Mmm, Fried Chicken

Every week I check the news to see if it will write this column for me. Usually it does. So far, the best example of that came with a report from New Zealand that a chicken there was suspected of being a suicide bomber. You can't NOT write a column when you're handed news like that!

Generally if the news fails me it's because it just isn't that interesting. Let's say it's a week where the only thing that happened was Jeff Renner said "Doppler" a record number of times. That would be a good week to write abstractly about the environmental cost of puppies, or efforts to legalize medicinal insane laughter, or the role of education, or the lack of it, in the employment of ceiling fans during winter.

This week, however, there is no shortage of interesting news. The problem is it's all too interesting. Six months ago I didn't think the Dow Jones could fascinate. Now it fascinates to the bone. It fascinates like a wild Bengal Tiger pawing through my innards, looking for the tasty bits.

Six months ago I thought the biggest danger we faced, economically, was that a lot more people would become homeless in America who have never been homeless before. Now I'm afraid the biggest danger we face is that plus riots, plus mass starvation, plus the people who have been homeless will get to be homeless again, plus our babies will all be two-headed, and the only thing on TV will be Donald Trump's Celebrity Apprentice, on all channels, in high def.

An indication of how bad things are: no one you know wants to take Mayor Nickels' job away from him. His current approval rating (33%) is lower than the approval rating of Single Parenthood (37%), but everyone who has a passing reputation as a leader wants to stick Nickels with the mayorship just one more term.

In 1997, I even offered my own self up as a write-in candidate for mayor of Seattle on the Pizza Party ticket. This time around, forget it. The salary would be great, and I'm sure the office has a fantastic view, but I don't want to be there when the villagers surround City Hall with the pitchforks and the torches, blaming me for their 20-cent grocery bags, their increasing pestilence and poverty, their consolation trolleys to nowhere they want to go, their two-headed babies.

So, anyway, what I'm trying to get at is, all I want to talk about this week is how much I like to cook my own food, and what I want people to understand about that.

When I tell folks I like to cook my own food, they invariably say, "Oh, so you're a good cook, huh?" That proves that their values are shot to hell. As long as human beings have crappy values like that, it will be necessary for people like me to set them straight. NO, I am not a particularly good cook, and that is NOT a proper reason to want to cook one's own food.

A proper reason to cook my own food (my reason) is that I get to be in control. My biscuits may end up tasting like burned sawdust and have the texture of modeling clay, but they will be MY biscuits.

It was precisely being homeless, too often and too long, which led to my need to be in control in matters of food. When you're homeless in the city you're eating other people's cooking day after day, meal after meal, because you don't have a kitchen and you can't set up a hibachi on the sidewalk. It's all part of the general powerlessness of the condition, going hand in hand with not being able to sleep under a roof or shower when you need to.

When I was homeless the burgers were always too salty, and you could never scrape off enough. Now, I want to enjoy my country, but it's been over-Bushed.

Homelessness to End in 2024

I'm writing nine days before this will appear. I can't possibly know what's going on there in the time where you're at. The problem isn't that I can't predict the future. The problem is, like everyone else, I can't predict it correctly.

Therefore, when I get the urge to predict the future, I prefer to predict it far enough out that when it will have come about my actual predictions will have been forgotten, and I can say that what happened is what I said would. No one is going to go to the archives to check. That's one reason I will buck the trend and make predictions now for 2010 instead of 2009.

The other is, I have this theory about why 2001 was such a bad year: 2001 A Space Odyssey was too good. The movie jinxed the year. So, ipso reverso, 2010 should be a great year, because the movie 2010 The Year We Make Contact blew. Since I've never seen any of the movies set in 2009, I can't begin to guess what that year will be like.

So I will now predict the wonderful world of 2010.

I'll start with the easy stuff. There will be no aerial highways for flying cars, once again, in 2010. 2010 will be the first year in US history that no one wonders for even a minute what having a Black president in the White House would be like. Some very bad weather will happen somewhere. In spite of all efforts to prevent it, terrorists somewhere will blow something up, so it will take even longer to get a ride on a ferry.

During the latter half of February 2010, Canada will be in the news constantly, and then be forgotten again by the end of March. Around the same time, clipboard sales will increase, and complete strangers will visit millions of Americans asking too many prying questions. Lisa Simpson, a cartoon character, will be married. (These items are courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Every US business will have received at least one bailout by the end of 2010. Some of them will have been bailed out two or three times. All the world's trees will finally be cut down in order to print all the money for the bailouts. In the summer, your kid's lawn mowing service will get a federal bailout.

In predicting local news, I'm trying to see the 2010 Mayor of Seattle. I'm getting an image -- it's fading in and out -- it's someone I don't know yet. But I can definitely predict everyone I know hopes I'm right.

Due to the economic downturn, Real Change will have more vendors than ever. As the number of vendors approaches the number of customers, we will have to make up for it by going daily. There will be not one, but two crossword puzzles in every issue.

There will be so many homeless people that area shelters will adopt an alphabetical admissions system. Everyone will get two days of shelter each month. The days you get shelter will depend on the first letter of your last name. The city will point to this system as proof that everyone is getting the shelter they need, so no new shelters will be funded.

As King County's Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness enters its sixth year, its Governing Council finally says, "Whoa, we're not getting anywhere at this," so they cross out "Ten" on all their literature and write "Twenty" above it, and put out a press release announcing that they're way ahead of schedule. Critics suggest they set the end date of the Plan to End Homelessness in the past. The Committee to End Homelessness is as likely to invent a time machine to return us to 1964 as they are to actually end homelessness by continuing to sit on their hands and wait for the magic federal pixies to solve the problem with federal pixie gold dust, as they have been doing.

Dr. Wes Endorses Anchovies

It's election time in the Emerald City again!

We look forward to these elections the way we look forward to bleeding gums. Especially the mayoral election.

As I am writing this it appears that the race for mayor will come down to a November run-off between my fifth and sixth choices respectively. Or are they my seventh and eighth choices? I forget how many are running and whether or not Charlie Chong is in or out this time.

One thing I will not be doing this year. I will not be openly endorsing any candidates. In particular, I will not be endorsing my customary write-in candidate, me. So don't anybody vote for me. Forget I even mentioned ever having been a write-in candidate. It didn't happen. We are not doing that this time. Vote for one of the suits or find some other write-in candidate.

I know this comes as a huge disappointment to a great many of you, but I have concluded that I am not mayoral material. I knew this as soon as I saw the results of the questionaires we sent out to the real candidates. How could I ever compete with so many Glinda-the-Good-Witches? Or Dorothy herself? I am not in that league. I am but one lowly flying monkey. Hang me on a wire and heave me out a parapet, but whatever you do don't vote for me.

Other reasons I won't endorse myself, in no particular order, are:

The beard didn't work for Lowry, it won't work for me.

The book I am currently reading has more alien characters in it than are on the City Council.

I think the city should have smart toilets that are so smart they let themselves be cleaned by paid workers.

I believe buses should be free for everybody, paid for by the businesses who would benefit from the ease in transportation, ie. all of them.

If something like WTO happened while I was mayor, the police would be SO busted.

My policy of wedgies for bad bills is not likely to be approved.

Narrow political base, primarily confined to eaters of pizzas with pepperoni and mushrooms and black olives with anchovies. Thus my hopes would be dashed by the powerful anti-anchovy faction.

Real Change won't let me.

But ultimately it just comes down to this: flying monkeys shouldn't be mayors. I think we can all agree on that, at least.

What can't we agree on? Well, let's see, how about this: Should it be possible for Seattle Times staff to be able to tell if a man sitting in their park is dead or not? Have people gone totally stupid and insensitive?

So Lukas David Stidd died across the street from the Seattle Times building. Nobody working there noticed that he was dead for a long time, and Nicole Brodeur sees tragedy in this. That it wasn't noticed that he was dead. Not that he was dead, but that no one noticed. As if everyone who passed should have stopped to take his pulse.

As if the problem was that there aren't enough people out there trained to tell a corpse from the sleeping.

No, that's not the problem. The problem is that people die on the streets all the time, and it is time to get them off the streets so that doesn't happen anymore.

Me For Mayor

If you are reading this paper close to the beginning of the month, and if you've been paying attention, you may know that Seattle is about to choose a new mayor.

I myself discovered this fact just last week. Here's how it came to my attention: I was just minding my own business, using the computer to make joke pictures of Tim Harris, our Director. With my back thus turned, he and our production manager were discussing who the Real Change ought to endorse for mayor. They were both certain that there was no way we could endorse either of the two official candidates, so that we would have to endorse a write-in.

Who should we pick? Well, lets see, they thought , who's not here? Why, Dr. Wes can do it! Dr. Wes will do anything! And the next time they spoke to me they said I'd have about 600 words for that wire service article and oh, by the way, we'll be running you for mayor hope you don't mind. Mayor of what? -- I asked, naturally. Of Seattle, they said.

Now I am told that this means I have to have a platform. We're sure you'll come up with something, they say. OK, well then here is my platform. These are my solemn promises to you the Seattle citizen should I be elected mayor.

1. If you have a complaint I will actually meet with you and hear it, once or twice. Maybe. If I feel like it. Lately I've had a cold.

2. I will cash my paychecks promptly and without complaint.

3. I will not maintain a house in a foreign country. Or, if I do, I will not spend much time there.

4. I will create a photocopy of my butt on Mayor's office stationary and send it to the City Attorney's office, and I will include an attachment to the effect that it is the view of the new mayor that the City Attorney's face is not a sidewalk.

5. Just for a hoot, I will propose laws designed to restrict the hours that homeful people can be on downtown streets. When people object, I will say, "Well, they have homes to go to, don't they? So why should we have to look at them?" When people still object I will laugh insanely and lock myself in my office for days.

6. When downtown businesses offer money to get their way with City Hall, I will politely decline it, reminding them that the City's policies are to be determined by its citizens at large and are not on an auction block.

7. Inauguration day: beer and pizza for all!

My slogan: "Let the vegetarians feed first. Then, while they're at it, we'll move in!"

Speaking of moving in, Operation Nightwatch and friends got out at 3am on the 24th for their annual count of Seattle's homeless.

As usual they only counted those who'd passed out in Seattle's "living room".

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. I know that the Count is important and supplies a lot of useful information. For example say I want to camp in the Pioneer Square area. Consulting the tables I find that 77 of the 108 street people found there on the night of the 24th were either in public parks or under roads or bridges. Not one was found in a parking garage. So for a quiet restful night's sleep I should head for a parking garage, that's where the privacy is.

But, seriously, I won't be sleeping in Pioneer Square at all, because I don't want to be anywhere that I can be so easily spotted. By Operation Nightwatch, by the police, by thieves, or by anyone else.

When I have slept outdoors, I have always done so outside of the areas that are included in the count, because they get too much traffic, and I have made myself as invisible as possible. So invisible that I don't believe I could ever have been found by anyone who failed to trip over me. And that's the way most of the homeless people I know go about it.

But precisely because we make ourselves invisible we are never counted. The public sees only those who either don't care about their own privacy or who are in no condition to hide themselves effectively.

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*!]