Don’t Rain on My Pleasure

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take public morning activities, for example.

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

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

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

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

Get Rich Quick

Last time we mentioned the homeless Kenyan teenager who found a roughly $5000 prize while urinating in a Nairobi park. As we said then, our motivation in mentioning that story was mainly to be able to use the word "urinating" repeatedly. As you can see, it can continue to serve that purpose.

But just when we were thinking that the Kenyan's story was one of a kind, we saw this one concerning a homeless Dallas man. Jay Sherman found out that a plate that his great-aunt passed on to him really came from the Titanic, the sinking of which she survived. The Czech company that originally made the plate has corroborated the story of Jay Sherman's great-aunt, certifying that the plate is one of theirs and one of a set made exclusively for use on the Titanic. So Mr. Sherman put it on E-bay with an asking bid of $49,995. As of this writing we don't know if any bids of that magnitude have been made but we are definitely rooting for Jay.

We are so happy for him and so much want him to succeed that if anyone out there were to come up with $49,985, we would kick in the last ten dollars to make the sale happen. That's a promise from me, Wes "Always Poised to Help in a Token Way" Browning. (I am subtly acknowledging a failing. Please forgive.)

In my own experience the finest way to get out of any one particular bout of homelessness is to have someone related to you die and leave you money. I highly recommend that the inheritance be in the form of cash, preferably small bills, personally handed to you in a sack by the dying relative just at the last moment, so they can hear you graciously thank them before you get the hell out of there and rent an apartment.

In my own case I didn't get cash. The money was held up in probate for three years. It came in the form of a check from a lawyer and I had to split it 50-50 with the ex as per the divorce decree or I wouldn't have been allowed to cash it at all. But my half paid for a deposit and a month's rent, new clothes, and three month's worth of groceries, so I didn't complain.

Another technique that you can use to get out of being homeless is to have a close friend leave the state and bestow upon you his apartment with the deposit and a month's rent already paid, just because he thinks you’re a cool guy who deserves a break. It's not as good as cash from a dead person because you don't get to choose the neighborhood, but it beats the freeway underpass, on account of the extra walls.

Some people get out of homelessness by selling drugs. I don't recommend this technique at all because it is not only illegal but puts you in dangerous company. I only mention it in passing here because I hear a lot of people say that they're afraid of homeless people because they're all "drug dealers and prostitutes." I guarantee you, if anybody you meet is a drug dealer or a prostitute, and they're any good at it, they're making enough for a room. The same goes for diamond smugglers and professional car thieves. In fact, the only diamond smuggler I ever met owned a house near Wedgwood outright, with a huge yard and cherry trees and a turn-around driveway. People like that don't get rained on.

Another way to get out of homelessness is to have the incredible good fortune to live in a society where the general public understands that (a) homelessness is the result of long-standing public policy decisions that have over time eroded the supply of affordable housing causing hundreds of thousands of people to be priced out of the housing market and to thereby lose the means necessary to maintain their employability and make themselves viable consumers of commercial housing, and that (b) the same public (the general public who originally stood by and allowed those public policies to go into effect and in some cases even clamored for them) has the moral responsibility to correct the effects of those public policy decisions, even to altogether reverse them.

But we've got a long wait now before anything like that will ever happen. In the meantime, let's keep our eyes open while we urinate in parks used by treasure hunts to hide prizes, and let's inherit plates imagined to have great historical value by folks with more money than they need.

Like Nipples on a Dude

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like, duh.

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

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

Useful is rare, useless is everywhere.

The Good, the Bad, and the Invisible

The good news: Saddam Hussein is effectively gone. The bad news: Bush and company can't tell the difference between doing something good and doing something good in a way that doesn't screw up everything else in the world.

You can't learn from a mistake you can't see. The administration is too busy dancing around the ball to realize they're in the wrong end zone. We haven't stopped terrorism. We've gone begging for it.

Meanwhile I have a cold. I had this cold two weeks ago, see, and I didn't want it, so I gave it to Anitra "on whose kitchen floor I have sometimes slept" Freeman. I gave her my cold in a duck-licking frenzy. I am not proud of it, I'm only reporting the facts.

But then, two days ago, Anitra gave me my cold back. No fair! She was supposed to pass it on! Now I will have to punish her by holding the cold just until she loses it and then giving it back to her again. That will teach her not to break the rules.

I'm just kidding, of course. The only rules here that matter are the rules of viruses and bacteria and immune systems and biology in general. This however brings up the subject of homelessness.

The crime of allowing homelessness to happen is a form of rape. Rape occurs when someone's own body and bodily functions are turned into weapons against them. Rape doesn't require penetration. It's already rape when you tell someone that they can't use your bathroom, forcing them to go in the alley and get arrested. It's already rape when you refuse to let someone sleep even in your cold doorway, so they have to sleep in the colder alley and get run over by a truck.

Boy, there's nothing that brings the humor level of a conversation down faster than the word rape, don't you think? Rape, rape, rape, rape. But what can I do? It's a fact. Sleep, urination, and defecation are physical necessities, and if you deny them to people it's no different than forcing them to participate in one of your BDSM fantasies without their permission.

Evidently I can complain about the crime of allowing homelessness to happen for seventy-seven years, and no one's going to do anything about it just because I say they should. So I keep looking for ways to make the point that it's wrong without sounding like I'm complaining. Maybe appealing to people's sense of self-preservation is the way to go.

You can't learn from a mistake you can't see. If you've never been homeless you probably can't understand how it could be regarded as a form of rape. The lesson may be lost on you.

But, hey, you have a vulnerable body too. You are not invincible. Have you been following the progress of SARS? OK, maybe SARS isn't the plague that's going to do you in. But the CIA says SARS is just the beginning so get ready for worse.

Here's a heads-up for everyone: when a disease becomes endemic you are only as safe as the most vulnerable populations among you. If there are people among you whose health is consistently neglected the disease will spread like wildfire among them, and you will be in line for it.

My biggest fear right now is that SARS will spread to third-world areas of Africa, for example, where there is inadequate medical care. There will be no controlling it globally at that point. My second greatest fear is that American homeless shelters will be infected with it. Then there will be no controlling it in our cities.

OK, suppose you don't have that much sense of self-preservation. How about Wes-preservation? I live directly across from a mission. If you don't care about whether you get SARS or not, please have a care for poor highly infect-able me. Please help eradicate homeless shelters so there are fewer opportunities for viruses to attack my tender air passages. Thank you.