Seattle Likes Shiny Things

What is it about this city that makes us the perfect final resting place for Captain Kirk's command chair?

What other city is so enamored of 1960's-ish retro futuristic junk? Think of it: it's basically a big glorified swivel chair. Does it recline? Does it have a vibrator? Does it wash your feet? I don't think so. So what good is it? It was Captain Kirk's glorified swivel chair, that's what.

Of course, even though Seattle has the stupid chair, and even though I hang in Belltown within walking distance of it every day, I will never be able to confirm that it doesn't do those things. That's because Seattle isn't Star Trek world, where they eliminate money and people fight Klingons purely for self-fulfillment and the opportunity to have sex with space aliens. Instead, Seattle is Paul Allen world, where you need money more than ever, and I'm several billion dollars short.

I'm not blaming Mr. Allen for it, just holding him up as an excellent example of a Seattle-variety futurism junky. He embodies the disease, what I like to call futuritis. That would be, namely, the desire to immerse oneself in a world full of toys that would have represented the future if found lying around the place in say, 1962, while not even bothering to try to realize any of the social advances associated with the science fiction that popularized said toys.

It doesn't matter if the toys are really advanced technologically or not. They only have to be associated with futurism. So, for example, a monorail is just a pigeon-toed articulated bus driven back and forth on a dedicated, narrow, elevated, road. The technology is more than 80 years old. But make it shiny and run it through buildings instead of around them, like those transport tubes on the cover of 1940's science fiction magazines, and you've got something that scratches the futuritis itch.

What concerns me is that in the future there's a handful of ace pilots, engineers, and rich space-tourists, but nobody's sweeping the streets. Paul Allen is going to be able to rocket-man himself from West Seattle to Ballard in less time than it takes to fry an egg, but the rest of us will be living in the cardboard boxes the rocket packs come in.

Five beautiful illustrations of what I speak are provided by our new space-age gleaming robot toilets.

They're self-cleaning, when they work. When they don't work they need to be fixed. This can keep maybe a handful of specially trained hotshot automation maintenance experts pulling down the big bucks. That's great, until you consider that if the toilets didn't clean themselves we could spend the same money supporting a team of 15 or 20 janitors and their supervisors to clean them around the clock after every use.

But no, that wouldn't be futuristic. Janitors don't gleam. Anyway, we're Seattle, city of hotshot engineers and technicians. You have to care for your own, right? Let the janitors get work in Pittsburgh.

Besides, in the future we're creating, anyone working here as a janitor won't be able to make enough money to live. That's because we'll make sure that all necessities come only in shiny, gleaming, expensive, packages. So if you're not one of the highly paid professionals we favor, you won't be able to afford the life we shaped for you. No problem for us professionals: the toilets will clean themselves.

In Star Trek it all works because the Federation passes out energy-matter materializers like our government used to pass out cheese. Give a man a piece of cheese, he eats for a day; give a man an energy-matter materializer and an endless supply of dilithium crystals to power it, he can eat for life and also materialize slippers and jockey shorts whenever he needs them.

It's just the opposite of what futuritis gets us. In Seattle, science costs money, and technology doesn't make slippers.

It's all about priorities. We'd rather spend millions connecting West Seattle to Ballard, than making them each better places to be. We'd rather pay one technician than five unskilled laborers. We want a future full of toys, with no more people than absolutely necessary.

Dr. Wes Endorses Anchovies

It's election time in the Emerald City again!

We look forward to these elections the way we look forward to bleeding gums. Especially the mayoral election.

As I am writing this it appears that the race for mayor will come down to a November run-off between my fifth and sixth choices respectively. Or are they my seventh and eighth choices? I forget how many are running and whether or not Charlie Chong is in or out this time.

One thing I will not be doing this year. I will not be openly endorsing any candidates. In particular, I will not be endorsing my customary write-in candidate, me. So don't anybody vote for me. Forget I even mentioned ever having been a write-in candidate. It didn't happen. We are not doing that this time. Vote for one of the suits or find some other write-in candidate.

I know this comes as a huge disappointment to a great many of you, but I have concluded that I am not mayoral material. I knew this as soon as I saw the results of the questionaires we sent out to the real candidates. How could I ever compete with so many Glinda-the-Good-Witches? Or Dorothy herself? I am not in that league. I am but one lowly flying monkey. Hang me on a wire and heave me out a parapet, but whatever you do don't vote for me.

Other reasons I won't endorse myself, in no particular order, are:

The beard didn't work for Lowry, it won't work for me.

The book I am currently reading has more alien characters in it than are on the City Council.

I think the city should have smart toilets that are so smart they let themselves be cleaned by paid workers.

I believe buses should be free for everybody, paid for by the businesses who would benefit from the ease in transportation, ie. all of them.

If something like WTO happened while I was mayor, the police would be SO busted.

My policy of wedgies for bad bills is not likely to be approved.

Narrow political base, primarily confined to eaters of pizzas with pepperoni and mushrooms and black olives with anchovies. Thus my hopes would be dashed by the powerful anti-anchovy faction.

Real Change won't let me.

But ultimately it just comes down to this: flying monkeys shouldn't be mayors. I think we can all agree on that, at least.

What can't we agree on? Well, let's see, how about this: Should it be possible for Seattle Times staff to be able to tell if a man sitting in their park is dead or not? Have people gone totally stupid and insensitive?

So Lukas David Stidd died across the street from the Seattle Times building. Nobody working there noticed that he was dead for a long time, and Nicole Brodeur sees tragedy in this. That it wasn't noticed that he was dead. Not that he was dead, but that no one noticed. As if everyone who passed should have stopped to take his pulse.

As if the problem was that there aren't enough people out there trained to tell a corpse from the sleeping.

No, that's not the problem. The problem is that people die on the streets all the time, and it is time to get them off the streets so that doesn't happen anymore.

Breaking News: Public Toilets

Lets deal with the elasticity of light.

Once again we at Adventures in Poetry have had the good fortune to bless a North American Street Newspaper Association conference with our presence. This one was at San Francisco. Fog City, USA.

Actually it didn't really fog while we were there, unless you count the conference. Something was dreadfully wrong. There was no infighting! What was up with that?! How could there have been seventy homeless and formerly homeless progressives in the same auditorium without any infighting?

Were they ill? Was it the flu making its rounds? Or was the food supplied by Food Not Bombs more satiating, owing to the added chicken? Was it something in the smoke, a Cheech and Chong effect? Or had the participants all learned their lesson from previous NASNA conferences that had been derailed by the disputations of the More-Progressive-Than-Thou?

No, they had not, I am here to tell you. Instead, they were distracted by a bigger enemy than each other. They were busy attacking the mainstream press, especially the San Francisco Chronicle.

Here's the deal. The Chronicle has been making an issue of the homeless, especially those who hang out on San Francisco's main drag, Market Street. It's mostly typical Sidranesque stuff, blaming the victim for bleeding on the nice clean sidewalk kind of stuff.

It's a bit more convoluted though. SF has expensive self-cleaning toilets, for instance, similar to the kind Seattle is planning to buy. So before complaining about homeless people urinating and defecating behind dumpsters, it's necessary for them to explain that the self-cleaning toilets around Market Street are mostly broken. But that's blamed on the homeless too. It's all those "homeless AND prostitutes AND drug addicts". That's the phrase used over and over again, as if those three categories were equivalent.

San Francisco's television isn't too enlightened either. One television report of a demonstration on behalf of the homeless briefly showed demonstrators talking followed by a long sequence of archived shots of people breaking laws on the sidewalks, as if only homeless people use sidewalks, as if the demonstrators were supporting criminals, and as if weeks of archived shots were all showing crimes that happened yesterday. It's a crime wave! Run for your lives!

It's too bad we don't have anything as bad as the SF Chronicle here in Seattle. Think of the fun we could have verbally abusing them. Also it would make it that much harder for us to mistake ourselves for mainstream, a fate worse than oblivion.

Sometimes, reading the Weekly, I'm not so sure. Maybe we're mainstream and we don't know it? What if the rest of NASNA found out, in time for next year's conference? What if Perfesser Harris were really Mike Mailway? What if Anitra "too much" Freeman were really Nicole Brodeur? What if I was Jean Godden? No wait, that wouldn't be a bad thing. I meant, what if I were Erik Lacitus? The horror, the horror.

If this were a mainstream column, would there be any difference? Well, for one thing, there'd be a lot fewer questions, and a lot more answers, surely. The mainstream press in this country always has all the answers for everything. How to improve your marriage and still play more golf, Life and the Arts, D2!

This couldn't be Adventures in Poetry. There is no mainstream poetry, contrary to popular misconception. We would be Excursions in Prose. Or Strolls in Speech.

But I think the biggest difference would be the lack of reflection. You have to be able to stop before you can stop and reflect. They don't call it a stream for nothing.