The Author Recalls Petticoats and Modesty, Too

[from 5/26/10]

Before I get to the main subject of the week, I want to thank the person who thought of "Draw Mohammed Day" for flushing out some truth that had previously eluded me.

Until now, I thought all Muslims objected to depictions of Mohammed entirely because they respect Mohammed so much. Now I'm being told by those blocking Facebook and YouTube in Pakistan that the objection is that drawing Mohammed could lead to idol worship. It's the slippery slope argument, like that marijuana is a gateway to hard drugs, that premarital sex leads to bestiality, or that exposure to Neapolitan ice cream will make you a social libertarian.

Well. Now I'M offended. I'm an idol worshipper. I am a confirmed member of the First Church of Idolatrianism, Lost and Found Department. Please, to all you Muslims out there, (and Christians too, I know you read the same books) remember that we idolaters are "in the room" when you put idol worship down. It's one thing when you say idolatry is wrong FOR YOU, and I respect that you shouldn't have to see Mohammed subjected to idolization, but that is no reason to be bad-mouthing idol worshippers in general, including those who make their own idols that have nothing to do with your Prophet. Thanks in advance for understanding. The period at the end of this sentence depicts no one you know.

Now, where were we? Ah yes, Real Change is moving to Pioneer Square this weekend, so I have to write this column a full four days sooner than usual. This means I've hardly had a moment to think about what to write since last column, so to paraphrase a person in our management, I must suck one out my thumb.

I already live in Pioneer Square.The biggest change to my life is that I'll be walking to the office instead of taking the bus.

So it's with much more apathy than usual that I greet the news of a report by King County Metro on fare evasion in the Metro bus system. They did a study last February and March on the subject. The main findings: Fare evasion happens. Bus drivers don't like it. Maybe we should do away with the Ride Free Area. Also more security would be nice, and simplify the fare structure. Peak what?

According to the study, the cost of fare evasion is perhaps 2.5% of total fares, depending on some guesswork. Since fares don't hardly pay even half Metro's costs, that loss in fare income is less than the loss of gross sales income that big national chain stores endure from shoplifting.

When I first walked downtown Seattle streets in 19-fifty-freaking-7, there were twice the pedestrians there are now. It was shoulder to shoulder and there weren't nearly the loiterers. The reason is clear in retrospect. Poor people had a reason to pay bus fares to go downtown. There were Woolworths, Kress, and Sears Store. There were other Five and Dimes. There were 10 cent coffees. Nobody objected to taking poor people's money, and relatively poor people were mainly the people who packed the sidewalks.

Then somebody came up with the idea, probably in a Business Administration Class while hungover, that you shouldn't waste time making nickels and dimes selling goods to poor people when you could make dollars selling goods to middle and upper classes. So the idea was born that we don't need poor people in our economy, and gentrification happened.

Like so many good ideas, that one was crap. When the poor people stopped coming, the higher classes stopped, too, because they had better smelling cars made by MBAs and could now shop at regional malls, designed by MBAs.

So the Ride Free Zone was born. The Ride Free Zone was paid for by Seattle to draw business and workers downtown.

I've said it before. Go ahead, get rid of the Ride Free Area, and see who it hurts more. The few 2.5% who abuse it, or the businesses downtown.

The Way of the Dodo

I’m on a mission to call attention to the stupidity and cowardice and inadequacies of human beings as a whole.

Many people in the world make it part of their religion to tout the Glories of Humankind. Humankind, also stupidly called Man, as if the half that birthed and suckled it never existed, is supposed to be created in God’s image. We are supposed to be the Pinnacle of Creation. Our Superior Intelligence is presented as one proof of this alleged fact.

Yes, we are undeniably the most intelligent species on this planet, when we have had our coffee. But we humans also account for all the most grievous stupidity that inflicts Earth, and the total amount of stupid human behavior outweighs the total amount of actual intelligent human behavior by at least a factor of ten, in both the amount of behavior generated and in the consequences incurred.

If a creature is a genius one hour every day, but throughout the remainder of the day the same creature is so stupid it can’t figure out how to exist without persistently contributing significantly to the successful ongoing dismantling of the biosphere of a planet 40 million meters in circumference, then that creature is – in sum total -- dreadfully, pathetically, and laughably, stupid.

If we were created in God’s image, then God is stupider than the dodo. The dodo only managed to get itself extinct by being so stupid as to trust human beings. Humans are so stupid as to be utterly untrustworthy, even toward defenseless dodos. That’s stupider, and if it continues, humans will not only be as extinct as dodos already are, but they will have made of themselves much bigger jackasses in the course of becoming so, by taking down everybody else around them in the process except for an assortment of lucky germs and insects.

This rant is brought to you by a man typing in the morning of March 20, 2006, contemplating the third anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, a war which was never urgently necessary, whose “victory” is costing more than $80,000,000,000 a year, not counting deaths, anguish, and other mere secondary costs.

This rant also comes from a guy who regularly hears people in the local homeless service community, some of them exceptionally intelligent people, when they have had their coffee, say that we need to practice “triage” to solve homelessness in King County and the rest of the country.

French wool traders used “triage” to mean “choose” or “select.” Napoleon’s surgeon used it in a medical context to describe the systematic prioritization of battle wounded for medical care, under emergency conditions, when there is a shortage of medical resources, in the form of personnel, supplies, space, or time.

Where is the shortage of resources to solve homelessness, in the form of personnel, supplies, space, or time, in a country that can afford an Iraq War at more than $80,000,000,000 a year for three or for ten years, or however long it may take, whenever it feels itself in the freaking mood?

The ridiculousness of the situation we find ourselves in was brought home to me yesterday afternoon. I was waiting for a bus in front of the King County Courthouse. As the bus approached, a young man walked across the street to my side, slowly, and steadily, directly in the path of the oncoming bus, deliberately forcing the driver to brake for him 40 feet before the stop, endangering the safety of the passengers on board.

The man got on the bus, and the driver asked him why he had walked in front of her bus. His defiant answer was, “I have a Purple Heart”.

That pretty much summed up the stupidity of the situation we’re in. Question: Why are we squandering our nation’s resources in Iraq? Answer: 9-11. It’s our country’s collective Purple Heart, and in our collective stupidity, it justifies any and all cowardly recklessness.

We are thus so much a part of Humanity.

Don’t Rain on My Pleasure

Last week a California court, in the course of seeing to it that a cocaine possessor wouldn’t get off on a technicality, came up with what struck me as a very useful new legal theory.

The arresting officer had searched the man against his wishes after finding him urinating in a Berkeley parking lot. Of course, a police officer can’t search you against your will anytime he or she wants. He or she has to catch you committing a crime, or have a reasonable suspicion that you have just committed a crime, or some such thing. I don’t know the exact legal language of the rule, but one of the words “crime” or “illegal” is in there.

So it looked like Mister Crack Pants might beat the charge, since for some reason not explained in the news story where I found this, there’s no law on the books to explicitly make peeing in Berkeley parking lots illegal.

Now, before you all rush to Berkeley to enjoy the heady freedom to pee virtually anywhere in that urban paradise, I should warn you that the appeals court’s clever thinking has corrected the situation. They determined it has been illegal all along to pee in Berkeley parking lots, in spite of the inconvenient absence of legislation to that effect, on the grounds that it “interferes with the comfortable enjoyment of both life and property.” Shazzam! So the arresting officer had the right to search, so the cocaine can have been admitted into evidence, so the conviction stands, so let the sentencing proceed!

This is good news. All any of you need do to break the law now is interfere with my comfortable enjoyment of life. If you have any questions, that’s “my” as in me, Copyright Dr. Wes Browning.

It’s not just finding urine in my parking stall that hinders my absolutely precious enjoyment of every moment of my precious life and my precious pleasure in parking my motor vehicles, but there are certain definite other things I don’t like either, that are now -- post factamente, no contradicteme -- as illegal as peeing in a Berkeley parking lot. Make my day, or you’re under arrest.

Take public morning activities, for example.

I’m not going to say all morning people should be lined up against the wall and shot. For any of us to say that would only be to stoop to their level. All I’m going to say is that for people to drive around and talk and whistle while they work before noon interferes with the comfortable enjoyment of my life and that of other decent people and therefore such people as do those things are guilty of misdemeanors and they must turn themselves in to the police at once. The actual penalty for their behavior will be worked out later, when some more judges have worked out what the law has always been all along. Such work will wait until afternoon.

Recently I have been noticing some delays as I ride busses about downtown. Metro Transit has openly admitted that, subsequent to the tunnel closure, bus travel times across downtown have increased by an average of 2 and one half minutes. That is 2 and one half minutes twice each day subtracted from my comfortable enjoyment of my life by the criminal bus company. Again, I don’t say heads should roll, permanently, but only that they should roll for at least five minutes daily, or as much as jurists may later deem fair.

Thanks to this precedent having been set, It is now and always has been against the law to be Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, or my former next door neighbor Steve G., or anyone else who hacks me, Dr. Wes Browning, off. Because when I get hacked off I’m not comfortably enjoying my life.

Thank you California’s Court of the Appeal for the Second District! Now we won’t ever need stupid legislators again. One law fits all!

For Auld Lang Syne

Here it is, the end of the year, bringing me end-of-the-year memories. Unfortunately, being as old as I am, and as scattered, I can’t focus my memories on one year, so don’t expect an end-of-the-year roundup like you’ll get from a convergent person.

Instead, my thoughts race back and forth across the last 56 and a half years, and I recall who did what to me, and I calculate how much they need to pay. New Year’s Resolution: Round up bastards, chastise, repeat.

There was the campus security officer who forced hour-long conversations on me whenever he caught me sleeping in my car on campus. Such sleeping was legal at the time. But he wanted to let me know that he, personally, did not approve of the law having such a loophole, because it took advantage of working people like him. I told him I had a job. He said, oh, well then, get a better one. I said, how about yours, you’re not doing it…

On nights when that one wasn’t “working” there was another campus cop who didn’t, personally, mind me sleeping on campus. But he took great umbrage when he caught me using a public bathroom after hours.

I said, “It was left unlocked, it’s a public rest room. I’m a member of the public. What’s the problem?”

He said, “Don’t you know that people have to clean these bathrooms? They don’t just clean themselves.”

I said, “When I finish, I’ll clean up after myself, unlike any of the thousands of other people who use it during the day, who don’t get to meet you.”

He said, “But you’re homeless. How do you think those people would feel if they knew someone like you was using their bathroom?”

“Vicariously relieved?”

A certain deli downtown used to be open all night and welcomed the homeless if they at least paid for coffee. I was grateful and repaid them by patronizing them and steering other business their way. Then I moved out of downtown for a few years.

When I moved back downtown, I returned to the old haunt to find it very different. Not only was the store not open all night, it had been remodeled and rearranged. I saw people chased away just for appearing homeless. But what earns them a special place on my little list is what happened after I used one of their two unisex bathrooms while waiting for a sandwich to be made. I had accidentally used the wrong one, because I was used to the old arrangement. So they reported me to the police. I had been in a bathroom labeled “Women” on the door, by myself, for a whole minute. And oh, yes, I was obviously homeless again. So I was clearly a danger to society.

Here’s the one who goes at the top of my list. I had gotten on welfare at one time, but wanted to get a job and get off welfare as soon as possible. To help things along I got into a work shelter program through the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation. Having a work shelter job meant being paid less than minimum wage. The state made up for that partially by providing bus passes.

Every day until I got my bus pass I’d take the same bus to the job. The driver would smile and nod. There’d be fewer than five passengers on the trip. No one ever complained.

The day I flashed my newly obtained state authorized bus pass, the same driver who had always smiled at me before said he was going to stop letting me use his bus if I didn’t start taking showers. When I told him I just had one, he answered that he was sick of people like me abusing the system.

As soon as I figure out what that system was he was talking about, it goes on my list, too.

Like Nipples on a Dude

Let's take some time off from News We Can Use and have us a short helping of Useless News!

I enjoy useless news, and what could be more useless than learning that, recently, a homeless 17 year-old Kenyan found a more than 5000 dollar treasure hunt prize while urinating in a Nairobi park? Evans Kamande found a small box, with a piece of paper inside, between the forks of a cactus. The paper turned out to be a voucher for the prize, which Mr. Kamande later collected from the local radio station that had been conducting the treasure hunt.

What possible use could we get from that? Maybe if we played the lottery we could conclude that we might be better off urinating in city parks. But, realistically, what are the odds that a Nairobi radio station would leave a voucher for a cash prize in Denny Regrade Park? So all we get is an excuse to use the word "urinating" repeatedly. But we could have done that without the excuse!

Here's some useless news from Graz, Austria. Professors from the Karl Franzens University there are taking part in a project to bring the news to the homeless of Austria's second largest city that laughter is the best medicine.

That's right. Frolicking, happy-go-lucky, Austrian university professors are spreading the word to homeless people in shelters and drop-in-centers that if they would just laugh more their immune systems would work better. Here is an actual translation of an actual hilarious quote from the "act" of one of these professors: "Phrases such as laughing yourself sick should actually be turned around to read laughing yourself well." STOP, I'm NOT in stitches! I'm well!

Sure, it would be useful if homeless people learned to laugh better. It might also help if they got plenty of sleep and avoided sweets. But how about getting them shelter?

OK, that brings us to news concerning world-famous Australian architect Sean Godsell. This guy designs cheap housing intended to shelter the homeless. His works include a converted shipping container that has been on display at the Smithsonian design museum in New York, and a bus shelter house – a bus shelter by day, a homeless shelter by night.

How does that qualify as useless news? Well, ask yourself, why are these things always in museums and never in use? In order for a shelter idea to be useful, people have to permit it to be used. What good is a bus shelter house when every transit system in the world is so hostile to the homeless that they not only wouldn't want to install Godsell's creations but they would furiously destroy existing bus shelters wherever homeless people rest at them?

Godsell also has designed a park bench shelter. It's a park bench by day and a safe home out of the weather for someone at night. They say the only problem with it is, no city will have it. And when cities don't want something that tends to be the end of it. Except for homelessness itself, of course. That, you can't legislate away.

Which brings us to the least useful news of all. No more useful than that the sun will rise tomorrow. No more useful than that George Foreman has a kid named George. No more useful than my left nipple: knowing that the neighbors N don't want a shelter in neighborhood X. (X can take on any value in the universe of all neighborhoods, and N can be any subset of the residents of X.)

Like, duh.

Guess what, some Kirklanders don't want Tent City 4 in Kirkland! Wow. You could knock me over with a feather. A twenty-pound feather with a three-foot handle.

Useless: "Not in my neighborhood." Useful: "What can I do to help?"

Useful is rare, useless is everywhere.

Smells Like Your Uncle

OK, it's winter, I expected to be cold and miserable. But La Niña? What!? As I swear on an oath to the Almighty Butterfly Effect, they must now be making this nonsense up as they go along. Next year -- LOOK OUT! It's El Tío! Escape the planet at any cost! (The weather's not too hot or too cold, it just smells like your Uncle Joe smells after two six-packs on top of Mama's "Last Days" Burrito and Nuclear Beef Enchilada Plate, with extra guacamole.)

But that was just the start of it. Now look at us. The tabloids can't even keep up. The impeachment resolution having just been passed as I write this, what do I see in the Enquirer but "Hillary Goes On Rampage in the White House." So they've completely given up telling us unbelievable stuff, you can get that in the mainstream papers. Now the tabloids are trying to shock us with "Fight Breaks Out on Jerry Springer Set", "Madonna Reportedly Had Sex Last Night", "Scientists Don't Believe in Sasquatch", "Seattle, Boston Joined by Highway" and "Monkeys No Longer Thought to Fly."

Meanwhile, the mainstream papers have gone off the edge. Last month we only had to pick up one of Seattle's highly respected dailies (I won't say which one, who cares, they're both full of it) -- NOT an irresponsible tabloid, to read that a "homeless" man shot and killed a Metro bus driver. A "homeless" man that, it turned out, has LIVED IN THE SAME APARTMENT FOR THIRTEEN YEARS.

Next, thanks to that little senseless bout of SCAPEGOATING, there came a call for the downtown Free Ride Zone to be discontinued, so that what hadn't happened the day after last Thanksgiving on the Aurora Bridge might never not not happen ever again. Are you following me?

OK keep hangin' on: most homeless people in this city who avail themselves of the Free Ride Zone would be inconvenienced by having to hike around that one and a half mile long area all the time, but that's nothing that most of them aren't prepared to do if they must.

Therefore they could all bring themselves to say to Seattle and especially to downtown's retail businesses, go ahead. Go ahead and kill the program that has done more than any other to turn around the consumer exodus to the suburban malls. Do it just to spite us, even though we are just as peaceful as the rest of you are, and had nothing to do with the tragedy of the 359 Express. We'll live.

Meanwhile, the gutsy Democrat that I didn't actually favor in the 1992 primary (I voted for the poet) is now at risk of being replaced by an android from the moons of Uranus?? An android who only got elected at all because he was a running mate, because ever since that Jefferson/Hamilton screw-up that's just the way we do things? Or was it Adams/Jefferson? Don't any history teachers email! Just let me tell you what I'm talking about here.

OK let's say I'm getting a little cous-cous (a grain) on the side. But my wife is known to have the meanest right in the Free World, you can read about it in the tabloids. And say some pip-squeak of a latter-day Torquemada asks me if I ever had that particular grain, and I say yeah but it wasn't any big deal, and I don't tell him anything more.

And let's not forget to mention that by this time it is all too evident that Nuevo Torko will bend every rule in the modern inquisitorial handbook.

So now I'm supposed to resign, so that an android from outer space should replace me? Whose wife is even weirder than mine??

Well, enough of my bad mood. Allow me to greet the New Year with a song.

A Bratty Annoying Song For This New Year

[To maximize annoyance, repeat each line just

until threatened with a massive air strike!]

by © Dr. Wes, me

Let's all sing a bratty song, song song song

How could such a thing be wrong? wrong wrong wrong

See the ugly Ne-eww Year, Year Year Year

We'll kick it in it's silly rear, rear rear rear

Poke it in its stupid side, side side side

Then we'll all go run and hide, hide hide hide

While were hid we shouldn't squeak, squeak squeak squeak

The better that we all can peek! Peek! Peek! Peek!

Peek at a politi-ician, shun shun shun!

Engaged in fornication! Fun fun fun!

Make the scoundrel RE-zign, 'zign 'zign 'zign

Never let 'em 'cross that bratty line!

-- Line line line! --