Or: What Are You Looking At?

[from 6/9/10]

Congratulations to the Homeless Remembrance Project for getting approval for the Tree of Life in Victor Steinbreuck park. This is such great news it has sucked a week's worth of piss & vinegar out of me. Sorry for the visual. I hope that this column will not be too ruined by my good mood.

I also hope this doesn't mean I won't be able to buy fifteen minute's worth of a security guard's wages by paying restauranteur Tom Douglas too much for baked salmon. I do love baked salmon & wieners, especially when fed to me to memorialize what Native Americans mean to Seattle (baked salmon and security guards.)

Questions I get asked all the time: "What was it like wearing bell bottoms, old man, and not knowing how stupid you looked?" "If you're so good at math, calculate how much I don't care." "What time is it?" "What's the difference between a bull and a cow?" "How can there be a just, loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful God in a world of so much random senseless pain and suffering?" "How much do Capuchin monkeys cost, anyway?"

But my life is not all frivolity. Occasionally, someone asks a question that matters, like, "What can I do to help homeless people?" and I say go find one, give them the keys to your house and let's see you sleep in the bushes for a year.

No, I don't. That would be rude. I say lots of other things. I talk about this initiative and that regulatory problem, and how affordable housing is impacted by political decisions, and watch people's eyes glaze over. So this time I'm going to say something different.

Instead of asking what you can do to help homeless people, ask yourself what you'll let them do to help you.

Seriously. I'm not trying to be Kennedy-esque here. I'm trying to be anti-Kennedy-esque. Ich bin kein Berliner. Ich bin ein Frankfurter.

Today in my customized Google News I found a story titled "Program offers help to homeless veterans." I see headlines like that every day, My reaction this time was pretty typical. I wondered how many homeless veterans really need help. I think about where they've been and what they've done. I find it hard to believe they need all that much assistance. I think they mostly need people to get out of their way.

I think at least 50% of homelessness is caused by obstruction of homeless people's own efforts to pull themselves out of homelessness, and most of that obstructionism is motivated by the belief that homeless people are needy useless people who can only be helped and can't possibly do anything for anyone, and who couldn't possibly know what's best for themselves, belief driven by refusal to allow anyone to prove otherwise.

When I was homeless, as soon as someone realized that was the case, they wanted to know what I wanted from them. Some of them said it with a smile, some of them said it with a frown, as in, "Oh great. What do you expect me to do about it?" No one noticed that I hadn't asked for anything. I didn't want anything from them, I never wore bell bottoms, I never claimed to be great at calculating, it's time to eat your peas, young man, I'm not sending you out to milk, 42, and 100K per dozen if they have all their original teeth.

I don't see anyone concerned about the loss of habitat of polar bears suggesting that we get together ice-floe food banks and pass out canned seal meat among them. The discussion is focused on ending the loss of habitat. Hello: that's what we have here among us. It's a loss of habitat. Fix that.

In the meantime it would help make the wait for housing bearable to let homeless people contribute to the work of getting there, and let them make contributions, in general, if only to lift the conviction that the untried is impossible.

Homeless Don't Belong Near Homes?

I just took an online quiz to find out how Malaysian I am. I am 25% Malaysian, it said. That's good to know, isn't it? We all struggle with our identities. Now if I can only figure out what my other three quarters are.

One of the things I've struggled with is how liberal or conservative I am. I've decided those labels are used wrongly all the time. I've decided I am both conservative and liberal, and everyone who isn't both simultaneously is a fool.

Some self-identified conservatives are saying Obama makes America look weak by admitting to other nations that we have made mistakes in the past. How is it conservative to go around saying you have never made mistakes? That's not a political stance at all, it's a character flaw.

Other "conservatives" are saying both that "getting through this recession will take sacrifices from everyone" and that "taxing the rich more is not the answer." Taken separately these do indeed resemble familiar conservative propositions. But together they just prove a kind of schizophrenia. What sacrifices are the rich going to make if not higher taxes? Should we draft them for a shovel-and-pick carrying economic army, a mandatory public works program for the super rich? Will Bill Gates and Paul Allen and friends lay the asphalt for the new Mercer Boulevard? Oh please, say it's so.

The poor, in fact, are sacrificing already, by being poor and getting poorer. So for the "sacrifices from everyone" to ever kick in, the rich have to sacrifice. Again, what? Well, what do they have? Duh, money.

Here's your conservatism: You pick the country you want to live in and you pay for it. You want an America that looks like a Third World country? Fine, that's free. We can abolish all taxes and you can have pregnant barefoot beggars on every street corner. You want an America that has a middle class to aspire to, and HDTVs for all the masses, to keep the revolutions in check, and restore the consumer class to buy the crap your overseas factories make? That's extra.

I started down this rant because of another "Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY)" story in the news. The NIMBYs this time were residents of Ferndale, Minnesota. A church there wants to set up a daytime service for homeless people, and the neighbors said, "Homeless people don't belong in a residential neighborhood."

Would that be a conservative position? It's a call back to a simpler time, certainly, when people could say things like "[insert plural of racial epithet] don't belong in a residential neighborhood" and not have to mumble or hide their heads in shame among their white brethren, but it is a slander against conservatism to equate bigotry with the philosophy just because conservatism means to conserve values and bigotry has been a past and passed-up value.

Real conservatism should mean to conserve good values, only. My ancestors, and yours too, if you go back about two hundred generations, valued their enemies' heads for trophies, hearts for food, women for two minutes, and their children for slaves. But those are not values that any non-criminals now want to conserve, so we can remove those values from the discussion of what conservatism means.

Can we please do that with the NIMBYs' "values" too? If homeless people don't belong in any residential neighborhood, where the freaking hell do they belong? A swamp? A big pit with a lid on it? This is not a conservation of a good value; this is just plain asinine unreflective boneheadedness.

Of course they belong in a residential neighborhood, they're residents of this land, they're human beings, humans make neighborhoods. The value you need to conserve is the value of humanity and neighborliness. You let them into your neighborhood and you help them not be homeless, and when you have succeeded in helping them not be homeless, voila! -- no homeless people in your neighborhood!

Done the right way.

Comedy Gold

Increasingly, I find the present, the here and now, to be exceedingly unfunny. Even the funny parts of the present are tinged with unfunniness. For example, the spectacle of Republican Party members rising to the defense of Rush Limbaugh would be better if it were not so tinged with Limbaugh.

That explains why I look more and more to the past for hilarity. Even though the past is past, it contains nuggets of hilarity that are still new to most of us, because we were most likely high when it was passing. This includes the public past, which, as it escapes us, turns into history that we then don't understand, since it is a school subject.

A nice illustration occurred to me this week. I was contemplating the fact that racism no longer exists in America, now that we have a black president. At the very moment I was contemplating that irrefutable and ironclad fact the hardest I could, I was also listening to Monkey Time by Major Lance, a 1963 song that taught Americans a dance called "The Monkey" or "The Monkey Time." The song contains such lyrics as "Do the Monkey, yeah (do the Monkey Time) / Ah-twist them hips (twist them hips) / Let your backbone slip (let your backbone slip)." All at once I realized the true origin of white guy dancing. It isn't genetic! Rather, it is a natural lingering cultural artifact of our racist past! All across our country, white people heard "twist them hips, let your backbone slip," but hardly any of them ever saw it done, because we were mostly segregated! So the white guys just followed the directions in the song, and that became white guy dancing, to be later handed down from father to son to grandson! That's sociological comedy!

Personal pasts can also be treasure troves of comedy. Recent assaults on cab drivers in Seattle and Tacoma have reminded me of my own side-splitting experiences in the 80s as a Seattle cab driver.

It even started out comical. I was planning to look for new work anyway, when I saw a headline that said a Seattle cab driver had been shot and killed. I immediately thought that there would have to be an opening at that cab company for a driver! And -- ha, ha -- there was!

Altogether I drove cab in Seattle as a lease driver for five years, from May '82 until the state certified me mad in May '87. I crashed cabs six times during those years. Each crash was a laugh-fest I'll never forget; those were good times.

Remember the recession we had in the early 80s? You ought to, because you just heard about it last week when the national unemployment hit 8.1% and people said it was the worst unemployment since 1983. For Seattle cab drivers 1984 was the worst, though. A lot of business conventions that had been planned for Seattle that year were canceled, impoverishing local cab drivers. It was also my personal worst year, as I was homeless most of it. Still, it was a hoot.

One of my favorite funny moments happened one night when a woman was riding my cab home from work. She lived near Broadway, and as we approached her home she told me she'd started taking cabs home instead of buses to avoid all the homeless people on the buses. When I told her I was homeless, she said "NO! You can't be!" and I laughed and laughed.

Another amusing moment came about when a man took my cab for an 8-dollar trip and gave me a twenty, telling me to keep the change. He said I deserved it for being so cheerful and not giving him a hard luck story like the other cab drivers always did. In effect, he rewarded me with a $12 tip for having had a manic swing!

That's what this country needs today. We need a manic swing to get through the bad times.

Nickels Makes History Repeat

I have a column due by 9 AM this morning, and I've also promised Anitra "Not Acting On Behalf Of Anybody In Particular" Freeman that by the same time I'd read a book-length manifesto on Nickelsville that she wrote with a committee. Not being inclined to do needless work, I shall now attempt to combine the two efforts into one glorious slack-off.

[Above Left: Anitra with acquaintance.]

I've talked about Nickelsville here before but I've never spent an entire column on it. This is mainly due to the fact that it hasn't existed yet. I generally find that when I talk about that which is not, the results are even more obtuse than what you usually get when I talk about that which is.

But Nickelsville is poised to be, probably before the next column is out, so it has achieved a degree of concreteness analogous to that of The Melting of the Polar Icecaps and The Rise of the Oceans Due to Global Warming, or The Great Stock Market Crash of 2008 (both expected later today).

So what will Nickelsville be? It will be a Hooverville that is named after Greg Nickels, Seattle's mayor, rather than after Herbert Hoover, a former US President. In the Great Depression Seattle had a Hooverville, a shantytown built by homeless people. A lot of people then thought that Herbert Hoover was responsible for a lot of the Greatness of the Great Depression. So they named the shantytowns after him, the need for them being perceived to be partly his fault.

Today, we don't just think Greg Nickels has a lot to do with how hard it is to survive homeless in Seattle, we know he does. We have listened to him talk a good talk about ending homelessness, while at the same time chasing homeless encampments all around the city and destroying survival gear wherever found. The message from Nickels is, we, the City of Seattle, will end homelessness in the abstract by 2014 (only: not really because the plan isn't to actually end homeless, but hah, hah, that's what we say about it, even though the plan itself says something entirely different, read the fine print), but concretely we will strip all the homeless that are forced outdoors for lack of adequate shelter of all their property, and leave them to the elements.

So as those homeless people who wish to live band together into a shantytown, there is no question whose fault it all is. Nickelsville will be Nickels' fault. Without Greg Nickels and the homeless encampment sweeps he instigated, Nickelsville wouldn't be about to happen. As bad as George Bush is, there would not be a Bushville at this time. Until maybe next week, depending on how many multi-billion dollar financial greed factories file Chapter 11 this week.

As Anitra and Friends' manifesto ably and concisely points out, Nickelsville will cost the City of Seattle nothing. To be less concise: it will not take money out of the general fund. It will not be built by city workers paid by taxpayers. The residents will build and maintain it with assistance from private donors. The city will not be billed for the labor.

People are always saying, "Why don't homeless people ever do anything to help themselves?" Well, they do, everyday. They help themselves by barely surviving in spite of all the obstacles and all the persecution. It's understandable that people can't see that work of surviving, because it's scattered among thousands of personal stories.

Nickelsville should make matters clearer. "What are homeless people doing to help themselves?" Nickelsville, for one thing.

And if, as feared, the city tears Nickelsville down, that would help answer the follow-up question, "Why, if they are helping themselves, are they still homeless?"

The first step in getting out of homelessness is finding a way to maintain and survive every day. If that first step is continually tripped up by the police power of a mayor, then there can never be a second step.

Epidemic of More Hair

Here's a quote I find fascinating. It was in an opinion piece for Indymedia in San Francisco, attributed to an unnamed reader of Mortgage News Daily. "If we don't do something [about the foreclosure crisis] we are going to have an epidemic of homeless people who are fed up and commit crimes this winter begging to be housed in Jail."

First of all, it's good to see that we are now capitalizing Jail, just like we have learned to capitalize Mother, God, and the Right Honorable So-and-So. If you incarcerate a higher percentage of your population than any other country in the world, it's time to start paying Jail some respect, in the sort of way Germans respect Himmel and Heimat. We capitalize White House and only one family lives there, and all it means is "white house." More than one in a hundred of our adults live in Jail; that counts for something. I'm also in favor of capitalizing Toilet, for the same reason.

The thing that really fascinates me about the quote is the notion that as soon as good law-abiding citizen homeowners become homeless they will immediately give up on all that and start breaking laws, loving Jail and the lawlessness that gets them there. This view does not describe my own bouts with homelessness.

I was homeless for an accumulated total of three and a half years before I started to think breaking laws would be a fun change of pace. For the whole time up until that I was actually, amazingly, the same fastidious, conscientious, law-abiding person I had been in all my previous (by that time) 45 years.

When I finally did consider breaking a law, it wasn't me that had changed; it was the law. It had become against the law to sit down on a sidewalk no matter how tired you were.

But maybe today's homeless people are different. Today's homeless people were born into a different world than we were. They haven't had Eisenhower to ground them and give their lives meaning. They smoke better weed. They have more hair and faster reflexes.

I was thinking about all this when I found a story in an online Florida newspaper titled "Homeless man charged with exposure of sexual organs." Actually the man, "Jimmy," was drunk and had an extremely full bladder, and therefore it wasn't his sexual organs, per se, that he exposed, it was his bladder-relieving organs, properly speaking.

Jimmy's real crime, it turns out, was not sexual in nature, but being so drunk he thought the New England Cafe in Jensen Beach was the Toilet.

So, how drunk were the owners of the New England Cafe of Jensen Beach, Florida, when they decided they were in New England?

Next, how drunk was the reader of Mortgage News Daily, to think that having your house foreclosed will make you want to live in Jail and do all the things it takes to get there?

Whenever people use terms like "epidemic" or "chronic" in connection with homelessness they reinforce the idea that it's a disease you catch. It's no wonder, with the government using such language all the time, that housed drunks, like that reader, would think that if you catch homeless cooties your personality will change and all your principles will atrophy and fall off after one cold night in a doorway.

It never occurs to housed drunks that the Jimmies out there who are now homeless drunks pissing on cafe tables in Florida were once housed drunks just like themselves, pissing on the coffee table in their living rooms just before passing out on the living room floor, and just hours after writing a stupid letter about homelessness to a newspaper.

Exercises For Advance Credit

How drunk was the writer when he wrote this column?

Which of the following comes closest to the writers point? a) "We're all just people, everywhere," b) "We're all drunks, under the skin," or c) "I need to lie down."

The Joy-Full

Consider how many chronically cheerful people you know.

I mean really, how many? Three? Eight? Sixty-two? I want a number.

I'm not talking about the temporarily cheerful. A chronically cheerful person is one who has been cheerful continuously for a period of one year, or who has had at least four episodes of cheerfulness in the past 3 years. A person has an episode of cheerfulness if the following holds for at least 30 consecutive days: 1) they are able to get up each morning, AND 2) they smile outwardly at least once each day (inward smiles do not count) without simultaneously expressing contempt or Schadenfreude. (Chronic amused contempt and chronic Schadenfreude are separate categories.)

Of course, you can't always be there to see the smile. So we need to adopt a "methodology" to assess the definition's satisfaction, absent direct evidence.

[Right: Schadenfreude is excluded.]

You could ask each person you know, "Are you chronically cheerful?" If they say yes, add one to your count. If they say no, add zero, and continue to the next candidate. Of course this should ideally be done with all your friends on the same day.

The problem with that approach is, you don't know if the persons you ask understand the question. A better methodology would be to read the definition of chronic cheerfulness first, and then ask.

In a still more accurate methodology, candidates would report smiling behavior daily and you would keep a record and make your determinations accordingly, rather than relying on the subjects' memories and limited self-awareness. You could computerize the process and call it a CIMS (Cheerful Information Management System.)

Can you see how the different methodologies could give different totals? The Bush Administration could and has seen that. That's how they lied to you last week.

Here's the scam that just went down.

February of just last year, 2007, HUD instituted an Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to the Congress. The AHAR presents, among other things, an assessment of the number of chronically homeless people in the country at a given time, namely one day in January of two years previous (for the first report, Jan. 2005). Since HUD doesn't have the manpower to do its own counting, the actual counting is done by many service agencies that have signed on to this enterprise.

The methodology used to determine who was chronically homeless, in 2005-2006, for the 2007 AHAR, was generally speaking, nonexistent. Some communities didn't do a count in January 2005 because national one-day counts weren't established yet, so they reported previous numbers and estimates. The 2005 numbers were in turn not based on a consistent national methodology. Every agency did it their own way.

No problem, thinks HUD. That was just the first AHAR. Each year they should get better.

The second AHAR came out just one month late, in March 2008, based on the count in January 2006. The numbers of chronically homeless were down. Hooray!

That report did say that the lower numbers could be entirely due to changing methodologies of counting. Specifically the HMIS, the Homeless Management Information Systems promoted by HUD, were just beginning to be used in some areas. Other areas continued to use the method of reading the definition to people of chronic homelessness and asking people if they were such. The report admitted that just those changes in methodology could account for the entire drop in numbers.

Evidently, when the Bush Administration saw the numbers dropping because of changes in methods, they saw a chance to lie big.

I know that because the third "Annual" Homeless Assessment Report came out last month! Seven months ahead of schedule!

Look at the even bigger drop, they said! It's because we're ending homelessness, not because the methods of counting are changing, trust us on that, they said!

They couldn't wait to take advantage of the confusion. If they'd waited until the report was due out, Bush wouldn't even be president any more.

That will have to be our consolation.

Zoned Out

Today our ongoing History of Poverty is continued with Parts R1, R2, R3, and Parts U1 through U6: Zoning ordinances. Let the hilarity ensue!

Last time we danced around construction regulations. We said those have deprived poor people of the kind of cheap housing they've used in times past. To the degree that is so, the government (that means all of us -- it's our government) is responsible for that much homelessness and has a moral obligation to correct the negative effects of those regulations.

That in itself justifies increasing subsidized housing in this country. But the government has not only meddled in the housing market by regulating construction. There is also zoning, the institutionalization of across-the-board NIMBY-ism: Not In My Backyard, Not In My Neighbor's Backyard, Not In Anyone's Backyard.

I know all about zoning, having spent 1998 in a cave playing Classic Sim City 18 hours a day until I became emaciated. The trick is to put commerce between the residential and industrial zones. Duh.

You might think they'd been around since the reign of Henry III, but actually city-wide zoning ordinances didn't happen in this country until the time of WW I. They were first enacted in New York City to help preserve sunlight for residents finding themselves too much in the shadows of newly built skyscrapers.

Zoning was controversial then. Some thought it violated the Constitution, amounting to a taking without due process. In fact a court struck down the zoning law of Euclid, Ohio, as unconstitutional. But the ruling was appealed to the Supreme Court, which decided in 1926 that Euclid's zoning ordinances were Okey Dokey after all. I tried to read the ruling so I could explain it here, but it's all "averred this", and "alleged that", and appell-ees, and appell-ants, and nuisances and such, and I had appointments to keep with my life, so I gave up. But the gist seems to be the court upheld restrictions on industrial uses, while saying little to nothing about restrictions on residential uses, on account of those not being at issue in that case.


[Above: From zoning maps on the Seattle.gov website.]

Still, the Supreme Court had said the Euclid, Ohio, model was fine, and a precedent is a precedent, so just about every other town and city in the country latched onto the Euclid model, so that now everybody's zoning ordinances are called "Euclidean," and we're pretty much stuck with them, including the residential restrictions the court didn't have to address.

This is a pity. I think we all agree it's reasonable that pulp mills, which stink, should not be built next door to me, Dr. Wes Browning. Other uses of property that I'm sure all will agree should not be allowed next door to me include slaughterhouses, and fish canneries, which likewise both stink, airports (too loud), fire departments (too loud), dog parks (too many wet dogs), flower gardens (make me sneeze), and nail-care shops (too strip-mall-ish). But is it right, really, that my city government should be able to pass a law prohibiting my neighbor from renting a room out?

That's what we have now in the descendants of the Euclid zoning ordinances. Cities and towns tell us all where we can build apartments and where there must be single family housing. In Seattle, single family housing has its own god and he lives in our zoning law, and he makes it illegal for poor people to be housed in rooms rented by home-owners.

The wrong people sued the city of Euclid. Instead of a business suing, it should have been a class-action suit by all the homeless people of today, visited upon the Supreme Court of 1926 by time machine.

Pregnant Exercises

1. If the test case for zoning law had involved Sim City, wouldn't most of the zoning ordinances in use today be called Simian? Ha.

2. The ancients believed that if you could name a god you could destroy it. Do us a favor and name the god of single family housing.

No New Homeless, Please

Consider these three recent headlines chosen "at random": "Report: Quake leaves 5M Chinese homeless", "Summertime is Nickelsville Time!", and "[Chicago's] plan to end homelessness by 2012 threatened by subprime meltdown". Watch me pull a column out of them, Rocky!

For some time, a certain fellow editorial committee person for this rag (not me -- the one with musical talent) has been drumming on and on about how totally unprepared Seattle is for a big earthquake and how we here at Real Change should write about all the people who'd become homeless if we were hit by, say, a 7.9 quake centered at, say, Occidental South and South Weller. And what folks should do to prepare properly. Now that a disaster of that magnitude has happened in Sichuan, he keeps saying, "See? Do you see now? What was I saying? Will you listen to me now?"

In fact, when we had the little 6.8 earthquake on Ash Wednesday, 2001, radiating from Nisqually, Anitra "Now, I'm Not Speaking For SHARE/WHEEL Here" Freeman and I were homeless for 8 hours while the authorities made up their minds whether we could safely be permitted to enter our own building. If there had been more damage than there was, like if it had been a 7.2 quake, or if it had struck closer, we would probably still be homeless. I base that guess on the astonishing non-rapidity with which Katrina's victims got relief.

Now, I've been homeless before. So has Anitra. But if we had a really big earthquake like the one that hit in China the other day ALMOST EVERYBODY in Greater Seattle would be homeless, including a couple of million people who have never been homeless before, and including many of the pinheads in the Nickels administration who came up with the extremely flawed protocols for sweeps of homeless encampments in this city, inspiring some to plan a "Nickelsville" in response.

But we don't have to wait for an earthquake to see a lot of newly homeless people in Seattle. The subprime meltdown that's threatening Chicago's Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness isn't just happening to Chicago. Not that Seattle's Ten Year Plan to Plan Planfullness is threatened by it. You can't exactly threaten a thing that's already in the process of imploding from its own stupidity. But it can be made to implode faster.

"Where are you going with this, Wes?" -- you might well ask. Well, what I'm concerned about is, I don't want all these damn Nouveau Sans-Abri messing up the street scene.

I don't want to be homeless side-by-side with Nickels administration pinheads. I don't want to share emergency disaster shelter with ex-Belltown-condominium-owning, BMW-driving, laptop-toting, cappuccino-addicts. I don't want to find myself in a Food Not Bombs line behind the person who last month insisted that Magnolia is no place for people who can't afford pheasant-and-rosemary pâté.

If we have a 7.9 earthquake centered in the Seattle city limits, the streets are going to be OVERRUN with people who wouldn't know a P-38 can opener from a teacup!



Seattle is full of people who think homelessness only happens to drug addicts and alcoholics, and who consider themselves superior human beings. When they're homeless what do you think will happen?

What will happen is, they won't change. They'll STILL consider themselves superior human beings. They'll make a virtue out of being homeless by earthquake, or homeless by foreclosure. They'll turn their own ignorance into a virtue. "Of course I don't know where to find shelter, I wasn't raised like that!" At community meals, if they fall into one by accident, they'll ask for Grey Poupon.

When they find themselves outside at 3 AM needing to use a bathroom and discover the lack of 24-hour public toilets, they will pee in their pants and congratulate themselves that at least they didn't use an alley like "those people."

The streets are no place for people who can't eat cold raviolis out of a can.

Anthropologists!

I'll admit it, sometimes here at Adventures in Irony we don't want to write one more word about our mandated subject, Homelessness. We, meaning me, Copyright Dr. Wes Browning, have/has a long list of subjects I think are vastly more fun and entertaining. One of those subjects is Anthropology.

I probably like Anthropology because I am an anthropon myself. In fact, when I first learned that Anthropology meant the study, by human beings, of human beings, I pictured an Anthropology professor standing at a mirror, checking herself out. Or maybe I already had that picture in my head. I should get that studied.

It turns out that United Way has just discovered that people who are homeless are human beings, so they have hired an anthropologist to study them. I learned about it in the P-I last Thursday. So I get to talk about Anthropology after all!

Her name is Debra Boyer and the picture accompanying the story shows her standing in a Seattle alley "that is commonly populated by drunken homeless people" with a proud Vince Matulionis standing well behind her, clearly thrilled to have her there and ready to anthropologize away.

Vince Matulionis directs the United Way of King County's Ending Homelessness group. I met Mr. Matulionis a few years ago when the King County Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness was just getting started. He talked about the Ten Year Plan, such as it was, and the need to deal with chronic homelessness first, and gave every impression of knowing about whom he and his Ten Year Planning people were planning for. After all, he had different names for different kinds.

It wouldn't make sense, would it, to go off and plan to end a bunch of people's homelessness in ten years, if you didn't know anything about the people whose homelessness you were ending? It would be sort of like going to war in a foreign country when you didn't know anything about the people who lived there, or whether they would greet your troops with flowers or guns. Only a moron would do that.

So it's a bit of a shock to me now that Mr. Matulionis is so proud of United Way's implied belated admission (what's it been, four years?) that they have been planning to end the homelessness of people they didn't know.

Let me explain what a field anthropologist does. The P-I article isn't real clear on this point, so I think it's worth spending a few words on it. An anthropologist gets to know people by going and meeting them and talking to them. Then, she goes and thinks about what they said to her, and writes up what that tells her about them.

So, in other words, you hire an anthropologist to get to know people you don't have the time or the interest to get to know. Your anthropologist sums up her findings, and you work from there.

I feel compelled to make an admission of my own. Obviously, I did not get to know Vince Matulionis as well as I should have, those four or five years ago. Perhaps I was too interested in ordering lunch. Perhaps I just didn't care enough about Vince Matulionis and his planning group people.

And it's not just Mr. Matulionis. It's the whole bunch of them. I'm talking about all the Ten Year Planning to End Homelessness Planners. I'm talking about their Governing Board. I'm talking about the Interagency Council.

Who are these suits? Why am I always finding out they know less each day than they claimed to know the day before? Is it part of their culture? Is it passed down from father to son, from mother to daughter? Or, are there no fathers and mothers? Are their families structured some weird way I never heard of, and everybody is raised by pigs?

What I'm saying is, I need a field anthropologist to get to know Mr. Matulionis & Friends, and report back to me.

A View Of Elliott Bay, Denied

I never get to write about what I want. This week is no exception. I had planned a happy, cheerful, good news piece about how we're finally winning WW II, fascism is on the run, bunnies are cute, and we have iPods, too! But then Craig Thompson, All-American fear-monger, went and wrote a little opinion piece for the Sunday P-I, and I have no choice but to deal with his vicious crap point by sickening point.

The piece, called "Homeless camp sweeps needed" is one of the most outstanding examples of hate writing I have ever seen, and should go down as a classic of the genre. It starts with "Before me is a view of Elliott Bay lost for a decade." Today, homeless people have taken away one of our precious views of Elliott Bay -- tomorrow, they will take away our daughters!

[Below: You can't see Elliott Bay from anywhere you want because homeless people live in camps where the DOT has already said you can't go. But you can go where this picture was taken in Discovery park and not only see the bay but stick your toes in it.]


"Above Interstate 90, it was taken over by drug addicts, dealers, prostitutes, pimps and a homeless encampment." In the past, it's been drug addicts prostitutes, pimps, and welfare queens. Or drug addicts, prostitutes, pimps, and Negroes. Or Drug addicts, prostitutes, pimps, and Jews.

Craig Thompson reports he's taking apart a camp there; he says it smells of "of rotten food, mud, worms and human debris," and that a World War I trench would smell the same. He could have said, a Third World slum smells the same. Or that it smelled like the crotch of his own jockey shorts. Or Blethen's armpits.

But it's in the 4th paragraph that Thompson's genius for twisted hate speech really drives forward. He acknowledges that at a Queen Anne site, "Camp residents weren't notified before a cleanup and lost personal items." and says "people should know [sweepers] are coming -- unless they're criminals." And then, with just that justification and no more, he adds, "The sweeps should go on."

Let's see how that works in other contexts. How about "People shouldn't be sent to concentration camps -- unless they're criminals. The roundups should go on." How about, "People shouldn't be lynched -- unless they're criminals. The hangings should go on." Oh yeah, works great.

He says, "I'm not a cruel man, persecuting poor people. I support SHARE/WHEEL's roving Tent Cities." I'll bet he owns a puppy, too, and even feeds it. To show us how good he is, he tells us how he's in favor of various projects to house homeless people that have come under fire. He proves his compassion-credentials by criticizing the City Government's failure to create affordable housing.


[Above: Craig Thompson is not a cruel man! If he were a cruel man could he hold a puppy like this? (-- Not Craig Thompson's actual hand. Not Craig's Thompson's puppy. Hand and puppy are shown for illustrative purposes only.)]

That's followed by accounts of criminal activities in and around the greenbelts that he, Craig Thompson, has helped clean up, leading to the arrests of "dozens of criminals" -- out of thousands of homeless campers. He tells us how good this is for the homeless people themselves. He, Craig Thompson, has done them a favor. "Thuggery made life hell for homeless people who just wanted a place to sleep."

He says that homeless people living in camps are no more victimized by the government than are the rest of us. I find it hard to believe that Craig Thompson is regularly visited by agents of the government like himself and forced to stand by while all his belongings and all his ID and means of survival, including his home, are confiscated and destroyed. But if he says so it must be so. Maybe he should complain about it.

There are several paragraphs of calculated irrelevance to the effect that heroin imports into Seattle are up. News flash, Craig: You have housed neighbors on Beacon Hill who are using and dealing heroin. There has never been found a single major dealer of drugs who was permanently homeless. Dealers make enough money for rent. They can afford $500/day hotel rooms.

The final insult in Thompson's piece follows his own rhetorical question, "Where will residents go when camps are busted?" He just says, "that's another question," and drops it.

Answer the damn question, Craig Thompson.

Just Plain Mater

When I graduated from the University of Washington with a Bachelor's of Science in 1971, my parents wanted to give me a Lifetime Membership in the Alumni Society as a graduation present. They were too cheap to pay the whole $100, but they chipped in $50 and I paid the rest. I'm an official card-carrying U Dub Alumnus! I get mail from the Alumni Society all the time! I get a glossy magazine! They want me to give the University more money, to make it a greater University than it already is!

Let me explain why I won't.

First, there was this little dispute that arose in the 80s when I was painfully homeless. Getting over the worst of an onset of PTSD, I tried to get back into my math career by using the Math Research Library at Padelford Hall. No, not to sleep there. I went in just to look for books and check them out. Then, I returned them on time! Those days I still respected libraries, and returned books. I'm wiser now.

The librarian didn't respect me. She said, "The books are for people who need them." I said I needed them. The librarian indicated my need didn't count. I flashed the Lifetime Membership card. My need still didn't count. I asked one of my former professors to intervene on my behalf, a guy who had given me a glowing recommendation that helped me get into a graduate school. He denied ever having known me before even one cock crowed. He probably thought, "Did I have any homeless in my classes? Let's see, I had an Armenian. I had a Nigerian. I had a Hoosier. But no, no homeless."

OK. That sort of thing can leave a bad taste. But I'm an easy-going, forgiving, SOB. Yes I am. I have been willing to forgive and forget that slight. I don't know, maybe that librarian was acting out of line. Maybe I didn't complain to the right person, the one who would have set her straight.

Recently the University pressured Gregoire to go along with booting rehabilitating sex offenders out of the fraternity neighborhood, ostensibly to protect students from possibly in the future feeling uncomfortable about them being there. Turns out the University really wants to expand into the property the sex offenders were housed in.

The University should now be barred from doing so for a generation, until the stench of its corruption has had time to dissipate. But if that were the worst of the University's crimes I'd be saving every penny I found in the gutters and every dime I find under every vending machine for my beloved college.

There is one unforgivable injustice.

In 1967 I paid $345 per year for state-resident tuition. Since then, average tuitions for residents have gone to around $6,500 per year. In 40 years we've had six-fold inflation overall, but over 18-fold inflation of UW tuition!

At the same time there has been only a little more than a nominal 4-fold increase in workers' pay, two-thirds the inflation increase. Consequently the economic burden on low-income working residents is 4 and a half times what it was when I was a student.

Poor people are being gouged on a steady ongoing basis. They may get loans, but they are having to spend lifetimes paying them back. It's the new slavery. An indentured servitude of decades instead of the traditional seven years. And what do the Board of Regents and the President talk to Gregoire about? Getting sex offenders out of a building they want.

I'll give them the same deal my parents gave me. If the University's governors make a good faith effort to get the state to bring tuitions down to around $2000 a year, I'll think that they really do care about their mission after all, and I'll make an effort to scrounge up $50 for them.

Until then, the University of Washington will get from me what I got from them when I was homeless.

Let Them Eat Editors

I've avoided talking about the flap over Capehart. I thought I had nothing new to add to the topic.

I was thinking this week I would instead talk about brain-eating amoeba. There are few concerns I have that are more pressing to me than my concern that brain-eating amoeba not invade my nostrils and eat my brain, starting with my olfactory nerve.

Ordinarily what I write here at most mildly amuses a few people for four or five minutes and then gets forgotten and ignored. For example, if I say the Iraq War is illegal, unjust, and immoral, no one notices. I could get more action out of people if I reproduced a page from Silas Marner than if I told you all what causes homelessness and the simple steps that would end it. But I am sure if I told you how to avoid having your brains eaten by mutant brain-eating amoeba from Australia, you would listen up.

[Above right: Some brain-eaters save the brains for dessert.]

But evidently I was wrong to think that I had nothing new to say about Capehart. Last week the P-I ran an editorial in which they wrote, "We did have some concerns, however, about access to shops and transportation. For example, the nearest bus stop we could find was close to a mile away and basic drugstore supplies required a trip of more than two miles." Members of the city council said basically the same thing, that the housing was inappropriate for housing the homeless, so the plan to demolish it should therefore go forward.

I have two things to say about the inappropriateness of that "therefore."

First of all, homeless activists were never saying that the Capehart housing should be used for housing people who are currently homeless or at immediate risk of it. What we were saying was that the loss of middle class housing, in the current market, would force people who could have afforded it, and who had their own transportation, to compete for less expensive housing that could have gone to people with lower incomes, and that a loss of 66 units of housing at the lower middle class range, such as at Capehart, would ultimately either subtract 66 units from very low income housing, or those with cars would move away from Seattle altogether, and you could kiss their tax dollars goodbye.

If you really think that demolishing middle class housing doesn't hurt the homeless, try this thought experiment: Get rid of all of it. Bulldoze all the single family dwellings in all the nearly 100 neighborhoods of Seattle. Now picture where those people are all going to live if they are to stay in Seattle. When you finally see how that would put a few hundred thousand more people on the street who weren't there before, next visualize what would happen if instead of sticking around all the middle class people whose homes were bulldozed moved to Phoenix. Answer: Phoenix is the new Seattle, and Seattle is the new New Orleans.

OK, so that wasn't anything that hasn't already been said. Other homeless activists have said the same thing essentially, minus the thought experiment. [Above left: Our hero, Mr. Thought Experiment himself.]

I am now going to astonish you by saying something utterly original about the Capehart housing. Something that no one else has said and that even the brilliant editors of the intelligent Seattle Post-Intelligencer were incapable of thinking of.

Yes. The nearest bus stop to Capehart is almost a mile away. But: Metro has bus stop signs to spare!

You have to be utterly brain dead already not to be able to think that if people lacking cars and legs were living in Capehart that Metro could not be induced to extend Route 33 that far.

Have all of you forgotten that bus companies are run by human beings and do the bidding of human beings?

This country has lost its imagination and its humanity with it.

We can save ourselves from the brain-eating amoebas. Feed them P-I editorialists, and they'll all die of starvation.

[Above: In case you wondered why investors aren't much interested in a property bordering a big beautiful park.]

Unreal Estate

As I've said repeatedly, most homeless people don't want to be.

It turns out, though, that some do. The fact that I don't come right out and say so annoys some of my very favorite friends, so I want to make up for that and talk about the tradition of being homeless on purpose, saying where it comes from, and why it needs to be celebrated. Let's begin with a real life situation.

Last June a man died near Medford, in southern Oregon. Authorities have accused another man of manslaughter. There were three homeless witnesses, including a married couple. For the past 11 weeks all three innocent witnesses have been held in jail with miserly compensations of $7.50 per day, and the married couple separated, not because they are flight risks, but, in the words of the judge who ordered the jailing, "When they weren't incarcerated, they weren't easy to find."

I guess to appear to save a little trouble and expense it's OK to treat people like animals, in Medford, Oregon, notwithstanding the fact that these days hotel rooms cost less than properly staffed jail space.

The story touches on one reason why people prefer to be homeless. If you have a permanent home, your next door neighbor could be anybody. You could end up being stuck next door to an sickeningly inhumane judge for example. There would be no way out but to move.

Now, if you move away from idiots or monsters once every three years, you're an American. But if you're moving away from idiots and monsters every two or three days, you're a nomad.

Nomad is the technical scientific term for "person who chooses to be homeless." There are three kinds of nomad, the Hunter-Gatherer, the Pastoral, and the Peripatetic.

Fellow Real Change editor Artis has been a Peripatetic Nomad, and a good one. The term refers to people who travel about to sell their skills from place to place. You can only be a Peripatetic Nomad if you are really good at something, enough to be paid for it.


[Above: Nomadic Kazakhs on the Steppe.]

The Hunter-Gatherer Nomads were also called "humans" at one time. That one time lasted, oh, a few million years. Winter in the Levant, Summer in Greece. Good times.

Human beings evolved to be Hunter-Gatherers. Hunter-Gatherers were the first-born number-one sons-of-righteousness for eons and eons. How dare anyone say that it isn't a proper lifestyle? It's like saying sex was meant to happen in a test tube. No, it was meant to happen the other way, the way it's been happening. When it comes to lifestyles Hunter-Gatherer is the way it's been, longer and before any other.

The Pastoral Nomads are the guys herding the sheep and the horses and the goats and the chickens and the roosters all around the country-side. The Bible records the exact moment that these people got the upper hand over the Hunter-Gatherers, when pastoral Jacob cheated hunter-gatherer twin brother Esau out of his heritage. To this day, Pastoral Nomads are considered tricksy, but are in reality no tricksier than the people who stole their heritage from them.


[Above: Vincent van Gogh: The Caravans - Gypsy Camp near Arles (1888, Oil on canvas).]

Those who stole the heritage of the Pastoral Nomads were, of course, the biggest thieves in all human history, the thieves known as Settlers. Everyone knows that Settlers stole America from the Hunter-Gatherer and Pastoral Natives, but did you know that the word Settler is just another word for someone who chooses a housed lifestyle?

Settlers claim land that used to belong to everyone. That amounts to stealing from all the rest of humanity. For each parcel of land in the world, the first deed ever written up for that parcel marked its initial theft. All real estate is stolen property.

Whereas, being a nomad means not participating in that kind of thievery. That's respectable.

[Above: Jeune fille nomade (16 ans) devant la tente familiale à Matamoulane, dans la région du Trarza (Mauritanie)]

Choose wisely, Reykjavík!

Let's do a homeless news roundup! We'll rope'em, tie'em, and brand'em!

Here at Adventures in Irony we make it our duty to leave the local homeless news to the paid professionals. We will have nothing to say, for now, about the SHARE/WHEEL occupation and subsequent arrests at the Lora Lake Apartments which were a big deal of last week's homelessness-related news in the Seattle area. Except, "gross misdemeanor, my ass." The gross misdemeanor was shutting down the apartments.

OK, moving onward and outward. A wheel-chair bound homeless woman in Fresno was arrested and cited at a McDonald's restaurant for attempting to use the restroom without first making a purchase. And rightly so!

Think about it. Let's say you want to start up a McDonald's franchise somewhere. How do you choose where to put it?

What I would do is ask myself, where would people get the most benefit from my placement of my McDonald's? I would take into account all that McDonald's franchises have to offer. There's greasy, over-salted burgers. There's tastes-like-chicken sandwiches. There's parking. There's air-conditioning. There's 30-minute seating in tiny little chairs made for people with one buttock each, in a room with walls painted in scientifically calibrated "move-along" colors. And there's bathrooms. I should site my new franchise someplace where one or two of these items of attraction will be a big draw. That means a place in a warm climate with a severe shortage of public bathrooms. Sounds like Fresno to me!

So I can totally sympathize with the management of that Fresno McDonald's. That wheel-chair bound homeless woman was trying to use her full bladder, or whatnot, as an excuse to steal one of the only two good things their store has to offer. If they didn't draw the line with her, then, pretty soon, everyone would know that you didn't have to buy the food at their McDonald's to use the can, and then nobody would buy the food there, 'cause the food sucks!

In more abstract homeless news, but still out of California, an article on homelessness and health care by Margot Kushel, MD, of the University of California at San Francisco says that, "Since the early 1990s, the average age of the homeless population has risen approximately eight months each calendar year."

Combining that with statistics which show that the average age at death of homeless people is under fifty, and we can now predict that old age, murder, and suicide, will assuredly solve the homeless problem in ten years after all, in spite of all our recent hand waving and hollering in the direction of the opposite conclusion. We are most sorry for having been so wrong.

The most interesting news this week is NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) news from the online Iceland Review, which says that the shelter that was planned for homeless men at Njálsgata 74 in downtown Reykjavík will open in October, as previously scheduled, over the objections of neighbors, but, by way of compromise, would house only 8 men rather than the 10 that were to originally have been sheltered.


[Above: Y'all's gotta see this picture of Njálsgata Street!]

My concern is, what are the odds that the two guys that are excluded are going to be just exactly the two bastards that the NIMBYs were trying to keep out?

Out of any 10 people, statistics shows that two of them will be saints, and another two of them bastards, whether the ten are homeless or not. Studies have repeatedly shown that two out of ten of all human beings are worthless scum.

But if you pick 2 people out of 10 at random the odds that the 2 you picked will be the 2 bastards of the bunch is only 1 in 45. That's just simple math!

Choose wisely, Reykjavík!

Tokens at the Top

The online list of members of the King County Governing Board of the Committee to End Homelessness (CEH) may be out of date. But we can use it as a rough indication of the Governing Board's makeup.

Let's see, the list includes: Ron Sims, Greg Nickels, Tom Rasmussen, Mike Lowry, Dean Robert Taylor, Norm Rice, Blake Nordstrom, and OK now I'm tired of typing these names, but so far I haven't found any dimwits.

Likewise, a similarly scientific half-assed glance at the Interagency Council, which implements CEH policies, didn't turn up more than a couple of hollow headed chair warmers, too few to significantly lower the group IQ of the IAC.

So why, given that, has the CEH outsourced its brains?

"Wes," you say, "there's no way they've done that! You are surely making that up!"

It's a fact! I found it out like I find out everything I know about the CEH. I go to meetings, get the handouts, then find out from someone else. Two weeks ago I learned through people in SHARE/WHEEL that the Consumer Advisory Council (CAC), yet another CEH subcommittee, would be forming a speakers bureau. The CAC consists of "consumers", i.e. consumers of homeless people's services, i.e. homeless and formerly homeless people. So who better to form a speaker's bureau, to go out and tell the people of King County what homelessness in King County is all about?

Leadership Tomorrow, that's who! The very same day I found out about the speakers bureau plan, the same people in SHARE/WHEEL who told me about it also handed me 15 pages of stuff with the CEH logo on it including a Q&A about homelessness and a guide to a slide show about homelessness. The Q&A part of the handout SAID on its own page one it was "a sampling of questions posed to [CEH chairperson] Bill Block and his responses" and that it may "serve as a guide for managing the Q&A portion" of the slide show.

The contents of the Q&A and the commentary for the slide show included real genuine information mixed with misleading statements (about the one night counts, for example) smashed up with opinion masquerading as information (propaganda) such as whether the tent cities are really about shelter, or how panhandlers ought to be dealt with, or whose problem homelessness is, the cities or the suburbs.

Normally you think that when people are solicited to form a speakers bureau in accordance with their experiential expertise on a subject, you do not tell them what to say. So those of us at Real Change who subsequently read the 15 page handout could be heard all the way from our offices in Belltown to the Exchange Building shrieking and hooting about it, like monkeys in the jungle that just saw a big gnarly cat.

Well, Bill Block heard our hoots and he reassured us. No, no, no, he said, that handout wasn't for the CAC homeless speaker's bureau, it was for the rest of the CEH. And it wasn't written by him, he told us, it was put together by Leadership Tomorrow. Why did it have his name on it, I wondered. Would heads roll? Not likely.

So my question now is, who the freak are Leadership Tomorrow and when did they get to be the brains of the CEH? Whatever happened to "Leadership Today", the big geniuses that were appointed to the Governing Board and the IAC because they were such hot and sweaty kick-ass leaders?

Does the fact that Leadership Tomorrow is doing the thinking about homelessness for the CEH mean that not only are all the homeless and formerly homeless members of the CAC and the other CEH subcommittees just tokens, like we all knew, but so are Norm Rice, Lowry, Sims, Nordstrom and all the other big names on the top committees?

Is Greg Nickels just on the Governing Board for show?

I sure hope so. That's funny.

[Right: Just another pretty face?]

Be Silent, Consume, Die

[The title above was on the first Real Change T-shirt]

I'm a Consumer of Homeless Services. I'm not homeless now, but I was homeless, ten years ago, for so long I moved far down a waiting list for housing and I got housed. You don't hear that happening much anymore. Anyway, that means that just by virtue of having asylum, I am now a Consumer of a Homeless Service, until I'm evicted, move, or die.

[Right: Politicians invented "Consumers" originally as a substitute for the more problematic concept "Citizens".]

Homeless people are now all called Consumers of Homeless Services, even if they don't consume any. When I was homeless I never consumed any, except for food stamps. I've done all my homeless-service consuming post-homeless. But if things were then the way they are now, I would have been called a Consumer anyway.

A couple weeks ago I finally figured out why the service providers love to call us Consumers. It defines us relative to the service providers. It means that our meaning, our purpose in being, our purpose in being talked about, is entirely attached to our role as users of homeless services, which they provide.

What a great way to assert power over people! Don't even acknowledge their being except to note their dependence on the services you provide! Impressive. Most impressive. They are well on their way to becoming formidable Jedi.

I am trying to think of ways to return the favor. I want to call them something that says they barely provide services and have no other significance to me. I've thought of Stale Rice Cakes, but it's too metaphorical. Maybe someone can help me come up with something more straight-forward.

Speaking of stale rice cakes, I'd like to share my intercom story.

When I attained this asylum run by the Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC), it had an intercom so I could cry for help in emergencies. I didn't think about it at all.

Then one day, after I'd been here four years, I was told my intercom had never worked. I said, no problem, I don't need it. They said, "Problem! You need it for emergencies". I said, I haven't had an emergency for four years, I don't need it. They said, "We're fixing it."

They fixed my intercom against my will. Immediately, I got called mornings for free breakfasts. I got weekly messages, "It's Bingo night, come on down!" 10:30 pm alternate Saturdays I heard, "There's pizza in the community room!" One random night every month, around midnight, it was "The church group has sandwiches out front, hurry down before they're all gone!"

There is no volume control, it was permanently on loud. They said if I snipped the wires to the speaker they could tell downstairs. I doubted that but decided on the direct approach. I went down to the front desk every time they woke me up and told them I wanted them to shut themselves up.

I complained to higher-ups. They repeated my complaints to me to show me they heard my pain. But nothing happened, because the conflict resolution course they took only talks about talk. Doing things is a whole different course.

So I got a notebook, set it by the bed, and took down times and dates my peace was interrupted by intercom. Within a month the first page was full. I took it to the management and read off instances in which I had been woke up at midnight and then again at 7am the same morning. I said does this mean that I'm officially only allotted 7 hours of sleep per night in a DESC building? Because if that's my ration, I need to plan for day naps. Might I be allowed to sleep siestas? Would they let me have 2pm to 4pm each day?

It worked! Within days we had an agreement that no calls would be made 10pm to 8am. I would be allotted a full ten hour window of peace every night!

Because of sarcasm, I sleep better, and my health has improved. I recommend it to everyone!

Where Ideas Go to Die

On the 24th of February 2007, it was confirmed that 100 percent of all of us have blogs. I have three of them. Anitra “Netmama” Freeman has a different blog for every skirt in her closet. Timothy “From Him All Power Comes; To Him All Praise Flows” Harris, our Director, has a blog. You, dear reader, have a blog, whether you know it or not. Maybe you have a daughter who was born last week. Your daughter, though she has never touched an internet-connected device, has a blog with her name on it. Her profile lists her favorite kinds of music. She’s into stuff you grew out of in the ’90s.

Since you all have blogs, you know how I feel when people beg me to use their ideas for this column. You know that writing a column, or a blog, is something that has to come from the soul. Like the time you posted all your eggplant recipes. You can’t be handed material like that. It has to flow from the gut.

Now my gut says I need to devote this column to detailed excuses for not using the unsolicited ideas I get.

Here’s one I get every week. “You know what you should do, Dr. Wes? You should write a column that tells the truth about being homeless. Let people know how bad it is on the streets. Oh, what’s that? You did it already? 200 times? In 200 different ways? Well, you need to do it again. A good idea doesn’t become bad just because it’s been done 200 times.”

According to this reasoning, I, Dr. Wes Browning, should personally record a cover of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. I should re-lose my virginity in a cheap room in upstate NY immediately. I must order the Orange Mandarin Duck for dinner tonight and the next night and the next, until it kills me.

Here’s another one I get a lot. “I stay at XYZ Mission a lot, and their management’s all corrupt. You should write about that.”

“No, you stayed there, you saw the corruption; you write about it.”

“But they won’t let me stay there anymore.”

“Write it anonymously and bring us the facts, and if they check out we’ll print it.”

“They’ll find out it was me.”

“I’ll be over here contemplating my spine while you find yours.” I learned when I was 19, you don’t empower people by letting them bleed your nipples.

I constantly have to ask the question, “You know it’s a humor column, don’t you?”

“You should talk about violence against homeless people, all the time, until people do something about it.”

“What’s the rest of the paper for?”

“You have to write about it too. All the time.” All right, here’s your hate-crime news o’ the week: It’s being widely reported that a third of all violent U.S. hate-crimes against homeless people happen in Florida. Ha. Chads. Jeb Bush. Old people. Cuban refugees. Teenagers. Fort Lauderdale. Spring Breaks. Hilarious stuff.

On Jan. 11, 2001, I wrote that today the U.S. only has room for eight acres per man, woman, and child, even counting swamps, garbage dumps, and shopping malls. So if everyone regardless of race had to get 40 acres and a mule we’d need to first conquer a land area four times the size of all 50 states. I mention this again for the benefit of vendor Calvin T. Again I say, we don’t have that much power to ourselves; the rest of the world has something to say about it, something involving guns, and bullets, and ungraceful death and suffering.

I give up on this one. I have a request that I learn about Chinese New Year and write what I learn. Great idea! It’s 4705! It’s the Year of the Fire Pig! Make me lucky! Give me $8 in a red envelope by Saturday! Then, I will eat a stuffed dumpling with my sweetheart!

How educational was that?

The Lovingcup-full

Don’t we all have limits? I know I do. The Wellbutrin only works so far, and then Mister Smiley turns into Mister Where’s My Baseball Bat.

It takes me a long time to snap. This is a problem for me, or more precisely, for everybody else, because when I do snap everyone thinks there was no warning. In truth there was plenty of warning. There was me calmly saying, over and over again, “This better stop,” and there was everybody else calmly ignoring me because I am being so calm and cheerful. Then all of the sudden there’s a crazy man in the house.

Sometimes it takes years. About 1983 I became homeless for the second time in my life. I lived out of a ’69 Rambler for about eight months while I worked the night shift as a cab driver. I say I lived out of the ’69 Rambler because the police, security guards, and vigilantes wouldn’t let me actually sleep in said vehicle. Through a twisted logic I can’t possibly reconstruct, they deemed me a threat to civil society whenever I locked myself away from them in my car. So I was forced to sleep out in the open where I was constantly subject to harassment. I’m sure I said something at the time to the effect of “this better stop,” or “this sucks,” or “I’m getting royally steamed,” but I don’t recall anyone saying, “Oh gee, I guess in that case we’ll all have to stop using you as a whipping post.”

The whole situation -- being homeless -- reminded me of little Bobby Lovingcup. “Little Bobby Lovingcup” is not his real name but it’s so close that if he reads this he’ll know I’m talking about him. Bobby was the son of my parent’s best friends. I couldn’t stand him when he was sane, but I had to tolerate him because his parents and my parents hung together. Besides, he didn’t mean any harm by being a dork -- he just was one.

Then the Lovingcups moved to the Big City and one day some other kid who had his own problems threw a rock at Bobby’s head and it connected.

A year or so later my parents took me with them to visit the Lovingcups in the Big City, and the four parents sent Bobby and me out together to “play,” in order to leave them to their important adult conversation.

Bobby showed me a new game he said he liked to play since getting hit with the rock. It was called “whip” and it consisted of him whipping me repeatedly with a three-foot long branch from a tree. He hit me in the face first, and when I turned away he hit me on my back, oh, once every three seconds or so.

I didn’t mention that Bobby was then 9, while I was 12 and proportionately bigger, so I could have at any time reached past his switch, grabbed him by the arm, twisted it till it came off, and fed it to him. But I had to be nice to Bobby, because Bobby had been hit in the head with a rock, and you don’t hurt people who don’t know what they’re doing is wrong. So instead of breaking his arm I just took his whip away from him and broke it into 12 3-inch pieces, and went back inside and told his parents to keep him away from me if they liked him intact.

That’s how I feel about homelessness. I don’t feel like anyone owes me anything for having been homeless. But the fact is I was used as a whipping post while I was down by many, many, people. I try to tell myself those people didn’t know what they were doing was wrong. But I still want all the whips broken.

In Las Vegas, a municipal court struck down as unconstitutional Las Vegas’ recently enacted No Feeding the Homeless ordinance.

One less whip, for now.

Mend It Like Beckham

As of this Monday morning, Sept. 24, the Homeless World (Soccer) Cup has gotten under way in Cape Town, South Africa. It will continue through Sunday. If you have a fast connection and the right plug-in you can watch it live at http://www.homelessworldcup.org.

For those of you that don’t have a fast connection, I’ll describe it for you now. There are people on a field kicking a ball from one end to the other. Some of the people are trying to kick it to the right side into a kind of netted-enclosure like thing guarded by somebody. The others are trying to kick the same ball (hence the contest!) the other way, to where there is another person guarding another netted-enclosure like thing. There’s also the voice of a guy telling you about it while it’s happening. Some scores so far: two, zero, ten, one. Yes, ten! Blame the Hong Kong defense.

How can a World Cup be Homeless? The answer is that homelessness is a part of the eligibility requirements for this particular annual event. The rules state precisely that players in the Homeless World Cup must be a) male or female and at least 16 years of age at the time of the tournament and b) have been homeless at some point after the previous year's World Cup OR make their main living income as a streetpaper vendor OR be asylum seekers (who have neither positive asylum status nor working permit.) No, I don’t know why they have the restriction to male or female. It’s not my fault; I’m just the messenger here.

The first Homeless World Cup was held in 2003 in Graz, Austria, near Arnold Schwarzenegger’s boyhood home. The idea for it sprang into the heads of a couple of directors of street papers meeting in a bar during a conference of the International Network of Street Papers. Meeting in bars can result in that sort of thing. Usually the next day it’s all forgotten though. This time they actually went through with it. This year there are teams representing 48 countries scheduled to play, and it’s been reported by the Associated Press that there are nearly 500 players in attendance, presumably including substitutes.

The actual quote from the Associated Press article speaks of “nearly 500 drug addicts, alcoholics, orphans and vagrants” kicking the event off. This is where I really got interested.

I mean, as I have said often enough before, my interest in spectator sport is pretty much limited to watching women’s singles figure skating when my internet porn connection is down. So I wouldn’t care about the Homeless World Cup except for the fact that it might in some way have a positive impact on homelessness.

It’s just fascinating to me that when some people see a person kick a ball around as part of an organized sports match, they feel differently about that person. I ascribe it to trust.

Trust is a quality that you don’t hear enough about these days. It’s the thing homeless people need next most, after decent sleep and physical safety. If people so don’t trust you that they don’t let you interact with them at all, not even to say hello, it’s impossible to even start to earn any trust from them. The Homeless World Cup is a sustained interaction that can enable the participants to earn some trust.

Most of the news stories about the Homeless World Cup focus on the benefit to the players in “getting their lives together.” The Associated Press story I mentioned gushes about how 94 percent of last year’s players report “a new motivation in life,” whatever that means, and then says that 38 percent now have regular jobs. That’s great, but it misses the story.

The real story isn’t the players; it’s the relationship between the players and the spectators; it’s the trust. Let’s see how the same AP reporter describes the current players a week from now. If there’s a change, that would be the news.