Arena: Etruscan for Sandlot

[from 11/10/09]

Recently while I ate dinner at a community meal, the community TV was on, tuned in to some sort of friendly community game. It was a game of hit-the-ball, and boy, were those people ever bad at it. As I watched in between bites of my corndogs and tatertots, I saw one guy after another try to hit a ball with a stick and out of at least a dozen times only succeed four. They obviously had worked very hard at preparing for this. They even had uniforms with their names written on them, and they furrowed their brows very hard when the ball came their way, but they could only manage to hit it one time in three.

Admittedly the man throwing the ball all the time did a horrible job too, scarcely ever getting it anywhere where you could hit it without letting go of the stick with one hand and reaching for it, something that never occurred to the men holding the sticks.

Later I found out the last of the hits won a game for the "Yankees". So I thought it was some sort of activity in celebration of the Civil War, until I learned the other team named themselves after female horses!

Anyway, that, and some remarks by some friends to me concerning my observations of that, got me thinking about the value of sports vis-à-vis character development. We're always told that the reason we should support sports in schools and in the civic "arena" (ironically, Etruscan for "sandlot") is to build sportsmanship and create self-esteem among our growing, maturing, civic brats, and the civic grown-ups our civic brats grow up to be.

In my day, we didn't have sports in school. We had gym classes in schools. We had sports in the streets. If we wanted to play a game of hit-the-ball we got our own stick, stole some dweeb's ball, took over a dead-end street, and picked sides. We didn't need anybody's support, and we had all the self-esteem we had any use for, and we STILL have it. And if you don't believe me, you can kiss me smack between my big pink cheeks.

The really great thing about it was, if we didn't want to play hit-the-ball, we didn't have to. We could choose what we wanted to play, because WE had freedom. It wasn't, "Everybody get in the van, you're all going to your Little League game whether you like it or not." We could play Hide-and-seek. We could play Toss-the-dweeb. We could choose not to play at all, preferring to spend that time in a sanctuary of worship of the religion of our choice, or pretending to kill foreigners with play guns.

So right now, I'm calling for the separation of Sports and State. I don't care how good sports is for the soul, it's still just like any other religion except more people care about it, and so the "churches" are almost always packed. That alone should be a cue to everybody that we don't need State establishment of teams, they can establish themselves just fine.

As for me, I think if the State subsidizes the sports industry, they should also support the pornographic film industry, which I believe does far more good than sports does. Think about it. Which entertains fat boozers better, a game of football, where you can see men in tight pants bend over every two minutes and pat each others butts? Or porn videos? It's not even close. Also, our youth, who could get varsity credit to be in the videos, would be getting some real workouts. That's good aerobic exercise, without significant risk of head trauma or spinal injury. And it builds character, too, like any other job well-done.

Clearly, our extensive subsidies of sports have not made Americans any more sportsmanlike than ever. They haven't prevented road rage, or the unsporting belief that warfare should only happen in the countries we make wars happen, never here.

I'll Be Your Despot

Last Friday, our very own Mayor Greg Nickels shared top honors with some Indiana dude in the 2008 Mayors’ US Conference of Mayors/ Wal-Mart Stores Climate Protection Awards Program for his "outstanding and innovative practices to increase energy efficiency... and to help curb global warming." Learning of this, suddenly it all became clear. All his strange behavior lately, his obsession with banning plastic bags, plastic bottles, polystyrene, and beach bonfires, and his pushing compact fluorescent light bulbs, was all an angle to get a Wal-Mart Stores award. What? Does it come with a Weber Grill and a lifetime supply of charcoal?

We still have the gun ban, the trolley, and the crazy drive to keep the greenbelts to the squirrels to explain. A lot of people say that if you dig deep enough you'll find that on every issue Greg Nickels is in the pocket of big business, getting both a personal hand up and a hand out, if you know what they mean, but I think there's a very real possibility that Greggers is just keen on making Seattle the bestest gleaming city in the whole wide world, and he's thinking, "gosh, I'm the mayor of Seattle, so I can get it done."

[Below: Nickel's dream for Seattle.]

So we get an order banning handguns at Seattle Center. This is an improvement to Seattle! Now, when someone shoots someone at Seattle Center, they will be guilty of violating a mayoral order. That's something they don't have in other cities.

Naturally Greg wants the greenbelts cleared of homeless people, because doing so drives them to band together in tent cities for protection, and Greg Nickels knows that tent cities are good for Seattle. He's improving Seattle by making tent cities more necessary than ever. By the end of summer Seattle will even have a shantytown called Nickelsville, actually named after the mayor in honor of all that he has been doing to endanger homeless people. Not every mayor can boast a tent city named after him. OK, some people are calling all of New York City, Bloombergville, but it's not the same.

The point is, he genuinely wants to improve Seattle, and I can't argue with that. I also want Seattle improved. We want the same thing! I'd just prefer different methods, such as transparency, constitutional governing, consultation with the people, democracy, and some other silly things like that, and I would select and prioritize improvements differently.

A few ways that I, Copyright Dr. Wes Browning, would improve Seattle if I, rather than Greg Nickels, were your despot:

There would be a Separation of Sports and State. Instead of giving sports franchises public funds, we would exempt them from taxes, as we would any other cult. Ticket prices would have to be voluntary tithes, but failure to pay could be grounds for "excommunication." We would expect a season's ticket to reasonably go for 10% of one's income during that season. Refreshments ("sacraments") would have to be free.

I have always thought that what this country needs to do is reorganize into city states, like the Ancient Greeks had. I would strive to achieve independence of a Seattle City State from the US, while seeking alliances and federation with other city states for as long as it serves our interests, and otherwise crushing competing city states, looting and burning them, and enslaving their people, especially the Redmondites and the Lynnwoodians.

Gun Control: I would arrange for only my friends to have guns. Unlike Nickels, I tell you that up front.

Environment: There's no point in improving an environment if you don't have environs. "Environs" means room or space in which to move around. Downtown should be an environs for people, not cars. I will allow my friends to shoot cars downtown.

Mass transit: Metro knows where I live (we've corresponded.) I will tell them where I like to be. They will take me there when I say, and bring me back when I say. That is my promise.

No cake! Pizza!

Nightmare of Elm Street

This is my last chance to yap about the 2004 presidential election before it happens. Also, I have no idea as of this writing how the World Series has developed, either. So let's talk about a metaphor!

The metaphor I have in mind has to do with the fact that I learned at an early age to dislike sports. I have told a part of this tragedy before. How I wore glasses in grade school. How, when it came time for us kids to play baseball for gym class, my teacher realized the threat that my glasses posed if I were hit in the face with a baseball. As she herself put it, my glasses would break into deadly razor sharp shards and pierce my eyes on their way to my brain, where doctors would be helpless to remove them, and I would either die in violent throes of agony, or I would be a vegetable for the rest of my life.

Therefore she made me go out and play right-field blind. Therefore I was hit on the head with a ball which I could not see coming. Therefore I did not die or become a vegetable, thank you teacher. Instead, I became traumatized for life.

Actually, I had already been traumatized for life three years earlier. That was when my father took me to a Red Sox game. I was six, and I had never seen a baseball game before. At the time we lived at Fort Devens, an army base about 35 or 40 miles from Fenway Park, so seeing the Red Sox was well within reach. It's also relevant that we were living on a street named after a Civil War battle, Chancellorsville Street. It has since been renamed Elm Street -- this is absolutely true -- to make it easier to spell.

You see, when I went to that Red Sox game, I thought the idea was to watch a baseball game, yell on behalf of the good guys, eat some hotdogs, see them win, and go home happy. My father had neglected to tell me that the good guys don't always win.

All he had to do to prepare me was to explain to me what our street name was about. Namely, what did transpire at Chancellorsville, Virginia in early May 1863, when they had the aforementioned battle? He could have said, "Son, we live on Chancellorsville Street. Have I ever told you what happened in the Battle of Chancellorsville?" And I could have said, "No, Dad, you suck. You're always watching Lawrence Welk. You never tell me anything." And he could have smacked me.

Or, he could have told me that when the Battle of Chancellorsville was over, General Robert E. Lee was generally considered the winner, since he had got the higher score. And this would have taught me that the other side (we, my father and I, being Northerners) sometimes wins.

Or, he could have really bored me to tears. He could have told me that, actually, General Lee went into the battle with only about half as many men as his opponent General Hooker, so the higher casualties on Hooker's side in fact represented a smaller percentage of losses for his total forces, and he was thus left with the larger force at the end, so you could very well say that the Union side won after all, so there.

Or, my father could have said that it was exactly during the Battle of Chancellorsville that Stonewall Jackson was fatally shot. Who knows, but maybe that particular casualty by itself cost the Confederates the whole War.

Or, he could have said, go read about it in a book, I'm too busy watching Lawrence Welk to talk to you now.

In any case, I could have learned that winning and losing isn't always what it looks like. I could have learned that the Red Sox could lose that game in 1955 but might still have a chance to win the World Series in 2004, or 2005, or someday after I'm dead. I could have been prepared for the 2000 presidential election, when the guy with the best score lost.

So what is the moral of our story? The moral is, don't demand that street names have to be easy to spell. What do elm trees have to do with presidential elections and baseball games? Nothing. So leave the names of streets alone.

The Bigger the Houseboat, the Better

I hate the thought of staying in a shelter. In fact in all my time being homeless I never once stayed in one.

Gym locker rooms, libraries, marches, square dances, mosh pits, sports stadiums, crowded buses, crowded sidewalks, packed subways, shelters, they're all the same. Places where there are too many people.

If I wanted to sleep six inches on each side from two strangers, I would be a lot friendlier than I am. People who don't know me think I'm shy, because I don't talk much around them. What they don't know is that I'm just keeping quiet to avoid encouraging them to talk to me. Why would I want total strangers to talk at me?

I'd rather sleep in a patch of nettles or poison ivy or on rocks than have to talk sports with some Biff on the next mat.

But today the subject of shelters forces itself on me. I just can't ignore the fact that New York city officials just visited the Bahamas to check out the possibility of buying one or more cruise ships, TO USE AS HOMELESS SHELTERS.

It seems a New York State Supreme Court Justice over there is actually threatening to jail city officials if they can't shelter homeless families within 24 for hours after they apply. So immediately they got the idea to buy one-way tickets to the Bahamas.

No, that's not true. First they tried other things, like putting the families in gyms and defunct hotels and even jail. Some of these ideas worked. Others drew criticism. You had your NIMBYs. You had your whining homeless advocates complaining that housing people in jails is callous and cruel. City governments hate criticism. So hey, let's check out putting them on cruise ships, they thought. Then they thought, oh, there are defunct cruise ships in the Bahamas, let's go look at them. So they did.

Now they actually have some homeless advocates ripping them for this idea. No, I don't know why.

I've got to break ranks here. I think sheltering homeless families on defunct cruise ships is a terrific idea. I would especially like to see it done here in Seattle. I would even consider becoming homeless again if I were sure of getting a suite for myself and Anitra "On Whose Kitchen Floor I Have Sometimes Slept" Freeman, whom I would pass off as family for the purpose.

Think about it. People love houseboats. Houseboats are an integral part of Seattle's tradition. Why should just Tom Hanks get to live on a houseboat? Why shouldn't homeless people live on houseboats, too? OK, so you can't have a separate houseboat for every homeless person or family. So you do the next best thing. You spend a measly $20 million (that's around what the cheaper of the ships in the Bahamas would cost) for a cruise ship. You spend another few million to rip out stuff you won't let the homeless have, like the bar and the disco and the pool. Then you've still got a hell of a houseboat! I would be proud to live on one of these.

The ships examined hold thousands of people. Of course some space would have to be reserved for the crew and the all important activities director. Even without the bar people are going to need activities. It would be cruel to deny people shuffleboard under the circumstances.

Even when you add in janitorial and other maintenance I'll bet the whole thing could be done for a mere thirty million down plus a few million a year. Where can you find a housing bargain for that? And no NIMBYs except at the end closest to shore!

Maybe we could snag some old surplus battleships or submarines to use for shelters, too. The Navy just uses the old ones for target practice anyway. I bet Seattle could get a bunch for no more than what we would spend for one lousy skyscraper. And they already have beds in them. Imagine the savings that represents.

All in all, a sound, realistic, proposal. Let's get started!

My Very Successful Prognostication

I'll confess, I'm not a terribly physical kind of guy. I'm not into rough competitive sports like baseball or rugby or marbles. I don't object to sports altogether, but I prefer the solitary sports, sports in which it's just me competing against myself.

My favorite of those is Olympic Style Nervous Pacing. Incidentally, my best score ever against myself in a pacing competition was 9.6 (it would have been a 10 if it weren't for the Russian judge.) Not to brag, but I did so well I cost myself a medal. Myself was deeply chagrined and never competed again. Really. No, not really, I just wanted to say "chagrined".

So naturally, whenever I am in an earthquake, which seems lately to be whenever I am lying in bed naked in a vulnerable position, or at least once per decade, my feeling about it is not unlike the feeling of a student who, having tried out for the varsity band, was instead picked to be a center for the football team. My feeling is that there has been a horrible mistake, I don't do contact sports. I don't even watch them!

Not that earthquakes can't be entertaining to me. Hey, I can be amused as easily as the next guy. It's just that they don't amuse me for very long. It's like sticking your finger in an electric light socket, isn't it? The fun part is pretty much over when you've realized that you have done it and you haven't suffered massive cardiac arrest yet. So, well, that was an earthquake, wasn't it? Hey, I'm not dead! What fun!

Those of my friends who are sports enthusiasts tell me that part of the value of taking part in sports lies in testing their limits, learning what they can accomplish when they throw themselves into something.

I can see that now. I mean, it isn't often that I become so distracted that I forget where I put my pants. Ordinarily I am on top of those sorts of things; "life's little details." So I guess you could say that the earthquake allowed me to discover new depths of self-distraction, great new vistas of blind panic...

Speaking of senseless violence, how 'bout that Fat Tuesday? There's another contact sport I can live without.

The first few nights of the Mardi Gras violence had no impact at all on me, even though I live in the Pioneer District, because I ignored it. (Some things deserve to be ignored, I believe. Like the practice of confounding the District and the Square. I simply don't let myself hear such idiocy. It's the Pioneer District, damn it. Or the Pioneer Square District, at the worst.)

But Tuesday night, as I was riding the bus home at about 11:30 pm with Anitra "not an actual Italian Duck" Freeman, we were unable to not notice the crowds, as they were slowing the bus so much that we were better off walking. So we continued to our Pioneer District apartment building on foot, and I had to notice the way the police were deployed. Not interspersed with the crowds, but on the periphery, in fact, just next to our building.

So I told Anitra (I'm not making this up), "First, I am going to watch Letterman. Then, I am going to do my Real Change duty, and go out there and see what is going on in those crowds. Then I am going to come back, and together we we will be tear-gassed by these police at about 2 am, when they can't think of any better way to control the crowds, which will be dispersing at about that time, under our very windows."

Did I guess wrong? No, I did not. I did exactly what I said. I watched Letterman. Then I wandered out into the Fat Tuesday crowd. I saw the beginning of the brawl that was filmed so well from the police helicopter. At that point I returned to my apartment, and waited to be tear-gassed. We were tear-gassed right on schedule, at about 2 am.

OK, there is a sport I love. I love predicting what Seattle will do next. It's poetry in motion.