Adventures at Nickelsville

Back in the 60s I was a rally chaser. Missing a rally or a march would be like missing an episode of Star Trek. An enormous sense of grief would come over me, made worse by the knowledge that there would be no summer reruns in the case of the rallies and marches.


[Above: May 5, 1970. I was there. The Yellow Indicatrix tells you where. I am NOT between the other protesters and the Tac Squad. I am on the northbound on-ramp. No friend of head trauma, I.]

Now, though, I just want to sit in my little corner in my tiny room and watch the world go by on CNN and the internet. When a public gathering presents an opportunity to be arrested it only strengthens my resolve to hide out in my room, owing to desmoteriophobia (fear of dungeons).

Not all of us have such fear. Saturday I opened up the Seattle P-I to find none other than my beloved Anitra "Smiling Buddha" Freeman gazing blissfully up at a policeman about to haul her radical-hippy ass off to jail. The possibility that this time they could just leave her there and forget to tell anyone either did not occur to her, or it goosed her, or she'd gone batspit crazy and thought the policeman was Wilford Brimley come to take her to Antarea, where she'd be young forever, and learn break-dancing from Don Ameche.

Anitra was getting arrested for refusing to leave alleged city land upon which Nickelsville had been set up. You may recall that two weeks ago Nickelsville was a homeless peoples' shantytown only in potentia. On Friday of last week it was very much concrete, and as Mayor Nickels wanted it to return to being an abstract idea, he sent the police to try to make it so.

Before Anitra got arrested there was a scene, broadcast on KING TV, of her telling residents of Nickelsville ("Nickelodeons") three options the police had laid out. I've watched the video over and over, trying to figure out the logic of the three options. It sounds like what she said the police were saying was the Nickelodeons' options were EITHER 1) stay and be arrested OR 2) go away and not be arrested, OR 3) go away with shipoopy, and no kiss.

I was actually there to witness that episode and the subsequent 22 arrests, in spite of my aforementioned phobia, because I'd spent the night before boiling peanuts for my sweetheart not considering that, what with her spending the night in a fuchsia tent at Nickelsville and then surely wanting to stick around to be jailed, and me without a teleportation device, I would have to go there to deliver her the peanuts. So I went, and it was just coincidence that the police vans were arriving from the donut shop just the same time I arrived by bus.

It's the story of my life. I boil some peanuts for someone, then I think, oops, got to deliver the peanuts. I get there just as the cops do. Oh, look, doggies!

It all worked out half well though. I did not get arrested. Anitra got caught and released. Governor Gregoire granted a reprieve to Nickelsville itself, letting the Nickelodeons cram as many tents onto a state owned parking lot as could fit, out of reach of the mayor. I got to talk to the people the mayor sent from Human Services to refer Nickelodeons to "proper" shelter in the system, and I tried to find out how they could do that with a straight face knowing that the shelters are full every night. Answer: they don't think about that. They just pass out referral cards to whoever takes them and call it a job done.

Here's your irony adventure: Some people took the cards and went to be referred to the shelter that the mayor keeps saying is there for them, and the referral agency gave them bus tickets and sent them back to Nickelsville!

Greg Nickels is like the owner of a row boat trying to bail it out with a Dixie cup after it's already sunk in 10 feet of water. Greg Nickels is a fool.

How Is Your Stupid Today?

In order to prepare for what columnification I do here, I read far too much news and save bits and pieces on scraps of paper and electronica. One of those bits: Panels with wires sticking out of them depicting a cartoon character making the gesture popularly known as “the bird” sparked panic in Boston, resulted in charges against two men who distributed them, and may lead to further charges against the company that put them up to it.

Some people around here have tried to make out like Seattle is way cooler than Boston in this regard. After all, we got paneled too, at the same time, by the same broadcasting company, and we didn’t go bat-spit freaking Stupid and arrest people and turn on the sirens and redden our terror alert signs.

Upon closer inspection, however, Seattle is not that much different from Boston, just out of temporal synch with it. This is the city that in 1996 arrested and tried Jason Sprinkle, AKA Subculture Joe, for inducing bat-spit freaking Stupidity and a rush-hour traffic nightmare as nine city blocks were cordoned off to protect us all from a truck with the words “Timberlake Carpentry Rules (The Bomb!)” painted on it. So we were the Boston in 1996. Maybe in 2015 Boston will be the Seattle.

The truth is, Americans everywhere are fully as capable of becoming as bat-spit freaking Stupid as any crazed mob in any movie filled with stereotypic foreign babbling crazed mobs you’ve ever seen. That’s the whole reason we’re at war with Iraq right now. We Americans panicked when somebody actually attacked us, so as a nation we went bat-spit freaking Stupid and attacked somebody else who had nothing to do with it, and we’re still so Stupid we’re still doing it, and court-martialing people for trying to save us from doing it.

I was further reminded of what nut-cases we are capable of being when I learned that it was necessary for a three judge panel of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals to ascertain that it is not OK to arrest a man for using the word “goddamn” at a town board meeting, like happened a while back in Montrose, Michigan. Later, it may be necessary for the Supreme Court to reiterate that fact, because Montrose may appeal.

Again, don’t congratulate yourself that Montrose is the Stupid this time. When you’ve got the pox, you’ve got the pox. You don’t say, “oh I don’t have the pox, it’s just my elbow that has it.” If your elbow has the pox, you’ve got the pox.

Just because Stupidity breaks out in random places, doesn’t mean it isn’t always everywhere. It’s in all of our blood. You could be the Stupid next. Or the Stupid could be your own mayor or your own police chief.

Your could be like the New York dealer of over-priced antiques who is suing four homeless guys for more than a million dollars. He says he knows he isn’t going to get the money. He says he’s suing for the money “for legal reasons.” Yeah, and I’m laughing at him for psychiatric reasons.

Sometimes that’s all you can do.

In the early eighties a writer for the New York Times was reporting on a New Mexico celebration that she said was some sort of “community chicken killing festival.” She also referred to it as a “gang pluck.” Not only did the New York Times fire her for writing like that (even though it’s been reported she was originally hired for the purpose of livening up their prose!) but when the woman died this week they couldn’t bring themselves to quote the “gang pluck” line in her obituary.

Being fired by the New York Times might have been a crushing blow for some writers, but Molly Ivins apparently just laughed out the door and kept laughing all the way out death’s door, too.

We need to all remember how she managed to pull that off. It gives us hope.

What If Chihuly Signs It?

Let's talk about bongs and insane drug-paraphernalia convictions!

I have never used a bong. I'm not even sure I know what a bong is exactly. But I love saying the word bong, and I know I'm not alone in that.

It often surprises people to look at me and hear me say that I have never used a bong. But there are two good reasons. One, all my hippy friends in the sixties and seventies had plenty of rolling papers. And two, I've never liked marijuana anyway. It makes me cough my lungs up and by the time it gets me high I'm too sick to enjoy it.

Still, I'm of the age to have had all those hippy friends, and yes, my children, I did inhale. Just not from a bong.

But I've looked at a lot of them. Some are very artistic. I've learned a little from looking at them. As best as I can tell, they are pot-smoke delivery systems. That, I believe, is a principal defining characteristic of a bong.

The other thing that I have learned from looking at bongs is that you don't need to buy one to smoke pot. Let's say worse comes to worse and you are desperate for a toke from a bong. I have learned that all you need to do is procure an ordinary legal pipe for smoking tobacco and make minor adjustments to it, and that will do just as well.

Because of all that, and the ready availability of the afore-mentioned rolling papers, I am absolutely certain that no-one has ever failed to smoke pot due to an inability to buy artfully crafted bongs on the Internet.

Can you imagine someone saying, "Oh golly, now that Tommy Chong has gone to federal prison for making and selling glass bongs on the Internet, I can't buy his wonderful glass bongs, and therefore I won't smoke any of this evil grass that I have purchased on the black market through other sources?"

Let me be clear on this. I don't know what Chong's bongs look like. I don't know that they are as artistic as they've been made out to be. I don't know that Chong himself ever had anything to do with making them either. All I know is he lent his name to the selling of bongs and the feds busted him for it and he's gone to prison for what could be nine months, barring an appeal, and that's totally insane.

Let's suppose the public service ads are true and that smoking marijuana kills people like flies in a zapper. It would still be the marijuana that did it, not the bongs.

So why do we have a law against selling bongs? Because this whole country has gone freaking bat-spit nuts, that's why.

It's gotten so that I don't even have to look for absurdity anymore, it finds me.

For the last two years the administration has been telling me that the most important thing in the world for Americans to worry about is this country's security. Because of the need for security we had to go to war against two other countries. We had to pass a law making it legal to wiretap anybody and never tell them we did it or why.

We've always been told, at least since the Truman administration, that one of our needs for security is the need for good intelligence as specifically provided by the CIA and its undercover agents. And by the way, if they're undercover, it's for our blessed safety as a nation, right?

But when a right-wing columnist outs a CIA agent the Justice Department looks the other way for months, even though our security has presumably been harmed by it.

Meanwhile an old comedian gets nine months for capitalizing on a stale joke. I wouldn't mind so much if they'd just stop lying and telling me it's for my own good.