Don't You Dare Duck, Either

Family dysfunction. You don't see me discussing it much because I'm a little bit raw from it. On the one hand, reliving pain is the best source of humor. On the other hand, reliving pain is the best source of relapse, which is the best source of a med-adjustment, which is on the road to Zombie Town and/or a new room at Harborview with built in straps, and new friends bearing needles for those all-important around-the-clock blood tests.

But I think I can avoid all that by not actually making family dysfunction the subject of my talk, but rather the day's primary source of analogies. Therefore I will not be talking directly about such situations as occur such as where Mommy "lovingly" corrects you too hard and breaks your brain permanently. Instead I'll talk about other stuff that happens and only refer to those situations by way of illustration.

So my goal today is to piss away the rest of my column space talking about things that resemble family dysfunctioning that I've known.

How 'bout that Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness?

We're all one big happy family at the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness! Why wouldn't we be? We're ending homelessness! In ten years! We've said so!

Turns out that's a bit like promising to honor and obey until death do us part. After about two or three years a promise like that has a way of morphing into, "You expect me to do what? You want to die?" Which if you think about it is the same thing.

Some of you might recall that back in January I had fun laughing about a thing, in the planning of the ten year's planning, called the Ten Year Plan dashboard. That was a document, or maybe it was a 'device', which was not finished, which WHEN finished would tell the big shots at the top of the planning process when the planning car was in need of oil or gas or a tune-up, so they could order their underlings to take care of that.

It turns out that it was totally dysfunctional of me to -- using the day's primary analogy source -- "snicker at Daddy that way." You're not supposed to snicker at Daddy when Daddy is busy telling you how things are going to happen around here in the future. You're supposed to hold your tongue until Daddy has made a new rule, and then, when you are spoken to, you may say what you think of the new rule, provided you speak respectfully.

It was especially dysfunctional of me because such things as governing dashboards are common in organizations. Even Real Change has been working on one. So I had snickered at Daddy for doing something all Daddies do. Next thing you know I'll be laughing at Daddy for breaking wind.

In a slightly different vein, last week our director Timothy "My Cage Is Too Dirty" Harris smelled something bad coming our way from the Seattle weekly named so. A writer at that weekly was asking questions of Real Change folks that made it seem like either a bogus 'expose' was being manufactured, or that someone had a bean and cheese burrito for breakfast.

We've seen these things elsewhere. A local 'investigation' reveals that some vendors at a street paper make so much money they can afford apartments, and they aren't fired for it! Some vendors meet the conditions of incentive programs to get guaranteed turf and other vendors don't! Vendors are caught drinking alcohol in their time off, as if they were ordinary people, and the director does nothing to stop them!

So Tim did a dysfunctional thing. He had the audacity to use his blog, Apesma's Lament, to object in advance of anything actually happening. The writer hasn't even written a story yet!*

What have we learned today? 1) Never giggle at your Betters. 2) You're not supposed to scream before your Betters hit you.

* That was when I wrote this. The article under discussion, by Huan Hsu, is out now.

Plato Was Right, Too

As I’ve often said, if you want to write stuff but you’re too drunk, or hung-over, or you don’t have any ideas, write about whatever it is that’s keeping you from writing. Today, for me, as I will explain shortly, that would be history.

History. It's like belly button lint. It happens when you aren't looking. One day you find a bush baby nesting in your tummy dock. You had previously forgot you had a tummy dock. Next, a strange glib man you've never met before is an expert on your belly button lint and he's teaching a course on it at the U. You audit his course without notifying the bursar and find out your lint was originally funded by the CIA as part of Operation BAJAX, aimed at world dominance, one belly at a time. Knowing this, or thinking you know it, never seems to make any difference to your life.

And yet, history, whether it's true or not, does affect you even when you can't use it to your own purposes. That's because history is about more than the truth of what really happened. It's about myth. Myth is a living agent. You don't use it; it uses you.

Myth comes from an ancient Greek word meaning “story telling,” but connoting “horse hockey.” Poets, like Homer, often tell historic myth. Seattle poet and editorial committee colleague Stan “Rail-rider” Burriss frequently illustrates his points at the committee table by reciting a history of Real Change. “It's like a dozen years ago when Tim Harris rode the rails into town with nothing but the shoes on his back, a song in his pocket, a computer strapped to his head, and 10 hungry kids tied to his toes. But Tim had a vision. Writing on the backs of unpaid bills in a cold wet cellar, and using his computer in some magical way none of us will ever understand, he pasted together the first Real Change, which he sold out of a friend's garage in downtown Seattle.” These tales usually introduce a motion to use the word “human” in a sentence. They also provide Stan with an opportunity to say “speaks to all of us,” again.

Pretty soon, though, people catch on to what the poets are up to, and they start to employ all the poets at writing satires and sit-coms, precisely to keep them from telling histories, because they only make crap up. People begin listening to the survivors of the history rather than the rhymers of it. Since the survivors are usually identical to the winners, this accounts for the saying, “History is told by the winners.” The correct saying should be, “History is told by the still breathing.”

Even though the survivors tell a truer story than the poets, the resulting history is still myth. Contrary to popular myth, myth is not less myth because it's true. In fact the most powerful myths are the ones that are unassailable fact. In the phrase, “Tell it like it is,” the truth part is the “like it is” part of the phrase. The myth part is the beginning, the “tell it” part. The “tell it” part is an essential component.

“So, Wes, What are you trying to tell us?” I'm trying to tell you I didn't accumulate the usual pile of news stories to comment on this morning because I spent all last night jerking around with the Real Change History page, a work in progress begun by Tim Harris on the new Real Change Wiki. There was a lot of stuff in there that spoke to me, stuff wrapped up with Real Change like homelessness in Seattle, homeless activists, and advocates. I was moved to speak back, because it was the human thing to do.

That's how it is with myth. It draws you into itself. As always, Stan is right, on the other side of my morning coffee.