Necessity Is A Mother

Recently I was in a van with a bunch of folks from my building, coming back from the food bank, when a man with a shopping cart pushed it off the curb across an intersection right in front of us, while we had the green light. I reacted first and said, “Smart!” Then the others all said, “Stupid!” That got me thinking. Why am I so unrelentingly ironic?

I’ve also thought about how a lot of people say things to me like, “Dr. Wes, you must be the smartest person who ever lived. Where do you get your amazing understanding and knowledge of everything, especially things you’ve never experienced, like racecar driving, or stellar nuclear fusion, or significant work, or humility?”

The answer, of course, is that I utilize my enormous gift of imagination (making stuff up in my head), combined with my equally enormous gift of association (making the made-up stuff line up with other stuff that’s not so made up).

Let me illustrate. I have never actually tied one end of a long elastic cord to the railing of a bridge and the other end to my ankles and then took a flying leap off the bridge into an enormous gorge over jagged rocks. So how could I ever speak knowledgeably about bungee jumping? It’s easy! I just imagine stepping in front of a #1 bus on its way past Yesler and imagine showing the driver my middle finger. When the driver slams on his brakes and stops the bus an inch from my nose, in my imagination, I’ve understood the essence of bungee jumping. And aren’t the essences of things all we ever need of them?

But being so gifted intellectually isn’t all sweetness and sunshine, or pizza and cheese, or pajamas and coeds. There’s hardship too. I have long been a target of bigotry, having to endure the taunts and slurs of brainists. Growing up, I was called vicious names like Egghead, Einstein, Brainiac, College Material, Smarty Pants, Smart, and Poindexter.

The turning point came in the 8th grade when my math teacher called in our homework and I had forgotten to do mine. Supposedly his difficult homework should have taken me an hour to do, but I said, “No problem,” and took some paper and did the assignment in front of him, in a minute. The teacher said I was “weird.” At first I took that to be a compliment. But then I realized he didn’t mean, “You’re refreshingly different” or “You’re oddly delightful,” but rather something dark and mean, like, “You’re never going to own a house on Mercer Island,” or “You’re never going to be a member in good standing of a major fraternal organization such as the Elks or the Rotary Club,” or “You’re never going to sleep with a cheerleader.”

At that, something snapped inside, and, all at once, I became mean-spirited. I began to plot revenge on all the brainists. I used my enormous intellect and inhuman imagination for evil rather than good, as I dreamed up one hideous punishment after another for my many tormentors.

Sadly, most of the punishments I dreamed up were out of my price range. Being 13, I had no credit, and as my parents were cheap bastards my allowance barely paid for my school lunches. So I was unable to realize my plans involving the fighter jet, the remote-controlled giant robot with the heat-ray eyes, and the genetically engineered jock-eating gerbil.

I could complain about that from here to the end of the column, but the truth is that “Necessity is a Mother” and never having a mass-murdering genetically engineered gerbil made me what I am today, and that’s something I’m thankful for.

Because there wouldn’t be any Adventures in Irony if I hadn’t been forced to learn more constructive ways to cope with frustration than bombing and strafing all of my enemies.

If only all of us could be as fortunate as I’ve been.

On the Road to Pimpin' Rich

Recently, for no discernible reason, I became a mean-spirited conservative. Or maybe the reason was discernible. You decide.

It started late last fall. I was living down the street in my barren room in the basement of 2005 Sucky Nuts Avenue, a couple of cold doors north of the intersection of Sucky Nuts and Bush Street. I was chilling -- the radiator didn’t work. I had a bad dose of the post-WTO anarchistic clap, and a liberal itch between my toes, too.

Then a letter came. It was in a plain white envelope. Inside, it said, “Dear former math professor Dr. Wes Browning: We at Chuck Schtab and Cohorts have been trying to find you for 25 years. We believe we have finally succeeded. If we are in error and you are not the Dr. Wes Browning we’ve been seeking please let us know. Otherwise we will begin sending you quarterly reports detailing the holdings and value of your Chuck Schtab College Professional Retirement Account.”

In the past 25 years I had been homeless three times, and through it all I had completely forgotten the retirement fund I had when I was a math professor! I had untapped wealth, earned by itself during two and a half decades of market ups and downs! The reports showed my wildest dreams were true: I was set for life, if by “set” you mean I would always have bus fare and change for the laundry, or if by “life” you mean to say I have a very short life-expectancy.

Anyway, what matters is, I had experienced my first rush of seeing an investment reach maturity, take her clothes off, and show me her privates. What matters is, now I knew how it was done. You lock your money up in solid investments, you don’t spend it on booze or women, and 25 years later you’re 25-years-sober, unloved, and pimping rich. I wanted more of that.

But I wasn’t a mean-spirited conservative yet. Then I got my latest quarterly report. The first ones had reported positive earnings for my Schtab account. But the most recent report showed a drop in value of $300! I was losing money! I had to find out why.

It wasn’t hard to figure out. All the news about High Gas Prices, Global Warming, Cutting and Running from Vast Oil Reserves, Higher Gas Prices, and worst of all, Ten Year Plans to End Homelessness, was battering the stock market. Investors were getting skittish because the public sector was shifting priorities away from constant high-end investment growth. Sure, my Schtab account includes a hedge fund, but all that could ever pay for is my first month at the Home. I need the security that only ridiculously high earnings can provide.

So I looked into moving my money into real estate. I didn’t want a house; I wanted to partner with others on houses that could appreciate quickly. I read the trends and did the math and realized it would work. I could be truly set for life in the traditional sense within just one more decade. The papers said South Park/Georgetown was a high growth area, so my investment group loaded up on properties in those neighborhoods.

Just then we learned that new supportive housing for recently homeless people was planned right in the middle of our holdings. Now I’ve got nothing against the recently homeless, but those are my houses they want to live next to. I know about the studies that say supportive housing doesn’t lower property values, but I don’t invest according to studies, I invest according to my gut. What investor resembling me is going to want to buy my vacant houses in ten years for three times what I paid for them this year, if formerly homeless people are living next door?

The only solution I see is Three Strikes laws for vagrancy. We need to lock them all up in the state penitentiaries, where they can’t muck up my investments.

The Ol' Perspecter

We are excited about all the news concerning Viagra these days. We get to use arithmetic!

They say 42 or 43 of the roughly 30 million users of Viagra and the like have become blind as a possible result of their use. Additionally, somewhere on the order of a thousand sex offenders in some other states have been getting Viagra from Medicaid, even though that is stupid.

OK, so we learn that 0.143 percent of one sex offender in those states should now be blind! An entire 3/10,000th of a blind sex offender may be running around in New York State alone! At this rate, they'll all be blind in a million years, making them that much easier to hide from.

All of this is nevertheless dreadful news for Pfizer, which makes Viagra, because now men everywhere will forgo sex in order to save their vision, causing Pfizer to go bankrupt. Ha! That was a little joke of mine. Nobody is going to give up sex just to see. Still, Pfizer is worried that possible new warnings for their product might scare very stupid people, thereby ever so slightly decreasing the profits they make off the highly valuable demographic of Very Foolish, But Somehow Not Completely Parted From Their Money Yet, People.

I think, regardless of Pfizer's worries, we SHOULD warn guys that if they use Viagra regularly it might raise their odds of going blind to as much as 2 in a million, if that will help them make an informed decision for once in their pitifully ignorant, uninformed, existences.

For that very same reason, I am in favor of many other kinds of warning notices. Surely if we warn people of dangers we could only improve their lives, never diminish them. And wouldn't it be so much more useful if all the scissors we made, or that the Chinese made for us, had the words, "do not run with this product in hands - eye puncture may occur," rather than always having to rely on one's memory of one's mother? What if one had no mother? What if one had no memory, owing to advanced dementia? What if one were raised without scissors, forced to cut paper with crude razor blades, therefore having had insufficient direct prior experience with scissors, making one's parental admonitions seem purely theoretical, lessening their impact?

To take another example, shouldn't there be warnings on car doors? Let's do the math. There are 15 deaths per year per 100,000 Americans (whether they drive or not!) due to traffic accidents. That works out to around 4500 deaths per each 30 million, a lot more than 43. So maybe a warning on each car door would be appropriate. I'm thinking of something to the effect: "You are 100 times more likely to die from riding cars like this one than to go blind from using Viagra. According to 4 out of 5 doctors, dying is worse than blindness. But remember that Detroit and Toyota depend on you. Please make an informed choice."

How about warnings on warnings? "Warning, the following warning may either (1) unnecessarily alarm you, due to an unbelievable lack of ability to keep things in perspective, causing you to avoid living your life, or (2) not alarm you enough, because you've seen too many warnings already today, and due to an unbelievable lack of ability to keep things in perspective, and as a result you may very well die or at least be permanently maimed. But remember that the medical profession needs work too. Please make an informed choice."

Obligatory homeless connection: How about warnings on streets? "Warning, if you use this product as a home, you are twenty times more likely to be murdered in your sleep, while everybody else on the planet only cares whether they can take sex-enhancement pills safely. Oh, wait, you probably don't have a choice about living here. Never mind."

Speaking of Freaks

Let's continue to talk about people who make controversial statements in public!

Larry H. Summers, research economist and Harvard University president, made a little speech (you can read it yourself at http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html) to a conference of the National Bureau of Economic Research in January which got a few feminists more than a little angry, and now they want him to lose his job, or, failing that, be gently dismembered.

Ha! I was just kidding about the dismembered part. But they ARE ticked off, mainly because Summers said that he thought that one reason why women are under-represented in science professions is the "different availability of aptitude at the high end… " What he said sounds awfully close to "different aptitudes" and that sounds like saying women are dumb, but actually what he's saying is that men are statistically more likely to be freaks.

This theory isn't new. It was even discussed when I was teaching college math back in the olden days when the internet existed mainly to pass raw data around colleges and nobody ever dreamed it could someday help make your penis bigger. The theory is based on the true observation that for a large number of measurable attributes, women's measurements tend to be less extreme than men's. So in any large random population most of the freaks will be men. This applies to all kinds of freakdom. In a large random population, for example, it will be the men who will exhibit most of the freakishly high IQs. It will also be the men who will exhibit most of the freakishly low IQs. So the same theory used by Summers to explain women's under-representation in the sciences also has been used to explain why it's mostly men who win Darwin Awards for dying stupidly.

The important thing to me is not what reasons Summers could come up with in a relatively short speech about the under-representation of women in the sciences. The important thing is that he had the nerve to talk about it at all, and now because of that people are thinking about it more. Maybe the discussion will result in better ideas coming out than Larry's, and maybe he'd welcome them.

I think I have a better idea. I got my idea in 1980 when I was teaching basic algebra to a community college class that was three-quarters female.

I had a problem. I was explaining algebra the way the book explained it, which generally introduced new ideas by relating them spatially. Most of the class wasn't getting it. It occurred to me that it might make more sense to just say what algebra really is and leave the geometry out of it. So I explained how algebra is just talking about numbers. Equations are sentences, x's and y's are names, etc.

I had an amazing turn-around in the class. Before, most of the boys understood the geometric approach and only a couple of the girls. Now, it was most of the girls who got it, and only one of the boys! I started using both approaches to try to get through to everyone.

Now the bad news: a senior professor with control over my job found out what I was doing and told me to stop. His objection was, "The girls don't need to know math. They're just going to either get married, or be nurses." Worse, the senior professor had co-written the book, and he was going to get me fired if I didn't follow it word for word.

So here's my idea. I think that for about 25 centuries, math and science education has been deliberately geared to the interests and learning styles of boys, even at the cost, at times, of distorting content.

I think it's time to find out what science would look like if women did it. It could be an experiment.

Old Fart Wises Off

Good news! Thanks to the Democratic Convention occupying the media, there has been no actual news lately.

This gives us here at Adventures in Poetry – meaning by us, me, Copyright Dr. Wes Browning – a chance to take stock of our life. A chance to sniff the winds of our change and dip our toes into the pools of our stagnation. To audit the account books of the psycho-social-biological records of our historic being. To see to whence we have arrived, and from whence we have departed. And to see who or what is all that in the cargo hold, and why is there a woman in our bed wanting something.

Well, first of all, we are old. We just did the dreaded calculation and discovered that our current incarnation has been breathing air for 20,000 days and a little more than an extra hundred. As a mathematician, let us put that number in perspective. That's one more than 19,999. If he saw 20,000 Republicans laid end to end, Rush Limbaugh wouldn't raise any moral objections. Jules Verne talked about 20,000 leagues, but we don't know what a league is, we're a mathematician, not a damn encyclopedia. If you saw 20,000 pigeons flying toward you, you'd wish you had an umbrella, etc.

We once saw a guy walk on the moon live on television. We saw the assassination of an assassin live on television. We saw several wars live on television, so many that we lost count, sometime around about Panama. Most of them we're unnecessary and a huge waste of lives, health, and money.

History used to happen in black and white, but now it's always in color. Conversely Red Square isn't red anymore. There's nothing left for conservatives to be better dead than, which must be disorienting for them.

We have lived to see the amazing Wolf Blitzer ask Jesse Jackson, in Jesse's capacity as a black spokesperson, why did Barack Obama, a black African immigrant running for the Senate, not speak before the Democratic Convention in Boston using the same kind of rhetoric as did Al Sharpton, a black African-American reverend who had been running for president. Why oh why, Jesse?

Just yesterday, after living a thought-filled and examined life for over 5 decades, we arrived for the first time ever at an adequate working philosophy. This was facilitated by the able conversation and intellectual assistance of our regular companion, the afore-mentioned wanting-something woman and person on whose kitchen floor we have sometimes slept, Anitra Freeman. With her help we came up with this: "Good things now, bad things later." When in doubt always refer to that formula. It's a plan of action that can't go wrong. For example, by using it, you will never force yourself to save dessert for after the asparagus again. You will know all the times that it would be better to be home in bed than. You will learn to appreciate the paper plates of life, and the other disposables. You will shower for the fun of it, not because you have to. There is the way of wisdom.

We have been homeless four times in our life. We mention this in part to fulfill our unwritten contract with Real Change and the Real Change Editorial Committee. Every column we write is required to make at least one mention of homelessness, directly or indirectly, or one local politician must be made fun of, or two national politicians, or we must directly advocate for at least two of the following: minority rights, free pizza for Real Change volunteers writers and "editors", free/more/better treatment for recovering [insert addiction here], cats.

Duck licking. Speaking of speaking of duck licking, every column should contain at least one non sequitur, and one abuse of logical accuracy, which may be the same. But that has nothing to do with the unwritten contract. We have digressed.

We have lived in the same subsidized housing for almost 7 years now, the same housing funded by the Housing Agency Formerly Known As Seattle Housing Authority, the housing that was granted after 14 months on a waiting list, the housing that was promised to me as being permanent, the housing that is now threatened by Bush Administration cuts in Section 8 funding, the housing that we will never move from until they haul my cold lifeless never-to-be-homeless-again body out of it. Or until they come up with something better. Like that'll happen.

Birds Are Nuts

This is going to be one of those columns that isn't about anything. All the conditions point to it. For one thing, all the news is too depressing to write about here. You can only make fun of North Korea so much, and then people start to whimper. Iraq isn't at all funny anymore. The economy is only good for about ten lines and then I remember that my rent is due. Then Anitra "on whose kitchen floor I used to sleep" Freeman insists that I pick up malted milk balls for her at the store. A dollar eighty-nine. For a stinking bag of malted milk balls.

The good news: I'm back on my meds. The bad news: I'm back on my meds. No more interestingly bizarre perspectives. No more am I able to write pages and pages extolling the virtues of experiencing paper cuts and surviving.

It's times like this that being scattered is all I have. It's my anti-foundation, a non-solid core to wrap myself around. All my security emanates from my liquid centerlessness. Without it I would have to settle down and be something, which would surely result in doom. If that doesn't make sense to you, then you understand more than you know.

Mr. Stephens taught me that you could be scattered and still collect a paycheck. Mr. Stephens was my 8th grade math teacher. He was stark raving scattered. He would spend the first minute of every class going over the answers to the homework due that day. Like this: "The answers were 5, 17, 16.3, and 1." Then he would spend 50 minutes telling us about his house on Mercer Island, and about the patio he just built over his carport, and how he built part of the patio around a tree, and about how we should all respect how cool that was. Then Mr. Stephens would spend the last four minutes giving us the next day's homework.

At the same time I was taking "business principles" from Mrs. Wilson (these are not the real names.) "Business principles" was all about how to write out a check, mostly. I don't know how the schools got away with wasting kids time like that in those days. I hope they do better now. But Mrs. Wilson wasn't satisfied with just wasting our time with the syllabus. She felt it was necessary to spend at least thirty minutes of each class telling us how her daughter was a swimmer for the US Olympic team, and she won a silver medal for something. I learned that Mrs. Wilson's daughter got the silver approximately sixty times. That is roughly equal to the number of spitwads that I personally landed on Mrs. Wilson when her back was turned, during that term.

Why am I telling you this? I just want you all to know things could be worse. In addition to being scattered I could be a broken record, like my unbelievably neurotic middle-school teachers. But at least when I scatter, I scatter in a different direction every time.

Speaking of broken records, Groundhog Day just passed. No I'm not thinking about the Bill Murray movie, although that was good. Instead I'm thinking about a green singing finch I adopted on Groundhog's day 1990. I called him Zino, after the violinist Zino Francescatti, and he was a fantastic broken record. Apparently, birds are the ultimate broken records. They do not know the concept of "enough".

Zino had this trick where he would jump off his perch and attach himself up-side-down to the top of his cage. Then he would drop back to his perch, doing a back flip in the process. All this would be done to elicit a "wow" from me. Then he would do it again, to get another "wow". Then again, for another "wow". And again and again. Until finally I couldn't take it anymore. When I couldn't say "wow" anymore Zino might quit after one or two more times. But he never quit as long as the "wows" came.

I want to believe there is a lesson in all this for all humanity. From a back flip obsessed bird to a patio obsessed neurotic math teacher to a silver medal obsessed neurotic business principles teacher, I want to draw a moral for all of us to live by.

How's this? -- Everybody be careful what you say "wow" to.

Guest Column by Anitra L. Freeman

This is Anitra, Upon Whose Kitchen Floor Wes Has Sometimes Slept. Wes has a bad cold right now, which he says is my fault (because he's sleeping closer to me than the kitchen floor these days), and therefore I have to write his column for him.

Wes says I am starting out very well, staring at a blank white computer screen. He then gave me a tip to get started:

[insert column here]

Wes has just left the room, leaving me clear to talk about him with Cindy, Muse of Few Words. I ask Cindy, "I want to structure this column like Wes does, in the form that I have called a Wessitur: an apparent sequence of non-sequiturs that sneaks up behind a political subject and bonks it on the head. How do you suggest I start?"

Cindy says, "Say something about Wes now."

Wes was skinnier when I first met him (he also says that this is my fault, in spite of the fact that he does most of the cooking.) We were both homeless at that time, in October 1995. Wes attempted to teach me the use of acrylics, at StreetLife Art Gallery.

He still attempts to teach me math. I retaliate by singing sea chanteys at him.

Soon after I started going to StreetLife Gallery, Wes drafted me for the Real Change Editorial Committee. I retaliated by starting StreetWrites, to help more homeless and low-income writers develop material for publication. Wes said, "Okay, I'll attend, but you have to do the work."

How am I doing, Cindy? "At about this point, Wes says something else."

Speaking of something else, last week I attended the Seattle Police Department's first organizational meeting attempting to put together a Homeless Advisory Council. I was unhappy to see that I was the only person there who was a "community member" (still counted as low-income and formerly homeless) instead of a service provider or public official-- and I was only there because Timothy "Editor-God" Harris, Director of Real Change, was in production crunch on the paper. Tim made me feel a bit better by explaining that invitations did go out to SHARE, WHEEL & HOP -- but they went out very recently. Membership-driven grassroots organizations need more lead time to make decisions than top-down structured organizations. Adding in that the strongest memory most homeless groups have of such advisory councils is the sensation of having one's butt turned to rubber with the raised words "Whatever You've Already Decided" lettered on them, then pounded up and down -- and caution lengthens the lead time.

Speaking of caution, caution lengthened the lead time in the relationship between Wes and I. Within weeks of meeting each other we were spending large amounts of time together -- we were both officers of StreetLife Gallery, both writing for and editing Real Change, and we just hung out, because we made each other laugh, we sparked ideas for each other, I could say one sentence and he instantly knew what I meant, cutting my tendency to discourse at length and earning the undying gratitude of thousands.

But first, I was staying in shelters and he was Camping Out on Fern Hill (the exact location of which he still keeps secret in case he might have to use it again.) Then I got housing but Wes didn't; he could only visit me three nights a week at The Union Hotel, where he really did sleep on my kitchen floor, and we talked for several hours each night like kids at a slumber party. It was July 21st, 1997, at 4PM (I got the date and time from Wes) that Wes walked into the Real Change and handed his last pack of cigarettes ever to Tim Harris because I had mentioned that I wouldn't get intimate with a smoker's mouth. Then he didn't sleep on my kitchen floor any longer.

Speaking of lengthening, we were both divorced. Wes had a history of severe child abuse and suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I had a history of relationships disrupted by my bipolar disorder (manic depression). We were both used to being prejudged, misjudged, and making bad judgments about others. A lot of reasons for caution on both sides. We're now regarded as the happiest couple in the Union Hotel, mainly because we come in about 3AM each morning laughing manically over such things as the application of the policy of Harm Reduction to late-night transit.

Maybe homeless people and the SPD will someday be cracking jokes together, working comfortably side by side, hanging out together. Also the physically disabled, and those with mental health / chemical dependency / developmental issues: other groups that the SPD is hoping to have new Advisory Councils for. If there's enough common ground; enough support; enough patience. If someone gives up their cigarettes, or whatever other habits are in the way.

How did I do, Cindy? "You left out poetry."

Haiku for Wes

He sleeps on my kitchen floor
while I check my email.
I need no Valentines.

Write On!
© Anitra Freeman 2002