Yo Mama Is A SUV

When I was six I knew that I would never lack a home. I could stay at my parents until I finished college. After that, I could always sleep in my spaceship, if necessary.

As I grew older, I came to realize that I was being silly. It didn't have to be a spaceship. It only had to be an all-terrain ground vehicle with a self-contained ecology. The ecology would include me of course. It would have a fully automated hydroponics system that would not only grow my food for me, but prepare it and serve it to me. If it weren't also a spaceship, that would be OK. It could be a time machine, for instance.

I pictured the thing being only half as long as the average camper.

My design didn't even call for a convenient door, because there would generally be no reason to leave the contraption. I imagined that I would have a television screen with which to communicate to the outside world. I could manipulate external objects with robot arms. Somehow all the books I might want to read would fit in the on-board computer.

My seat would recline to a bed. When I needed exercise I could pull a lever (all the best inventions were controlled by levers and large impressive dials in those days) and suitable exercising devices would appear at my hands and feet.

Eventually, I began to sense a crucial flaw in the design: there was no passenger seat. I came to realize that there must not only be a passenger seat, but there must be no levers between it and me. So I was finally led to appreciate the idea of a camper with a separate space for a bed.

Campers, and their latest incarnations, the SUVs, are not just alternative homes that can ease the suffering of the houseless, they are also archetypes. The security they represent is the security of the womb. I am sure that this is why so many American guys feel they have to have an SUV. They miss their mothers, in a physical way.

Clearly though, the homeless have especially good reasons to appreciate the camper. Lets say you live in Lynnwood, in a house, and the backwards government of Lynnwood criminalizes people who live in houses. Well, then, you're stuck. But now, suppose you live in Lynnwood in a camper, and the backwards government of Lynnwood criminalizes people who live in campers. Then you can drive to Bothell and wait for them to be backwards. Bothell is prettier anyway.

Lynnwood's stated problem with the camper-endowed and other such homeless, is that they often relieve themselves in bushes. This doesn't prevent everybody in Lynnwood from owning campers and/or SUVs and polluting the air I breathe by driving them unnecessarily to and from work. Taking a daily crap in the air is still OK for Lynnwood, Everett, and Mark Sidran. Just keep it off the rhododendron roots.

Then there are people like Dave, whose real name is also fake. Dave is an old friend of mine who once made the mistake of morally opposing a war while people with guns were transporting him to it. They put him in the brig. After that his life sort of went downhill.

What makes Dave interesting, besides being a man of convictions, is that he is a whiz at creating shelter in deep forest, but his livelihood (recycling the cast-off toys of the middle and upper classes) depends on living in the city. So he would be a perfect candidate for a camper, except he can't drive.

But Dave shares the dream we all have for that mobile womb. He just has had scale his dream back to more of a rickshaw-like vehicle. He would build a home on wheels which he could physically pull from parking space to parking space as needed.

Such dreams are so powerful that they consume men like Dave, so that they spend years fretting over blue prints of the perfect home away from mother, and never demand more from society than that their dreams should be possible.

Those Colorful Natives

Lets talk about the alternatively homed!

What I have in mind here is a romp through the world of the alternatively homed, sort of like the way that guy with the deep voice on Nature romps through 20 species on hour showing you all the exciting ways they all have adapted to their little niches. Or big niches, as the case may be. Or think of this as a sketch for a National Geographic special, "Lost Tribes of the Suburban-ghetti", or something like that.

Adaptation is the key concept here. Why is it, I'm wondering, that we admire so much the way that indigenous people like the Inuit, the Australian Aborigines, the Hopi, the Dayaks, the Bush People of Africa, the Maori, the Swedes, all used to build their huts, igloos, lean-tos or whatever, praising it as proof of Man's adaptability in the face of harsh Nature, but when someone does it down the street they're seen as outlaws?

Am I the only guy in this city who's seen the "Gods Must Be Crazy?"

What does the attraction of Survivor mean if the same people who make it number one in the ratings also spit on the real thing when they see it? Maybe it's the same thrill that white Americans got watching Red Dawn. They spent years preaching freedom while snuffing it out everywhere in the world it appeared. Then they used the magic of cinema to identify themselves as the "real" freedom fighters. Look at me, I can be a guerrilla warrior too, for seven dollars, four at matinee.

Or, hey, I can be Kevin Costner and live in a teepee. For the price of the video I can learn to spell it tipi and impress my PC friends.

Meanwhile there are a hundred men, women and children right here in this city who are surviving in tents because they have to. They aren't doing it to identify with the oppressed, they are the oppressed. How about celebrating their successes at survival now, instead of waiting for the National Geographic special, or the Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts version? How about it?

But I digress. I was going to talk about other alternative homenesses. Not just communal tenting.

The road nomad. This is usually someone with at least four wheels, horses being out of fashion and motorcycles providing little shelter. As I learned personally years ago, even a car that doesn't run can provide decent shelter if it is fortuitously parked.

My Home Was a '69 Rambler

Opus 7, Verse 2

My home was a '69 Rambler

In a warm garage it was parked

My home was a '69 Rambler

As I already have remarked.

[Oh Rambler, Oh Rambler, Bring back my Rambler to me, etc.]

If the garage is right, who needs the car? I am thinking now of an actual person, a legally blind old man whose name wasn't Angus but should have been, who would have been home in the Highlands with Lassie, a serviceable knife, and someone else's flock.

Angus found himself an aging benefactor, some old woman, who rented him an unused one-car garage for ten dollars a month "for storage". Angus then stored himself. He paid his rent by clearing the neighborhood of aluminum cans every day. The earnings provided him enough extra money that he could spend his spare time in dignity drinking coffee at a 24-hour establishment as an honored customer, where he buried himself in books hour after hour, until his benefactor died.

Thanks to my ranting I've run out of space. But I'll get back to this. More "Lives of the Alternatively Homed," later.

Electric Juju Miracle Man

"He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher," Walt Whitman said. Walter, like Emily Dickinson, had a knack for saying things in a way designed to raise eyebrows on a dead man.

What teacher? I was lucky in school in that I was never assigned poetry by either Emily or Walt. So when I see that word "teacher", I don't think of some high school English teacher. Instead, I think of Walter himself in his own natural teachy-ness, being as Zen as he ever could be. (As in If you meet the Buddha on the Road, kill him.)

If it weren't for a sprinkling of quotes like that, you could definitely get the idea that Walt Whitman was deeper into himself than Donald Trump. In fact Walt was a whiz at selling himself.

"Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity, /When I give I give myself." After reading that, don't you feel guilty for not giving Walter more of your time?

He sang the body electric. Now you have to put that into its historical context. Back in Walt's day electricity wasn't the thing more common in households than bleach. In Walt's day, electricity was almost synonymous with juju.

Walt said, "Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle." Translation -- "I got juju."

Walt said, "The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual." Translation -- "The juju stops here."

Walt wrote, "This is no book; who touches this touches a man." Translation -- "I got juju to spare, some of it's spilled into these poems."

My own favorite Whitman sample: "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes)." Translation -- "I am mass juju, I cast juju shadow."

Speaking of selling and persuasion, experts agree that there are six basic factors that influence humans to comply with requests or give in to sales pitches. These are reciprocation, consistency, social validation, liking, authority, and scarcity. I could illustrate the use of these six factors with any successful advertising campaign, but this column isn't about Madison Avenue. So instead I will show you how to use these factors to sell NIMBYs on Tent City.

To the friendly, caring, people of Seattle:

You have probably heard many appeals on behalf of Tent City [social validation], but have you heard of the great benefits that Tent City has to offer to your community?

Yes, there is only one Tent City in Seattle [scarcity], and it can be yours! The homeless people who make up Seattle's Tent City are the cream of the crop [scarcity], the hardest working 2 percent.

Listen to what Dave, a good-looking well-groomed white [liking] policeman [authority] has to say about Tent City's homeless people. "I encounter homeless people everywhere. But nowhere have I found more cheerful [liking] and energetic homeless people than at Tent City. And they are so clean!" [liking]

Cynthia R., a happy, smiling, independently wealthy [social validation, liking, authority] housewife, is typical of many who have been fortunate to live next door to Tent City. She says, "Those homeless men were great! The way they scared off prowlers, my! We had almost no crime in our neighborhood the weeks they were here. And they were so sober, what a good example to our children. If only we could repay them!" [reciprocation]

Seattle has so far provided Tent City with 17 sites in one year. [consistency] That shows just how popular Tent City has been. [social validation] Now isn't it time you invited Tent City to live next door to you?

Give yourself mass juju!

Hope Is The Thing With A Roof

Imagine what it would have been like if Emily Dickinson had ever been homeless. I think we can say this much for sure: it would have been a drag on her career. Ha, ha, just kidding. No, seriously, her whole image would have been blown! She was so far from being homeless, she was the Anti-Homeless* Poet. Any ideas she might have had on the subject would have been purely theoretical.

Emily Dickinson said, "There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away." Likewise, there is no frigate like a pair of old dirty gym socks to haul our breath to China to be sold into slavery. Another exceptional frigate is the homeless frigate. Where does the homeless frigate take us? Could we get there some other way? What's with the hardtack and salted limes? Shuffleboard, anyone?

Maybe since the book frigate takes us on a world cruise, the homeless frigate does the opposite, it takes us to a house in the middle of Amherst.

Come to think of it, Emily was pretty theoretical on most subjects, wasn't she? Emily Dickinson called hope the thing with feathers. If Emily had your hope, what kind of thing would it be? My hope is the thing with pizza stains down its front. Maybe your hope has chocolate all over its face.

According to Emily, a word starts to live when you say it. That means Emily D. was an early exponent of meme theory. She must have known that the only way to kill words outright is to delete them from all memory files. It's like killing blackberries. The only practical way to kill them in your own back yard is to crowd them out with something worse. Go ahead, try it. Kill the word "is". Good luck.

"A wounded deer leaps the highest." How would Emily have known? What was she, some kind of sadist, wandering through the forest poking various animals in the butt? Maybe the wolverine jumps higher, huh? Always the theorist.

Then again, maybe she was torturing more than just animals. She also said, "I like a look of agony, /Because I know it's true; /Men do not sham convulsion, /Nor simulate a throe." Could this be insight born of experiment?

"Where thou art, that is home." All afternoon my roof leaked. It had a hole in it as big as the sky. No, wait, that was the sky. Doh.

Poverty is the Gust

by Copyright Dr. Wes Browning

Sing to the tune of the Gilligan's Island Theme

Poverty is the blowing Gust

That flattens us to the dirt

And drags us down an ugly ditch,

While ripping up our shirt;

It leaves us there, but lookit how

We build ourselves a yurt,

We're a little worn and slightly torn

We add up all the hurt.

Speaking of hurt, I notice from the news reports that the Liberty Bell was seriously injured by a homeless man the other day.

Let me get this straight. A piece of crap bell that was given to us by the English in 1752 and never worked is so important to us that if anyone should dent it they get locked up?

Frank Eidmann, director of special projects for the Independence National Historic Park had this to say: "Anyone who attacks a national symbol is disturbed. What he was disturbed about, we don't know."

Gosh, I don't know, Frank, let me think could it be because he is homeless, Frank, could that be the problem??!!

The man could get five years for, among other things, "damaging an archaeological resource" (I'm not making this up.)

The Liberty Bell is not an archaeological resource. It's a piece of junk, which was used by the Abolitionists to symbolize this country's failure to live up to its promise of freedom for all. That is how it got its name, that is the only reason it has been preserved.

All this man did was remind us of that fact.

* In the sense of physics, not sentiment. So if she every encountered a homeless version of herself the two would have annihilated each other & obliterated Massachusetts.

Bread and Putter

While we at Real Change are celebrating the first birthday of the current avatar of Tent City, we are also trying hard to understand why some people don't appreciate it as much as we do, so that we can be on the cutting edge of persuasion, as we change their minds, and so make the street papers in other cities jealous, and steal their women.

I mean, getting to the persuading part, the bottom line is, there aren't enough shelter beds, and affordable housing hasn't happened. Living together in tents is just the safest alternative to sleeping in doorways. Ya'll don't want people sleeping in doorways, right?

I know this is hard for some of you, so let me run that at you again. Raise your hands, everyone who wants the homeless who don't get into shelters to sleep in their own front doorway. Hmmm, I thought so. Next, hands from those of you who want them sleeping in your neighbor's doorway. Better. Now lets see hands for people who wants them to sleep isolated from each other in public parks. OK, not bad. Now how many hands do we have for them sleeping in tents somewhere together?

Hello? You in the back! It's the last alternative! You have to raise your hand sometime, because these people are going to sleep somewhere! You don't get to just sit on your hands like the problem will go away. People need to sleep!

Speaking of human needs, just before I sat down to write this masterpiece I noticed I was puttering. A lot of you will say I am still puttering even now as I type, especially those of you who know what the word means.

to putter, v, to busy or occupy oneself in a leisurely, casual, or ineffective manner.

Yes, I was puttering. And I noticed! And it occurred to me that I rarely notice when I have been puttering, I normally just putter about obliviously, but that in reality I must spend two-thirds of my waking life puttering, and have always done so, even when I was gainfully employed. Although of course we generally called it something else then.

We called it paper clip stuffing, or arranging our files, or fulfilling personal directives, or sorting priorities.

Suddenly I had an epiphany! I became aware, as I had never been aware before, of the extent to which puttering is a human need. I now realize that puttering is a need right up there with food and shelter and safety and moist towelettes. No, seriously, I realized that the need "to putter", in your Maslow hierarchy of needs, must precede all the noble sounding ones, like the need "to art" or the need "to science", or the need "to make lame jokes", or even the need "to mention moist towelettes repeatedly." Moist towelettes.

It explains so much. It explains for instance, why I am so fond of things that explain things. It explains why most men can't grow a beard, they trim it to death. It explains couch surfing. It explains cubicle art.

You know what I'm talking about. Cubicle art is the greatest contemporary American folk art form. Not Cubist Art. Cubicle art. You have a cubicle at work. You decorate it with stuff. That's it. All you get is the one cubicle. It's similar to hanging fuzzy dice in your car, only now it's a cubicle, not a car.

Or it could be a car, too. People still express their puttering need through their cars, even though cubicles have become the more popular medium. And what's the most popular medium of all?

The home, of course.

I have a dream. I dream of the day when every man, woman and child of this great nation of ours has at least a cubicle, or the equivalent, to putter in. I dream of the day when that puttering will be recognized, not only as leisurely casual and ineffective, but as the very stuff of life.

I dream of a day when people will be valued not for the size of their homes, or whether they have one or not, but for the puttering that they can do, when given the chance.

Moist towelettes!

We Happy Poor

Well, here we are again. It's income tax time and, to make matters worse, the stock market is sagging under the combined weight of dozens of beached dot-coms and the seasonal tax-time supply glut. It's time for all the rich people to come out and cry and whimper about how miserable their lives are.

And, what a coincidence, Bush's tax cut proposal is on the agenda in Washington, DC.

Meanwhile, thanks to my degenerate choice of a poverty-inducing lifestyle, I am able to live a lazy life of luxury off the taxes of the hard-working rich. Not only do I not have to pay income tax, but I don't have to pay servants, I don't have to pay for gasoline for my cars and yachts (I don't have any), I don't have to pay interest on my credit card debt (no credit card), and I don't need an expensive accountant. Neener, neener.

One thing fascinates me about all this. If I have it so good, why aren't the rich falling all over each other trying to join me in my idyllic life of ease?

Could it be they see drawbacks to my happy-go-lucky lifestyle? Even though I am not in a thirty percent tax bracket? But if there are drawbacks so severe that even the rich, who can have anything they want, would not be poor like me, then, perhaps those drawbacks rate some kind of compensation, no?

FOR EXAMPLE. Lately we have all had to see, on TV, over and over again, a bunch of basketball show-offs dribble and pass a basketball around for a minute, only to finish with a Swish ™ in the corner of the picture tube.

If I was rich I bet I could afford some gadget to filter that minute of aggravation out. But I am poor. Drawback! I have to watch this stupid display thirty times per hour, all the while developing an irresistible urge to wear basketball shorts.

Finally I break down. I buy basketball shorts. Hundreds of them. I spend all my beer money for a month on basketball shorts. I have nothing else to wear, I can't go to a concert at Benaroya Hall, they won't let me in, I'm always wearing basketball shorts. My cultural life deteriorates.

I go to public meetings of the City Council, but no one takes me seriously, because I am wearing basketball shorts. My political life crumbles. I am reduced to merely voting reactively, i.e., I become (eewww) a reactionary voter, because I had to sell my cut-off Levis to buy basketball shorts.

Then, just when I think my life could not sink any lower, my woman leaves me for a man who wears spandex.

Somewhere, maybe across the continent, maybe not even in this country, is a vice president of Random Crap Merchandise in charge of commercials for basketball shorts, who, thanks to all my purchases got a twenty percent raise boosting him into the tax bracket where they make you give them two-thirds of all the money you make, and then they paddle you if you make more. Lets call him Doug.

Doug's life is so horrible. In return for making me addicted to basketball shorts, all he gets is oodles of money and the envy of the world. He can't ever enjoy the simpler things in life that I had before he made his fortune off my consumption.

As Doug himself would say, "Companies like mine, that fulfill no real pre-existing consumer need, and only draw speculative venture capital for a while and then vanish in a puff of smoke, don't grow on trees. It takes real sweat and imagination and a gift for bilking investors to create the kind of wealth that I have. It takes clever exploitation of cheap overseas labor, leaving US labor sucking lemons. And it requires a deep understanding of the psychology of the buying public, that only well paid con-artist consultants can provide."

"And then the people, through their representatives, want to take a percentage of it back. Damn."

"Oh well, at least I still have a life. Not like that basketball-shorts-wearing loser Wes Browning."

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.