We Followed Our Bliss

Why do we need myths at all?

My first position on the creation of life, the universe, and everything, is that demanding that God tell you the answer is sheer blasphemy. You don’t ask your parents to tell you how your conception went. “Was there a condom and did it break?” “Was a threesome involved?” “Was it good for everyone?” “Was it videotaped?” “Can I watch it?” These are questions you do NOT ask.

My second position on creation, etc., is that, if any crimes were actually committed by any of the principals involved, surely the statutes of limitations have all expired by now. So there can hardly be grounds for prosecution. Although, look up the “Problem of Evil” for a view that indicates civil action, perhaps including class reparations, might still be appropriate.

So why are so many making so much noise about all these ideas, when they have nothing to do with things that matter in our everyday lives, like the price of gasoline, the rising costs of housing, government invasions of privacy, racism, the dismantling of the biosphere, or will Katie Couric dominate prime time broadcast news?

I think the answer to the question I just asked is that I was full of it when I asked it. I think that creation myths have everything to do with homelessness, invasions by Alberto Gonzalez, Katie Couric, etc.

For example:

Scientists studying mass quantities of human and chimp cheek swabs, have set forth a rich new theory, namely that ages ago common ancestors of chimps and humans (I’ll call them chumpans) split into isolated populations which evolved separately into distinct varieties, I’ll call them chimpans and chumans. BUT, these then came back together and got the hots for each other, and they went for it, and lo, verily they did have offspring such as chimans, chullimpas, chichichumans, and chuchums.

And then, THOSE did also come to know one another, and bunches of offsprings maybe beat each other, and other bunches wasted their lives getting high on fermented berries, and others simply sucked at termite hunting and starved to death, and finally, only “chimps” and “humans” were left, and those no longer had sex together, right? Because it had no procreative purpose now, wink, wink, as they were by then different species. Praise Darwin.

This is a fine subcreation theory every bit as fun as that Garden, Serpent and “Apple” business is when you figure out what the snake is really doing there. You can tell your kids, “Yes, children, scientists have determined that the entire species of Homo Sapiens has original sin. In fact we once were ALL trailer trash. Our ancestors didn’t just mess around one Sunday afternoon in a public park. They were messing around for millions of years with ALL the apes in the neighborhood of a continent, in every park, street, and alley, whether the apes bathed, or not, or shaved their foreheads.”

In fact you could say this theory suggests that we humans owe our evolution of big brains and our domination of the planet to our long prehistory of sleeping with relatives. We evolved BECAUSE we were all Jerry Springer fodder, for eons.

But I digress. I was going to say that these ideas are NOT irrelevant to important questions of public policy, like starvation, Darfur, immigration, the exploration of space, Key Arena, what part of the horse Tim Eyman is, gay marriage, homelessness, WASL, Putin’s opinion of Cheney, or Katie Couric.

It’s true. When we all can agree on where we all came from it will be like the good old days when everyone always watched the Ed Sullivan Show and could answer questions about it the next day. Or like that time a couple years ago when we all saw the Paris Hilton clip.

When that day comes we will cease to be homeless people and non-homeless people. We will all be hairless apes whose ancestors once had sex with hairy apes, and the world will be as one.

Intelligence is for SOCAs

Let’s talk about subversion!

“The Raging Grannies” is a worldwide subversive movement. It aims to undermine our (your!) civilization’s underpinnings and metaphoric undergarments. It takes our most underpinned, our elderly women, and uses them as weapons of mass instruction. Its MO consists of nothing less insidious than the wearing of silly clothes and the singing of horribly silly, but instructive, songs.

Who is really behind The Raging Grannies? Could it be the world’s grannies themselves? Could it be that our Mothers and our Mother’s Mothers have become subversives entirely on their own? Or are these unveiled, exhibitionistic women, who wear the silly hats and sing the silly songs, not the brainwashed dupes of Al-Qaeda?

Speaking for itself, members of the local chapter of The Raging Grannies were recently quoted singing, "Oh, we're a gaggle of grannies, urging you off of our fannies. We're raising our voice. We want a new choice. No -- more -- war." Clearly they are intent on ducking the question.

One member, and herself intent on ducking the question, indeed on ducking any and everything, is Anitra “Not an Italian Duck, But Ducky-ish” Freeman. Ms. Freeman, like the others, won’t admit to being a tool of Al-Qaeda, even to me. But regular readers of this column will know that I have spent many years in close association with Ms. Freeman, and they will correctly guess that I have thereby been afforded deep insights into her devious ways.

What I know about Freeman tells me that the evil masterminds behind The Raging Grannies are truly masterful, for if she is any indication, these hardened women aren’t going to give up their secrets to the prying eyes of mere amateurs.

Thank goodness the Federal Bureau of Investigation has stepped in. America’s professional prying eyes have been surveilling the elderly female parodyists for a while now, and any day they will get the goods on them, revealing them for the threat they are. Or not. In either case we can sleep peacefully at night knowing that our trusted G-Men are on the job, protecting us from people who sing.

I wouldn’t have brought any of this up now if I hadn’t read the news from the other side of the Atlantic that Tony Blair is starting up an organization intended to be modeled on the FBI, to be named, and I swear on a stack of holy scriptures of all faiths true and false I am not making this up, the Serious Organised Crime Agency, or SOCA.

How can anything modeled on today’s FBI be called the Serious Organised Crime Agency? How about calling it the Silly Organised Crime Agency? That would fit. And since it won’t change the acronym to call it that, that’s what I’m going to call it. The acronym is perfect. SOCA to me, SOCA to you, yes.

The news stories say that about a third of the initial staffing for SOCA will come from British customs. Those are the twits who wear bowlers and carry bumbershoots and, if you’re a married man, dig through your suitcase during inspection until they find a pair of women’s lacy underpants, and hold it up where your wife can see and say, “What’s this now?” and she says, “Hey, those aren’t mine!” and you have to say to her, “Maybe they got in there by accident at the cleaners in Amsterdam” and she says, “As soon as we get home I’m filing for a divorce!” and you think, “Customs twit.”

It’s clearly better that Customs twits work in the Silly Organised Crime Agency than that they root through our suitcases. They will make excellent British equivalents of our G-Men. Blair is definitely on the right track.

That right track, of course, is the track to greater unity in our civilization, to be achieved by eliminating all traces of disunity, such as unapproved silliness and unaccounted-for undergarments, until we are all one great united government approved and accounted-for whole.

Don’t Rain on My Pleasure

Last week a California court, in the course of seeing to it that a cocaine possessor wouldn’t get off on a technicality, came up with what struck me as a very useful new legal theory.

The arresting officer had searched the man against his wishes after finding him urinating in a Berkeley parking lot. Of course, a police officer can’t search you against your will anytime he or she wants. He or she has to catch you committing a crime, or have a reasonable suspicion that you have just committed a crime, or some such thing. I don’t know the exact legal language of the rule, but one of the words “crime” or “illegal” is in there.

So it looked like Mister Crack Pants might beat the charge, since for some reason not explained in the news story where I found this, there’s no law on the books to explicitly make peeing in Berkeley parking lots illegal.

Now, before you all rush to Berkeley to enjoy the heady freedom to pee virtually anywhere in that urban paradise, I should warn you that the appeals court’s clever thinking has corrected the situation. They determined it has been illegal all along to pee in Berkeley parking lots, in spite of the inconvenient absence of legislation to that effect, on the grounds that it “interferes with the comfortable enjoyment of both life and property.” Shazzam! So the arresting officer had the right to search, so the cocaine can have been admitted into evidence, so the conviction stands, so let the sentencing proceed!

This is good news. All any of you need do to break the law now is interfere with my comfortable enjoyment of life. If you have any questions, that’s “my” as in me, Copyright Dr. Wes Browning.

It’s not just finding urine in my parking stall that hinders my absolutely precious enjoyment of every moment of my precious life and my precious pleasure in parking my motor vehicles, but there are certain definite other things I don’t like either, that are now -- post factamente, no contradicteme -- as illegal as peeing in a Berkeley parking lot. Make my day, or you’re under arrest.

Take public morning activities, for example.

I’m not going to say all morning people should be lined up against the wall and shot. For any of us to say that would only be to stoop to their level. All I’m going to say is that for people to drive around and talk and whistle while they work before noon interferes with the comfortable enjoyment of my life and that of other decent people and therefore such people as do those things are guilty of misdemeanors and they must turn themselves in to the police at once. The actual penalty for their behavior will be worked out later, when some more judges have worked out what the law has always been all along. Such work will wait until afternoon.

Recently I have been noticing some delays as I ride busses about downtown. Metro Transit has openly admitted that, subsequent to the tunnel closure, bus travel times across downtown have increased by an average of 2 and one half minutes. That is 2 and one half minutes twice each day subtracted from my comfortable enjoyment of my life by the criminal bus company. Again, I don’t say heads should roll, permanently, but only that they should roll for at least five minutes daily, or as much as jurists may later deem fair.

Thanks to this precedent having been set, It is now and always has been against the law to be Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, or my former next door neighbor Steve G., or anyone else who hacks me, Dr. Wes Browning, off. Because when I get hacked off I’m not comfortably enjoying my life.

Thank you California’s Court of the Appeal for the Second District! Now we won’t ever need stupid legislators again. One law fits all!

Might Makes Jackasses

Here's a pet peeve of mine that I'm sure you all share: arrogance. We can't stand arrogance. All of us hate it. So how come it keeps happening? My biggest gripe is with people who justify crimes with arrogance.

Once while walking up the Ave in the U District I saw a couple walking toward me, the woman holding a balloon. Before they reached me a group of five frat guys came up and snatched the balloon away. When the woman's partner demanded it back the guys laughed and threatened to beat him up. Just then a policeman appeared and the matter was laid before him.

Incredibly, the frat guys complained to the cop that the couple had no business demanding their balloon back, ON THE GROUNDS THAT THE COUPLE WAS OUTNUMBERED AND EASILY OVERPOWERED. "There's five of us; we could take them; if they cause trouble by telling us we can't have their balloon, don't they know they're asking for it?" They actually said that the policeman should tell the couple to leave them alone, because not to do so would result in a fight that would get them hurt. They were concerned about maintaining the public order!

As amazing as it sounds, there are people in the world who think that way all the time. I first realized the truth of this when I was a cab driver. Hardly a shift went by when there wasn't some cowboy in the cab telling me I had to run red lights to get him where he was hurrying to, ON THE GROUNDS THAT HE WAS PAYING ME.

Once the dispatcher sent me to a house in the neighborhood of 85^th and Roosevelt, and when I arrived nobody came out to get in the cab so I had to go to the front door to announce myself. Two men greeted me, one with a pistol. While I stood in the doorway, not knowing if I would be shot if I said something they didn't want to hear, they told me they were hiring me to drive downtown by myself to fetch them two hookers. They told me I should do what they said BECAUSE THEY WERE GOING TO PAY ME $100. They said it would be OK if I couldn't find them good-looking hookers, ugly ones would do, and that they would share them with me. I said thank you very much, but that nevertheless I would decline their kind offer. They were shocked. I never did figure out why they pointed a gun at me. Maybe it was to keep me from running off with their welcome mat. They were probably thieves as well as johns. No one is less trusting than a thief.

The general rule seems to be: If I'm a monkey and I want to take a dump on your head, it's all right because I'm a bigger monkey than you, or I am just one of a gang of five monkeys and we outnumber you, or anyway I'm paying you so you have to do what I say BECAUSE MY MONEY SAYS I OWN YOU. You could call it Karl Rovism: this is our planet because, owing to our previous thefts of its wealth, we now have all the money, so we own all the people everywhere that we have stolen from.

This rant was inspired by the tiniest of provocations, namely Jeff Tweiten's theory that Seattle's No-Sitting Ordinance shouldn't apply to him while he's trying to set a new Guiness World Record by waiting in line for a movie. As best as I can determine this theory is founded on the principle that he should be able to sit or lie on the sidewalk for 136 days or more BECAUSE AT THE END OF THAT TIME HE WOULD BE BUYING A MOVIE TICKET, THEREBY PROVING THAT HE DESERVES MORE CONSIDERATION THAN HOMELESS PEOPLE, who are just about surviving, and other stupid crap like that.

Nothing News Under the Sun

Let's talk about the current lack of news!

I don't know how things are for you way out there in the future, three days from now, but here in your recent past nothing is happening. No world religious leaders have died in the last few days. No heir apparent to the throne of a major constitutional monarchy has wed within the last five or six days. If we're involved in a new land war anywhere nobody bothered to tell CNN. Headlines say China blames Japan for everything, but that's not news.

Oh, sure, there's the usual smattering of the homeless news that I enjoy so much. As a homeless news junky I make sure that I read all the homeless news there is every day. Today is as typical a day in the homeless news biz as they come. I will describe that typical day for you.

Today, as every day, there's at least one story about a big fire somewhere that leaves a whole bunch of people homeless. Sometimes it's a giant brush fire in Mozambique that renders whole villages worth of people homeless. Sometimes it's an apartment complex in Toronto or Budapest or Cincinnati. Today it happened in Duluth.

I always think of the people made homeless by fires as the luckiest of all the recently become homeless in the world because they have the easiest answer to the question, "Why are you homeless?" Others of us have to say things like: "Long-standing government policies regarding housing development, mortgaging, real estate laws, rental laws, subsidized housing, and zoning, have resulted in a desperate shortage of housing affordable for poor people, and I am one." The fire victims get to say: "House burned down."

Next, there's the homeless animal story. Today it's the story of "Blackie," the Dalmatian/Border collie mix, who became abandoned when her homeless owner froze to death under the Queensboro Bridge in NYC last December. It's a feel-good story. Thanks to some concerned private citizens, United Action for Animals, and a group called the Mayor's Alliance for NYC Animals, Blackie was housed until recently on the Upper East Side, and she has just this week been driven to a new permanent home in Philadelphia. The story, which appeared in the New York Daily News, also names three of the concerned citizens who helped out. But the original owner who froze to death is unnamed.

Of course, every day, someplace in the world, they are counting homeless people. Reports usually say homeless counts are up from last year, but sometimes they're down in one little town here or there. Let's say you live in Pissatchoo, Washington, and the town's one homeless guy, Max, hitchhikes the twenty miles to Wenatchee. Well that's going to lower your homeless numbers in Pissatchoo. It's all related to statistics and fluctuations and stock markets and missile guidance systems, and it's not really important unless Max scores housing in Wenatchee. Otherwise nothing good happened and nothing bad happened (that hadn't already.)

Finally there is a string of stories every day about new services or shelters that are planned or that are opening up, dovetailed with a roughly equal string of stories about existing services or shelters shutting down or not happening for lack of funds. Today we learn that pretty soon Phoenix will get itself a $24 million downtown homeless "campus," which will actually be more like a shopping mall of homeless services. Meanwhile, further west, Ventura County was having trouble even finding a site for some proposed transitional housing. You win some, you lose some.

Last but not least, there are the stories that tell me that homeless people commit crimes, too. I have yet to pick up a paper and read any headlines that scream "Housed Man Confesses to Nearly 50 Brutal Slayings" or "Apartment Dweller Accused of Eating Rape Victims."

When that happens, that will be news.

Wes Dreamed of Being a Baseball Goalie

Let's talk about baseball!

A lot of people think I don't care about baseball, just because I don't like to play it or watch anybody else play it, or hear about baseball games and scores, or know when the season begins and ends, or know how to play baseball.

But how wrong they are. I care, every bit as much as I care about all the other great joys of life. E.g., the daisies of the meadows, the smiles of little boys catching and gutting their first fishes, fishes in general. Oh, I don't know, kites are good, mom, apple pie, rhubarb roasting on an open fire, whatever. Baseball is like one of those kinds of things to me. I actually think about baseball a lot, even when it's not happening, like now.

Parts of baseball I especially like to think about are the bat parts and the running parts. I don't like to think about the catching parts because of a certain traumatic experience that occurred to me as a kid. My grade school had my gym class play baseball and it so happens I am a myopically challenged person who requires glasses (the technical term in baseball jargon is "four-eyes.") The teacher disallowed my glasses on the playing field for the very reasonable reason that if I were hit with a baseball it could shatter them and sends shards of glass through my eyes and on into my brain leaving me a vegetable.

So I was put out to one of the "fields" (I think it was the "right" one) to look for and catch fly balls, without my glasses. But I couldn't see this one fly ball that came at me so instead of catching it, it caught me, right in the head. Good thing I wasn't wearing my glasses at the time or it would have been just like I just told you, with me being a vegetable and all, and the shards! But it still left an emotional scar for life. Ouch!

In spite of that trauma I still want to talk about baseball. I want to share my excitement about the recent ruling by Seattle Municipal Court Judge Jean Rietschel that dismissed charges against some men for scalping Mariners tickets on the streets, on the grounds they were the victims of selective enforcement of Seattle's anti-scalping law.

Now I don't understand anything about Seattle's anti-scalping law. What I especially don't understand about Seattle's anti-scalping law is, how is scalping wrong if capitalism is right? I mean, there are crimes occasionally associated with scalping like theft and counterfeiting and fraud, but we have laws against those things already. Why do we have to throw a net out broadly for scalpers? Isn't that like arresting people who drive in order to put a stop to hit and runs?

I have lots of questions like that. Why doesn't the Ninth Amendment to the US Constitution ever get a nod in courts? That's the one that says a right of the people doesn't have to be on the list to count. I think we need an Amendment Nine and a Half that says, "We really meant Amendment Nine."

According to a Seattle Times story, Judge Rietschel based her ruling in part on her opinion that the scalping arrests would not have occurred had the Mariners themselves not pursued them by hiring off-duty Seattle police to look for scalpers. Also she pointed out the Mariners allow scalping on their own website by letting sellers use fake out-of-city addresses to get around the city ordinance. I guess that's OK to the Mariners because they get a cut of the on-line sales.

Here's what I'm really excited about: It can be done, people! It's possible to win a case of selective enforcement in Seattle! There's hope for the rest of us yet, that the courts might protect us from the selective enforcement of city and state ordinances by police in the hire of businesses.

There shouldn't be ANY police in the pay of businesses. When an off-duty police officer uses his power to arrest while in the pay of anyone but the taxpayers proper accountability is skirted and government authority is subverted. The power to arrest belongs only in public hands under public direction.

Hooray for small steps toward sanity.

The Good, the Bad, and the Invisible

The good news: Saddam Hussein is effectively gone. The bad news: Bush and company can't tell the difference between doing something good and doing something good in a way that doesn't screw up everything else in the world.

You can't learn from a mistake you can't see. The administration is too busy dancing around the ball to realize they're in the wrong end zone. We haven't stopped terrorism. We've gone begging for it.

Meanwhile I have a cold. I had this cold two weeks ago, see, and I didn't want it, so I gave it to Anitra "on whose kitchen floor I have sometimes slept" Freeman. I gave her my cold in a duck-licking frenzy. I am not proud of it, I'm only reporting the facts.

But then, two days ago, Anitra gave me my cold back. No fair! She was supposed to pass it on! Now I will have to punish her by holding the cold just until she loses it and then giving it back to her again. That will teach her not to break the rules.

I'm just kidding, of course. The only rules here that matter are the rules of viruses and bacteria and immune systems and biology in general. This however brings up the subject of homelessness.

The crime of allowing homelessness to happen is a form of rape. Rape occurs when someone's own body and bodily functions are turned into weapons against them. Rape doesn't require penetration. It's already rape when you tell someone that they can't use your bathroom, forcing them to go in the alley and get arrested. It's already rape when you refuse to let someone sleep even in your cold doorway, so they have to sleep in the colder alley and get run over by a truck.

Boy, there's nothing that brings the humor level of a conversation down faster than the word rape, don't you think? Rape, rape, rape, rape. But what can I do? It's a fact. Sleep, urination, and defecation are physical necessities, and if you deny them to people it's no different than forcing them to participate in one of your BDSM fantasies without their permission.

Evidently I can complain about the crime of allowing homelessness to happen for seventy-seven years, and no one's going to do anything about it just because I say they should. So I keep looking for ways to make the point that it's wrong without sounding like I'm complaining. Maybe appealing to people's sense of self-preservation is the way to go.

You can't learn from a mistake you can't see. If you've never been homeless you probably can't understand how it could be regarded as a form of rape. The lesson may be lost on you.

But, hey, you have a vulnerable body too. You are not invincible. Have you been following the progress of SARS? OK, maybe SARS isn't the plague that's going to do you in. But the CIA says SARS is just the beginning so get ready for worse.

Here's a heads-up for everyone: when a disease becomes endemic you are only as safe as the most vulnerable populations among you. If there are people among you whose health is consistently neglected the disease will spread like wildfire among them, and you will be in line for it.

My biggest fear right now is that SARS will spread to third-world areas of Africa, for example, where there is inadequate medical care. There will be no controlling it globally at that point. My second greatest fear is that American homeless shelters will be infected with it. Then there will be no controlling it in our cities.

OK, suppose you don't have that much sense of self-preservation. How about Wes-preservation? I live directly across from a mission. If you don't care about whether you get SARS or not, please have a care for poor highly infect-able me. Please help eradicate homeless shelters so there are fewer opportunities for viruses to attack my tender air passages. Thank you.

My Girlfriend's Loose

This column was going to be great. Anitra, Tex, and Cowboy, "the Seattle First Three of Six", were going to be tried by Seattle for the crime of sheltering people in out of the rain under the King County Ad Building overhang. I was going to skip the boring bits, skip all the hours that Anitra et al would spend watching lawyers jockey. Just as the trial got interesting, I would be there taking notes, and this column would have been the distillation of all the awesome trial drama.

Well, guess what. There wasn't anything BUT the boring bits. After about twelve hours of mind numbingly dull motions, not counting breaks for lunch and paper copying, the city just asked the judge to dismiss the charges, and the judge said OK.

That was it. No harangues, no "where were you on the night of." No "I would like to remind the witness she is under oath." No last minute note passed to the defense attorney by a handsome private detective. No brilliant cross examination. No map of the scene of the crime. No one screaming from the back of the courtroom, "Alright! I did it! Yes, I did it! I had to do it, don't you see? I hated her so much, with her damn poetry workshops and her computer lessons! That's why I framed her!"

It seems the defendants were charged with trespassing on county property, but the county wasn't willing to have a representative appear in court to explain why it objected to allowing a handful of people to escape the rain on public property when they weren't being a nuisance in any way. So the city, who was doing the prosecuting, realized it couldn't win.

So instead of talking about that, I'm going to reminisce about my old '69 Rambler. Long-time readers may remember her from my Opus 7, "Home was a '69 Rambler / I'd rolled it away from the road / Home was a '69 Rambler / until the state ha-ad it towed / etc."

I didn't just buy that car to live in it. We had a history together. We were a couple. A math professor and his wheels. I bought her at Rutgers NJ in 1979 for $200. Her previous owner had lost her in a drug bust. I needed her to make it between classes in that sprawling campus.

When classes ended in 1980 I had to come here to Seattle. I decided to keep the Rambler by driving us across country. That trip was to cement our relationship forever. (Get it? "Cement." Ha!)

There were "thunder strips" in Pennsylvania. Thunder strips shake your car apart if you are doing more than the speed limit. We met them in a rainstorm. I thought she was dying. I cried over her for hours on the side of the road. Then the rain subsided and I could see the strips.

The Man in the Yellow Beetle appeared in Pennsylvania. From there to Wyoming not a single hour passed that one of us didn't pass the other, except for a detour over a mountain. It was amazing. We took breaks at the same times. We must have slept at the same times. We drove at the same speeds. Uncanny.

I saw an interstate shunt that went over a mountain alongside Mt. Rushmore. As is my wont, I thought, "What the hell?" That stretch of interstate inspired this Haiku (this is the original version.)

'69 Rambler

Divided Highway Ahead

My Girlfriend's Behind

The "highway" was one lane in each direction, no shoulders, usually no railings. Divided highway signs signaled such things as trees in the middle of the road. As we reached the peak, my love nearly died of high altitude asphyxiation. It was snowing. I will never forget her gasps of pain. But she made it. We both arrived here May 17, one day before we would have been ashed on by St. Helens.

This column is dedicated to her spirit -- my '69 Rambler, b 1969, d 1984.

Duck Trouble

The latest news on the homeless front, besides the fundamental legalization of Tent City, is Anitra Freeman's turn to crime.

Anitra has been sort of sucked into sort of a life of crime by such repeat offenders as Michele "Give'm Hell with One L" Marchand of SHARE/WHEEL and Scott "the Facilitator" Morrow of SHARE. Actually more like a minute of crime. But she still should be able to look forward to a rewarding career playing parts in John Waters films, if she can bring herself to relocate to Baltimore three months of every year.

For those of you who just boarded this train at the last station, that's Anitra Freeman, alias Anitra of Many Associations Freeman, aka The Duck on the Italian Menu, aka Net Mama, aka Wes's Main Squeeze, on Whose Kitchen Floor I Have Sometimes Slept.

It went down like this. King County Executive Ron Sims got a bug up his butt this year about SHARE, nobody can say why, where, how, or when the bug came from or what it was doing there, but an unidentified source has reportedly said that "maybe he doesn't get the way grassroots organizations like SHARE operate."

The upshot of Sims' dissatisfaction with SHARE was that he wouldn't let them run the Winter Response Shelter at the King County Administration Building this year, even though they ran it for something like eight years without anyone complaining about it at the time. Getting new management for the shelter took time, he said, so the shelter wouldn't open until October 15, he said, instead of the 1st of October, when it usually has been.

So SHARE said, OK, but there is (was, this is all history now) still a need for a shelter Oct. 1 through Oct. 14, because the cold weather won't wait for the County to get its act together, and it's not safe out there even in good weather. Therefore SHARE offered to run the shelter those days. But the bug in Ron Sim's butt made him say no to that. "Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin," he might have said, but he evidently didn't, forcing me to make it up.

I'm not making this part up: Each night of Oct. 2 through Oct. 14 the County put up "no trespassing" tape to keep people out from under the overhang at the entrance way to the Administration Building. SHARE then went ahead and ran a sidewalk shelter in front of the Admin. Building every one of those nights, vowing each night to cross the tape if it should happen to be raining at the beginning of the night.

The office of Ron Sims referred to SHARE's sleep-out as a political stunt, without explaining why politics is bad for SHARE but OK for Ron Sims and his office. The unofficial SHARE position is that it was NOT a political stunt, they needed the shelter for survival, etc., but nobody at SHARE has explained to me why SHARE continues to let Ron Sims and others characterize politics as a bad thing when homeless people engage in it, but all part of a civic duty when anyone else does it. Politics are the means by which Americans set about choosing what's right, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Finally it rained on the beginning of the night of Oct. 12.

Six people were arrested -- Anitra, Michele, Scott, Claude "Cowboy" Nalls, Ted "Tex" Shirey, and Richard "No Fancy Nickname That I Know Of" West. The two women of the gang were cuffed and locked together alone for more than an hour in the SPD holding tank. There, Michele was forced to listen as Anitra, now hyper, theorized extemporaneously on the sociological origins of warfare. Eventually bail was set at $190 for everybody, and all but Scott got out by the next day on their personal recognizance.

I'm going to go out on a limb here, risking domestic turmoil and tumult, to say that I think both sides overreacted in this incident. But in the words of my unidentified source, "The county overreacted FIRST, so there."

Also, on a stupidity scale from 1 to 10, what the County did was a big fat 9, and what SHARE did in response was at most a 5, only slightly more than half as stupid.

To put those numbers in perspective, using scales from 1 to 10 (and how many of us haven't, be honest) is itself an 8 already.

PC Wimps

The controversy over hygiene centers is still raging. As always there are people working hard trying to break down stereotypes about the homeless. It seems like everyone wants to tell you its wrong to stereotype, that you should see people as they really are.

I say they're all a bunch of PC wimps! Stereotyping is great! It's fun, it's creative, and educational too. The only thing wrong with the stereotyping I hear about the homeless is that it's mostly dull and unimaginative. Let me show you how it's REALLY done, by a master.

Something Needs To Be Done About Those people

by © Dr. Wes Browning

Something needs to be done about those people.

Everyone knows it.

Look at how they whisper as they pass.

Always something to hide.

Riding in cars with tinted glass.

Buying land out of sight.

If they're not drunks they deal drugs.

If they're not muggers they're murderers.

Like that guy that killed and buried those kids

in his basement.

You know the kind I'm talking about.

They don't hide behind those walls just to stay warm.

You read it every day how they beat their own children.

Something needs to be done about those people.

Like that cannibal guy that tortured and raped and ate those boys

in his flat.

Disgusting.

They're all like that. They're all trouble.

Always something to hide.

Their crimes are in every paper.

The alleged Oklahoma Bomber, the woman who drowned her two sons,

the Lynnwood mutilator, are all just typical examples.

Everyone of them's a criminal of some kind.

Always something to hide.

Why else would they live like that?

In houses, apartments, behind walls.

Something needs to be done.

Those homeful people have really gotten out of hand.

Wasn't that instructive? Try it yourself, pick out a bunch of people that almost never get stereotyped, like stereotypers themselves, or satirists, or people who eat peanut butter. Make up your own brand new original stereotype for them. It's fun and you'll be amazed by what you learn in the process.

You can stereotype individuals, too, only then it isn't usually called that. It's called caricature, a respected traditional art, especially in its graphic form. An illustrative graphic example appears at the top of this column, a rendering by my own hand of myself as a carrot. There is nothing wrong with me for doing that. I am not in reality a carrot, I have merely portrayed myself as one in a drawing.

Speaking of caricature and hygiene centers, what's the deal now with our Mayor? He wants to block the building of hygiene centers at BOTH the Glen Hotel AND 9th and Lenora? Where are we supposed to build them, in his office? Is Norm Rice asking for it? Now that I have a whole page to fill I am going to assume the answer is, thankfully, yes!

Thank you, Mayor Rice!

by © Dr. Wes Browning

The Deadline looms before my pen,

that time of month's come round again.

Today it's worse than 'twere before,

they made my column this much more:

I got to write ten lines more rhyme

then any other preev-yus time.

I just about gave up the chore

When Norm came through for me once more!

He says he's for a hygiene place

as long as it won't take up space.

"That's been the problem all around.

Those people always use up ground-

If only we could shrink them small

to fit inside a box so tall,

[he gestures low to show us all]

I'd put them in my entrance hall!"*

Why Thank You very much Norm Rice

As always helpful, kind, and nice.

[* Not an actual quote from our Mayor. This is *caricature*!]