Actually, I Was High On Cheeseburgers

[from 11/10/10]

The history of elections, by me, © Dr. Wes Browning, would be a long list of poor-to-dismal elections, followed by one good one, followed by this last one. It’s not like I’m not used to disappointment. For example, I knew going into Carter vs Ford I had already lost, so, in a daze, I voted for a write-in candidate. I’ve forgotten who it was, but I think it was either the Ramones or a fireplug. Honestly, I was high.

But that was the 70s, and I’ve since learned it’s wrong to binge medicate. Kids, remember! Only use state approved pharmaceuticals under proper state approved supervision by a state licensed drug prescribing agent. Don’t end up like me.

We didn’t care for this last election. So we must look back on this experience and see what went wrong. Actually, we don’t really have to, but there’s this deadliney thing happening.

Anitra “No Closet Organizer” Freeman had an organized thought about the election. No matter what the Republicans said, all the American people heard was, “Hey honey, you know I’ll treat you good this time; I’ll never hurt you ever again, babe... “ and the American people cried and accepted the Republicans back, and agreed the beating they got from Bush and Co. had been their own fault.

That’s way better than the explanations I have, which are centered on stupid mistakes Democrats made. Oh well, here goes.

First there was this law called the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009. This winning bill was passed with Democrats dropping balloons and taking full credit for every aspect of it, way back at the end of May 2009. Obama had been in office just 4 months, and the American people were still cutting him slack. It sounded wonderful. Credit card companies wouldn’t be able to ratchet rates up without warning anymore. It was called the Credit Cardholder’s Bill of Rights.

However, the law wouldn’t take effect until 9 months later, exactly. Nine months calls to mind morning sickness, vomiting, endless nausea, swelling, and “You did this to me you bastard! I’m never letting you touch me again!” That was exactly how the American people felt when all the credit card companies used the nine month extension to crank rates up by an average of 20% on everyone, regardless of credit history.

You could argue that the average cost of those increases for consumers for the coming year would be offset fourfold or more by the one-time economic stimulus payments most of us got -- but nobody argued that. Maybe that’s just as well, since we’ll be paying those higher credit card bills for years to come.

Death panels. All the Democrats had to do was frame this as a right to life issue. The whole point of that provision of the health care reform bill was to give patients more opportunities to decide for themselves if they would want the plug pulled on them and force doctors and hospitals to abide by the patients’ wishes. But the Democrats got “right to life” stuck in their craws. Were they afraid it would compromise their support of abortion to adopt that language? It would not have. It might have even helped on that front. In any case, you can’t win elections acting as if you’re opposed to life.

New Department: Predictions I can scrape by on!

The boss wants this column earlier from now until ever! So to keep topical, we’re going to talk more about what hasn’t happened yet!

This week’s prediction is that “Rescued Chilean miner” will become a permanent feature of our culture, joining all the other characters that made up the Village People, policeman, Indian, biker, construction worker, and GI, along with Grownup girls who fell in wells, and Outstandingly calm airline pilots under pressure.

I want to see a Survivors series with all these characters plus a Crushed Democrat competing at the lonely end of some tropical island I haven’t heard of yet.

Magic, Mushroomed

As many of you know, I am not currently homeless. I am in a 52-unit DESC building very similar to the one DESC, the Downtown Emergency Service Center, is proposing to create in Rainier Valley, and it really ticks me off to hear that some residents out there think people like me wouldn’t make good enough neighbors. So I bet you think that I, director of Rant Central, will write about that.

Ha! Fooled you. No, I chose to take my blood pressure meds early this morning, and focus my thoughts on sweet things like baby bunnies, adult bunnies, pretty flowers, and dead Eyman-initiatives. And with my thoughts so cleansed and cheerified I chose to use the remainder of my space to cherish the magic.

I was inspired to do this when DESC workers delivered a brand new “Magic Chef” refrigerator to the woman that drew me to my housing, Anitra “Co-Conspirator” Freeman, and she said, “What’s magic about it? It’s not even energy-efficient! Doesn’t DESC know they’re wasting power and money by buying cheap energy-inefficient refrigerators?”

Poor, poor, jaded Anitra does not see the magic! Here she has a box that sucks invisible stuff out of the wall and turns it into coldness! You don’t have to feed it ice to keep the inside cold! In fact if you give it water it will turn it, magically, into ice!

There is so much magic in our lives. Our running water for example. We have a cold stream and a hot stream in our apartments! Right inside our apartments! Next to our toilets!

Thinking about these things made the weird neurons in my head (the ones in the back) zap my amygdala, or so it felt. I was motivated to ask, “What’s the most magical thing ever in all of our lives?”

The answer I gave myself was, “Volition.” I didn’t have to give myself that answer; I did it anyway, because I WANTED to. Isn’t that amazing?

People can make choices, then tell themselves -- tell their own dumb bodies -- to do what they decide, and their dumb bodies do it! Like magic! It goes on all the time every day, week after week, year after year!

I’ll give some examples. I’ll give you a second to contemplate baby bunnies before reading them.

Right. Lt. Ehren Watada became a Lieutenant of his own free will, by enlisting in the Army in 2003, by some accounts AFTER the Iraq War started. Now by his own free will he is ready to go to prison for refusing to join in that war. And he probably WILL go to prison! Volition: magic!

Here’s another example: The United States Senate consented overwhelmingly (89-2) to the UN Charter in the summer of 1945, making the UN Charter a part of US law. Since then there has been only sporadic and relatively insignificant popular protest of that action. So it can safely be said that the vast majority of the current populace of the US either agrees that the UN Charter should be US law, or is too apathetic to give a damn one way or another. Volition: magic!

Of course, that means that it is “our” choice, the freely-willed choice of this vast majority, that preemptive wars be illegal. Our government signed it in 1945, and we have since, as a people, freely consented to it! We’re enlisted! When does the warmaker go to prison? Volition: magic!

One more example. Pharmacists on the Washington State Pharmacy Board want to give pharmacists in the state the power to refuse lawfully prescribed medicines, when they feel like it, one at a time, just by referring patients to another pharmacist, who could also refer them to another, and another -- effectively depriving the patients of THEIR power to make the moral choice themselves, and violating the principle, “my body, my choice, you bastards.”

Yo, Pharmacists, you enlisted! If you don’t like the duty, you can will yourselves to resign. Volition: magic!

For Auld Lang Syne

Here it is, the end of the year, bringing me end-of-the-year memories. Unfortunately, being as old as I am, and as scattered, I can’t focus my memories on one year, so don’t expect an end-of-the-year roundup like you’ll get from a convergent person.

Instead, my thoughts race back and forth across the last 56 and a half years, and I recall who did what to me, and I calculate how much they need to pay. New Year’s Resolution: Round up bastards, chastise, repeat.

There was the campus security officer who forced hour-long conversations on me whenever he caught me sleeping in my car on campus. Such sleeping was legal at the time. But he wanted to let me know that he, personally, did not approve of the law having such a loophole, because it took advantage of working people like him. I told him I had a job. He said, oh, well then, get a better one. I said, how about yours, you’re not doing it…

On nights when that one wasn’t “working” there was another campus cop who didn’t, personally, mind me sleeping on campus. But he took great umbrage when he caught me using a public bathroom after hours.

I said, “It was left unlocked, it’s a public rest room. I’m a member of the public. What’s the problem?”

He said, “Don’t you know that people have to clean these bathrooms? They don’t just clean themselves.”

I said, “When I finish, I’ll clean up after myself, unlike any of the thousands of other people who use it during the day, who don’t get to meet you.”

He said, “But you’re homeless. How do you think those people would feel if they knew someone like you was using their bathroom?”

“Vicariously relieved?”

A certain deli downtown used to be open all night and welcomed the homeless if they at least paid for coffee. I was grateful and repaid them by patronizing them and steering other business their way. Then I moved out of downtown for a few years.

When I moved back downtown, I returned to the old haunt to find it very different. Not only was the store not open all night, it had been remodeled and rearranged. I saw people chased away just for appearing homeless. But what earns them a special place on my little list is what happened after I used one of their two unisex bathrooms while waiting for a sandwich to be made. I had accidentally used the wrong one, because I was used to the old arrangement. So they reported me to the police. I had been in a bathroom labeled “Women” on the door, by myself, for a whole minute. And oh, yes, I was obviously homeless again. So I was clearly a danger to society.

Here’s the one who goes at the top of my list. I had gotten on welfare at one time, but wanted to get a job and get off welfare as soon as possible. To help things along I got into a work shelter program through the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation. Having a work shelter job meant being paid less than minimum wage. The state made up for that partially by providing bus passes.

Every day until I got my bus pass I’d take the same bus to the job. The driver would smile and nod. There’d be fewer than five passengers on the trip. No one ever complained.

The day I flashed my newly obtained state authorized bus pass, the same driver who had always smiled at me before said he was going to stop letting me use his bus if I didn’t start taking showers. When I told him I just had one, he answered that he was sick of people like me abusing the system.

As soon as I figure out what that system was he was talking about, it goes on my list, too.

We're Listing

It's that time of year again: fall is falling, winter is wintering, a new year is yearing... Time to pause and reflect. So I'll do that right now...

There! I've paused and reflected. OK, what have we just learned? Nothing. No: we have actually learned that nothing can be learned from just pausing and reflecting.

This brings me to the subject of List Poems. List Poems are poems that are as easy as pausing and reflecting, provided you take the trouble to learn how to write them. We are about to take that trouble.

To write a List Poem you first need a List. Popular Lists to Use, Include: or Opus 99, Bastards to Line Up Against the Wall, Etc., & creatures that God should have recalled, cigarette brands, foreign lands, electronic devices, foods healthier than white rices, New Age jargon, dime-store bargains, people you've seen in People Magazine, skin diseases, genital diseases, gastro-intestinal diseases, cheeses, animals at the zoo, things on your list of things "to do", things you beat, cuts of meat, things that piss you off, guys with names like Nabakov, fictional places, imaginary races, Biblical names and phrases, musicals, novels, and playses, Papal Encyclicals, Democrats, rock stars, Republicans, words that rhyme with "rats", old shows on TV, Friends of Noam Chomsky, discredited ideologies, famous writers and/or their tomes, popular lists used to write pomes, and various kinds of pomes you can do, to name but a few.

To illustrate I will use my Christmas Wish List. This is a good choice because my actual Christmas list has only two entries, namely a place to live, and hot sex. Thus we are naturally led to the next step in writing a List Poem, which is stuffing it. We must pad the List with extra items which may or may not belong (but nobody really cares!) Ask yourself: "do I want this thing to rhyme? alliterate? scan? or do I want it to make sense?" If you have answered as I would you are ready to pad your creation. The trick is to make stuff up.

Finally rearrange the List so that it sounds better.

Now let's see where these steps can lead us.

My Christmas Wish List

Dear Santa - it would surely be more than enough

if you'd only bring me just some of this stuff:

A hygiene center on every block.

A real pillow, please, instead of a rock.

More Sidrans & Seligs to write poems about,

World Peace, an adequate cure for the gout.

More government cheese, less government slease,

less rain, less un-asked-for "feeling of pain".

A mayor who listens to my friends and me

& not just to people who wave mon-ey.

A bed and a roof above my head

(and a source of bread, I shouldn't dread).

A years supply of tolerable beer,

hot sex with someone I like to be near.

For at least one month not to hear anyone say

that the homeless should all just go away.

And while I'm at it Santa, for just one day,

having to hear "Jesus was homeless, too"

is another thing without which I could do

thank you.