Where Ideas Go to Die

On the 24th of February 2007, it was confirmed that 100 percent of all of us have blogs. I have three of them. Anitra “Netmama” Freeman has a different blog for every skirt in her closet. Timothy “From Him All Power Comes; To Him All Praise Flows” Harris, our Director, has a blog. You, dear reader, have a blog, whether you know it or not. Maybe you have a daughter who was born last week. Your daughter, though she has never touched an internet-connected device, has a blog with her name on it. Her profile lists her favorite kinds of music. She’s into stuff you grew out of in the ’90s.

Since you all have blogs, you know how I feel when people beg me to use their ideas for this column. You know that writing a column, or a blog, is something that has to come from the soul. Like the time you posted all your eggplant recipes. You can’t be handed material like that. It has to flow from the gut.

Now my gut says I need to devote this column to detailed excuses for not using the unsolicited ideas I get.

Here’s one I get every week. “You know what you should do, Dr. Wes? You should write a column that tells the truth about being homeless. Let people know how bad it is on the streets. Oh, what’s that? You did it already? 200 times? In 200 different ways? Well, you need to do it again. A good idea doesn’t become bad just because it’s been done 200 times.”

According to this reasoning, I, Dr. Wes Browning, should personally record a cover of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. I should re-lose my virginity in a cheap room in upstate NY immediately. I must order the Orange Mandarin Duck for dinner tonight and the next night and the next, until it kills me.

Here’s another one I get a lot. “I stay at XYZ Mission a lot, and their management’s all corrupt. You should write about that.”

“No, you stayed there, you saw the corruption; you write about it.”

“But they won’t let me stay there anymore.”

“Write it anonymously and bring us the facts, and if they check out we’ll print it.”

“They’ll find out it was me.”

“I’ll be over here contemplating my spine while you find yours.” I learned when I was 19, you don’t empower people by letting them bleed your nipples.

I constantly have to ask the question, “You know it’s a humor column, don’t you?”

“You should talk about violence against homeless people, all the time, until people do something about it.”

“What’s the rest of the paper for?”

“You have to write about it too. All the time.” All right, here’s your hate-crime news o’ the week: It’s being widely reported that a third of all violent U.S. hate-crimes against homeless people happen in Florida. Ha. Chads. Jeb Bush. Old people. Cuban refugees. Teenagers. Fort Lauderdale. Spring Breaks. Hilarious stuff.

On Jan. 11, 2001, I wrote that today the U.S. only has room for eight acres per man, woman, and child, even counting swamps, garbage dumps, and shopping malls. So if everyone regardless of race had to get 40 acres and a mule we’d need to first conquer a land area four times the size of all 50 states. I mention this again for the benefit of vendor Calvin T. Again I say, we don’t have that much power to ourselves; the rest of the world has something to say about it, something involving guns, and bullets, and ungraceful death and suffering.

I give up on this one. I have a request that I learn about Chinese New Year and write what I learn. Great idea! It’s 4705! It’s the Year of the Fire Pig! Make me lucky! Give me $8 in a red envelope by Saturday! Then, I will eat a stuffed dumpling with my sweetheart!

How educational was that?

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?