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 The Czech company that originally made the plate has corroborated the story of Jay Sherman's great-aunt, certifying that the plate is one of theirs and one of a set made exclusively for use on the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.

Power to the Min

WARNING: This is going to be one of the most diffuse, scattered columns I have ever written. I'm dealing with a concept I don't understand, because I've never had much concrete experience with it. I'm dealing with the concept of power.

So, Tonto. You'd like to make some changes around here, would you? Getting bored with all the picket fences? Want to break out and grow tomatoes, yams, and strawberries in the parking strip, do you, Tonto? Want to raise goats? Want to be the one who wears the mask instead of the one who has to talk to it? Well, get in line, take an application form, and get ready to fill it out, and we'll get back to you in six months if we feel like it.

Sometimes when I get bored I like to multiply and divide numbers to see how big or little things are. Like the other day when nothing was on the TV except Jerry Springer and infomercials for the Psychic Hotline, I got to wondering how big this country really is.

I mean, everyone knows the US is 3,615,211 or so square miles, but what is that in square dog feet? I still don't know, but I found out another cool fact. I found out that if you divide that by the number of people they say we have, and if you know there are 640 acres in a square mile, you get more than eight acres.

Not having grown up on a farm, I immediately converted that answer to football fields, and got almost eight. The US is so big that if you divided it up equally among all its adults and children, everyone would get almost eight football fields worth.

That tells me two things. First, that this country is a lot more crowded than it was in 1864. Back then General Sherman thought there was so much spare space that the freed slaves could all be given 38.72 football fields and a mule and nobody would hardly have to move over to make room. (The trick was to give them land covered with sand that nobody else wanted, and then take it back when nothing grew on it.)

The other thing it tells me is that the problem of homelessness is not that we've run out of places to put people.

No, it comes down to the same thing it came down to in 1864. Power.

People who have power saying that people who don't have power shouldn't be allowed it; it would upset the whole Natural Order of the Universe.

"You can't allow freed slaves to have land." "They never had any land before, they wouldn't know what to do with it." "How can people who only know how to steal chickens raise them?" "It wouldn't look right, have you seen the houses they live in? They're positively eyesores!" "Next thing is, they'll be wanting their children to be able to go to normal schools."

Et cetera. Every possible excuse except the one that gets to the point: "If you give them power, it's less power for me."

Let's see how this works on a smaller scale.

At first glance you would think that if El Centro de la Raza said that 100 or so homeless people could pitch tents on their land until Jan. 16, 2001, that'd be the end of it, wouldn't it?

You'd be right, if El Centro de la Raza had the right to say what happens on El Centro de la Raza land. But in reality, nobody has the right to say what happens on their own land, because power isn't distributed that way.

Go ahead, try painting your house neon mauve, and see what happens.

Or try growing bamboo in your front yard. Or kudzu. That would be interesting, wouldn't it?

Interesting, but not within your power, Tonto. Your Neighborhood Association has some interesting ideas of its own, as does the Department of Construction and Land Use. Their interesting ideas usually involve something called Don't Rock the Boat.

Now if you'd just come in the middle of the night and put up something appealing, like a monolith reminiscent of the monoliths in Stanley Kubrick's "2001, a Space Odyssey," that would be different. That would be art, and this is a forward-looking, artistically sensitive community, which cares about not looking like a bunch of Philistines to the Rest of the World.

What does the Rest of the World have to do with it? Well, they have the power, not us. Didn't you know that, Tonto?