Olympic Style Nervous Pacing. Incidentally, my best score ever against myself in a pacing competition was 9.6 (it would have been a 10 if it weren't for the Russian judge.) Not to brag, but I did so well I cost myself a medal. Myself was deeply chagrined and never competed again. Really. No, not really, I just wanted to say "chagrined".

So naturally, whenever I am in an earthquake, which seems lately to be whenever I am lying in bed naked in a vulnerable position, or at least once per decade, my feeling about it is not unlike the feeling of a student who, having tried out for the varsity band, was instead picked to be a center for the football team. My feeling is that there has been a horrible mistake, I don't do contact sports. I don't even watch them!

Not that earthquakes can't be entertaining to me. Hey, I can be amused as easily as the next guy. It's just that they don't amuse me for very long. It's like sticking your finger in an electric light socket, isn't it? The fun part is pretty much over when you've realized that you have done it and you haven't suffered massive cardiac arrest yet. So, well, that was an earthquake, wasn't it? Hey, I'm not dead! What fun!

Those of my friends who are sports enthusiasts tell me that part of the value of taking part in sports lies in testing their limits, learning what they can accomplish when they throw themselves into something.

I can see that now. I mean, it isn't often that I become so distracted that I forget where I put my pants. Ordinarily I am on top of those sorts of things; "life's little details." So I guess you could say that the earthquake allowed me to discover new depths of self-distraction, great new vistas of blind panic...

Speaking of senseless violence, how 'bout that Fat Tuesday? There's another contact sport I can live without.

The first few nights of the Mardi Gras violence had no impact at all on me, even though I live in the Pioneer District, because I ignored it. (Some things deserve to be ignored, I believe. Like the practice of confounding the District and the Square. I simply don't let myself hear such idiocy. It's the Pioneer District, damn it. Or the Pioneer Square District, at the worst.)

But Tuesday night, as I was riding the bus home at about 11:30 pm with Anitra "not an actual Italian Duck" Freeman, we were unable to not notice the crowds, as they were slowing the bus so much that we were better off walking. So we continued to our Pioneer District apartment building on foot, and I had to notice the way the police were deployed. Not interspersed with the crowds, but on the periphery, in fact, just next to our building.

So I told Anitra (I'm not making this up), "First, I am going to watch Letterman. Then, I am going to do my Real Change duty, and go out there and see what is going on in those crowds. Then I am going to come back, and together we we will be tear-gassed by these police at about 2 am, when they can't think of any better way to control the crowds, which will be dispersing at about that time, under our very windows."

Did I guess wrong? No, I did not. I did exactly what I said. I watched Letterman. Then I wandered out into the Fat Tuesday crowd. I saw the beginning of the brawl that was filmed so well from the police helicopter. At that point I returned to my apartment, and waited to be tear-gassed. We were tear-gassed right on schedule, at about 2 am.

OK, there is a sport I love. I love predicting what Seattle will do next. It's poetry in motion.