It's All About the Timing

We've all had our bad hair days. But me, I get bad column days.

Everything was going great. Bush and Kerry were falling off things. Philadelphia's horse lost. We all had long faces. Chalabi had a long face. We saw comic possibilities.

CIA-George resigned, for "personal reasons." We thought of some lame ways to make fun of "personal reasons" in general. We could recall the "personal reason" we had once for paying a fine for late taxes, for instance. We had reasoned that we didn't want our person in a federal prison. Or the time we had a "personal reason" for quitting a job, reasoning that our employers were about to anyway toss our person headfirst out the nearest window.

Then we heard that there were some unofficial but strong hints that the Salvation Army in New York City might give up millions upon millions of dollars worth of social service contracts, including contracts to manage homeless shelters and soup kitchens, in the event that the city went ahead with a law making them pay benefits to employees married to the wrong sexes.

We want homelessness to end, but until that happens we want there to be homeless shelters. We want there to be soup kitchens as long as there are poor people whether homeless or not. In NYC rents are already as high as they will be here in week or two, so they need soup kitchens everywhere for the people who have no money left over after the rent. Our president, meanwhile, wants to promote the idea that faith-based organizations like the Salvation Army should be the principal providers of those kind of services.

What does it say about the president's Faith-Based Initiative when one of the biggest faith-based providers in the country exploits its clients to blackmail a city over social policies, rather than fighting those policies fairly through lobbying and litigation? I'll tell you what it says. It says that daddy has a column landing in his lap! Come to papa, sweet column!

Just as I was working out the details on that impending masterpiece, which was going to be the greatest and most timely and relevant sludge of rant that I ever slogged through, Ronald Reagan screws me royal. How can I write about the NYC Salvation Army's disappointing petty snit-fit when there's a magnitude 7.5 wake going on?

I asked that very question of my muse Cindy. For those of you who may have forgotten, Cindy is my own personal muse, the Muse of Other, AKA the Muse of Few Words. Eternally a henna-redhead until Wednesday, Cindy is a Spark off the Generic Muse Archetype, hence to that extent Universal, but, hey, get your own Spark.

Cindy said, "Well, you're annoyed Reagan picked right now to die, right? So why don't you write about how annoyed you are? I'm sure you're annoyed enough to fill your white space up."

Yes I am…

With a deadline minutes away all I can think is Borax and California actor-governors for $200, Alex, a chimp, jellybeans, Star Wars, "Win one for the Gipper," who really won the Cold War, Ronnie or the Soviets and their people, and Iran-Contra and Ollie North and Hinckley and Jodie and Nancy and stem cells.

Most of all I think if it wasn't for Reagan and his administration I wouldn't be writing here lo these nine years. If it wasn't for Reagan's initiatives, adopted just because he was such a smiling optimistic guy, homelessness wouldn't have reached the crisis proportions that it did starting in the mid-eighties, becoming so unmanageable by now that the Bush administration is ready to betray Section 8 housing and consign more than a million homeless people permanently to living in shelters run by immoral faith-based hypocrites who despise the people they get paid to serve so much they would use them as pawns in their cultural battles.

… very annoyed.

Crackpot Writer Says Blowers Blow

From time to time this column inevitably takes a flaming, careening, nose-dive into column hell. The reasons for this are easy to enumerate. You've got your basic procrastination. You've got the fact that yours truly learned to write copying the words off of advertisements (my first word was "colgate".) You've got the fact that I don't get paid for this, unlike some geniuses I know. (I won't say who, I'll leave the director out of this.)

At times like this I naturally turn to Cindy, my personal Muse, Muse of few words, AKA Muse of "Other". I will beg her to give me a clue.

"What should I write about, Oh great immortal Muse," I will say. So I do.

"Well, you act like you're in a bad mood," she says. "Why don't you tell the readers why?"

Hmm. Yeah, that could work.

OK, what the hell was the city thinking when they decided to let skateboarders race outside my window today when I sat down to write this crap? Complete with announcers, paid for by Red Bull, and a PA system aimed directly at my window?

Don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against skateboard racing, and I suppose if it's going to happen it has to happen SOMEwhere, and what the hell, what is there at 3rd S and Washington anyway but poor people and more poor people, they listen to fire truck sirens and aid truck sirens all day anyway, so they're used to it, right?

So whenever the city wants to put some noisy celebration down somewhere on the map let's put it at what is already the 3rd noisiest damned intersection in the city, where the poor people there have proved by the sheer fact of putting up with it year after year that they won't raise hell about it, right?

And let's do it in style. Let's not just ruin everybody's afternoon. We can do much more that that. After having the event, which we'll run until 4PM, we'll do some half-assed but loud cleaning of the area for two hours. Then we'll go away leaving approximately ten stables worth of straw in the streets, so that at roughly 1AM, when that crackpot writer will think we all are gone for the night, we will send in the streetcleaner and the guys with blowers to clear out all of the straw.

No, I don't have anything against skateboarding of any kind, my gripe is with a hypocritical city that would try to shut down a barely audible dance club a few blocks away near prime real estate on the grounds that the noise it generates disturbs the peace, but lets anything go where I live.

A note to the City Council: put it one of YOUR neighborhoods next time. The well-off aren't the only ones who can play NIMBY.

Speaking of finally cracking after all these years of taking it without complaint, let me tell you what else would have my shorts in a bunch, if I were wearing any.

I STILL can't walk into the First Avenue Service Center by the front door. It has been years since I first saw that sign telling me to use the alley entrance.

Excuse me? I wouldn't mind if it were like the Alibi Room, and the alley entrance WAS the front door. But in this case there is a clear front door on the third avenue side, and it isn't even locked! It's open for ventilation all day! So the only reason to tell me to use the back door is to be sure that people like me aren't seen coming and going.

Now Cindy tells me I should wrap up by saying what's wrong with that.

Damn it, where's Rosa Parks when you need her?

Cindy, Ancient Muse of Other

Here it is, production week at the Real Change. As always, I'm staring at an otherwise blank document with just the words "insert column here" at the top. For some reason those three words usually get me going. But not this month. Time to call upon my lovely and talented muse Cindy, the ancient Muse of Other, AKA Muse of Few Words. As soon as I do, there she is behind me licking what's left of a Hershey's Special Dark from her fingertips, looking over my shoulder as I type.

"So... that's it so far. One paragraph," she says with a sigh. I hear the disappointment in her voice and wonder what she's thinking. Old abandonment issues well up within me. What would I do without a muse? She's leaving me for another editorial board member... I thought... yeah, that's it... probably that Michele "let's find new writers" Marchand. Curse her!. "Too inbred", indeed!.

But Cindy ignores my anxiety fit and just says, "OK, I'll walk you through it. First: you need a poem -- right here." (She points at the next patch of blank space.) What about? "The Real Change wants submissions from new writers." Oh yeah, I knew that...

Make a Change!

Or, Hey Look! I Got a New Rhyming Dictionary!

by © Dr. Wes Browning

Steak and eggs every morning?

Steak and rice every noon?

Steak and beans every dinner? -

Then drive a stake, please, through me soon.

Thank God I'm not the only poet that writes within these pages,

for, maybe not right now, but in time you know, by stages,

if I was I'm sure that I'd even cause myself to sicken.

(While surely others all around me would immediately be stricken.)

But its not only poetry or steaks that we're talking about,

those were hypothetical examples.

Don't make me yell and shout it out,

send us your prose and journalistic samples...

"OK, maybe you should leave that now and go on to something else."

But I haven't worked the title in, that was going to be the big refrain, you know - write for the Real Change, let your story make a change! -heh.

"Um-hmm, and you should let your column make a change right now."

Oh, I see what you're saying. You're saying I should bail out of the poem with one of those all-weather non-sequiturs. Sure, people can reread the title, great.

So, speaking of change, how about these lengthening days? And what's with this El Niño business? Is the new millennium marking the end of the world as we know it? Are we all going to be globally-warmed like a collective poodle in a microwave until we all explode and there's no one left to clean up the mess?

"More focus." And what in our daily experience is more focused than a microwave oven, one could ask. "Focus on one change."

One of the latest popular causes on the poverty front as reported from Oregon is that of public funding for doctor assisted suicides by the indigent, wherever doctor assisted suicides are allowed at all.

"Otherwise only the economically advantaged can end their lives with dignity, etc. We must make this service available to all, etc."

I can't resist comment.

I know that assisted suicides are a fine art (as are hangings, they tell me) and that they take a lot of preparation and time. But they have got to be cheaper than extended stays in hospitals hooked up to respirators and IVs and heart-pumps and whatever else's been invented lately. All of which are after all just as sophisticated as killing someone neatly and painlessly. And many of those life-extending technologies are already covered in part by public funding, with the result of being serious drains on public funds, at least in the view of a great many people, including many policy-makers, and many voters.

Does that sound like an important concern? It's just a caution. I don't want to end up having more access to assisted suicide than the rich simply to save them money.

How was that for focus? "Too essayish." So I'll just have to rewrite it, then? "Or you could just add a Limerick. That might be fun."

The One That Got Away

A Limerick I'm sure would be fun,

But I know the one here will not be the one

'cause the one I know will

is that one about Bill -

and Monica, et al, that I haven't begun.