Learn What's Real

[Above:Children have been useless ever since child labor was outlawed. Here we see useless children engaging in useless behavior over fifty years ago.]

I don't often talk about children. There are many reasons for this. For example, children are all too human. Too much of anything is ugly. I prefer 25-year olds, who are human in moderation. Also, children are incompetents. They can't vote. They can't drive. They can't buy their own health insurance. What good are they?

George Bush agrees with me for once. Rather than arrange for poor children (the worst kind of children there are, always wanting what they can't buy) to have health care, he wants the market to handle it. In other words he wants the poor children to pay for their own health care, or go without. If that means there are fewer poor children around by next fiscal quarter, well, that's what we call a demand side adjustment.

I say it's time we did away with health insurance altogether. I don't think there are many people who realize that health insurance is a communist plot to "re-educate" the public to accept communist ideals and practices. I am in a unique position to alert the public to this plot, because as a mathematician I almost allowed myself to be recruited among the ranks of the "aktuariik" myself!

The original idea of insurance was to make everyone pay equally for all the health care! Everyone would pay the same amount every month, which would be called a premium, as though it were a good thing. Then only the sick would get the money back in the form of payments for health care. Healthy people would get nothing! That's communism!

Now, the communists want to go a step further. As if the ordinary idea of health insurance isn't red enough, they want to say, "Oh yes, and if you are unfortunate enough to be too poor at the outset of the whole program, never mind, no premiums for you, we'll let the rich pay for you to get well!"

[Below: Children love Communism! Here, some children sing a favorite commie song they learned on the playground.]

As always, the communists and the children push their common unholy agenda, "From each according to her/his ability, to each according to her/his need."

Fortunately George Bush is President and he knows how to stop communists and children dead in their tracks. He knows that in order for Americans to continue to be the most productive people in the world we must have a healthy citizenry, and that means we must have healthy productive children. And we're not going to have healthy productive children if we waste health care on the sick unproductive ones.

It reminds me of that other communist plot that was popular here in Seattle not that long ago, to let poor people wash themselves and their clothes for free at accessible communist sites scattered throughout the city. The trouble was that if you did that, not only did that mean the rest of us had to pay for all that soap and electricity and real estate, but worse, poor people wouldn't look poor anymore.

When you can't tell non-consumers from consumers you don't have any way to weed the non-consumers from your retail centers. The people wandering your stores might look clean, as if they were potential buyers, but be incapable of adding to your profit. You might as well scrub a herd of caribou, sprinkle them with cologne and let them wander the aisles of your stores, for all the money you'd make.

[Above: No money; no admittance.]

Whether the communists like it or not, this is a capitalist country. If you aren't part of the profit, you're part of the problem.

I think it was in 1988 that I finally saw the light. I was homeless at the time and I was sitting in a sandwich shop drinking coffee and scribbling equations on a napkin. A businessman sitting next to me asked me what the equations were good for. I said they could potentially have some value in the future, but I didn't know what. He said, "You don't know what's real. Potentialities aren't real. Money is real."

That's the trouble with children. They're not money; they're not real.

OJ And Me in the Lonely Crowd

Ever try to imagine the internal conversations of people who turn up in the news?

Did Michael “Kramer” Richards think to himself, “I’m a great comedic actor, but I’m having trouble getting roles these days. Hey, why don’t I try stand-up for a while? That’s got to be easy.”

Maybe the Pope thought, “I know what will show Muslims I’m cool. I’ll go to a predominantly Muslim country and let my people drive me around in the Pope-mobile and show them all how cute and harmless I am. They’ll love me for sure!”

I’m not going to try to guess exactly what OJ was thinking when he came up with that book idea of his. I’m afraid that if I ever got myself to think that way my brain would get stuck in that state and I’d never be able to fake normal again. But I’ll guess part of what he was thinking was “Hmm, money.”

Let me risk seeming to change the subject entirely. I’ve been noticing a pattern in the news lately. A lot is coming down to conflicts, real and imagined, between individual and group rights.

Example: Why should we have hate-crime legislation? Doesn’t that give rights to groups that individuals can’t share in? Why should it be worse to beat up someone because you don’t like the group they belong to, than to beat the same person up because you just don’t like their looks?

Come on, people, that one’s simple. The hate-crime beating is worse to the extent that, in addition to the immediate harm done to the immediate victim, other people are also threatened with future violence. Such threats amount to terrorism.

Here’s an example where the conflict appears genuine: Recently in Montreal the police had a brief internal discussion over whether it might not be good, when engaging with certain extremely patriarchal ethnic communities within that diverse city, to leave the police women in the back seat of the police car, so to speak. Apparently the discussion lasted just long enough for someone to write a memo about it, and then the decision was: no way that’s going to happen. I learned about this from an editorial I found that framed it as a case of women’s individual rights vs a minority group’s rights. But is it?

Wasn’t the decision really to go with offending the tiny minority groups rather than offending the one huge majority group of women? I’m betting the Montreal police department wasn’t looking out for any one woman’s individual rights.

If I’m wrong about that, then what do we make of the veil controversy in France? Veils are losing out there. Why? Because the majority of French women don’t care if they wear veils, that’s why.

Getting back to the questions that started this, the news says that the hecklers that Richards spewed racist language toward are interested in receiving monetary compensation. That puts the whole Michael Richards’ career-in-flames story in a whole different light, one that swings the focus radically from group to individuals.

Suddenly it becomes an issue not of how racist Richards is, or how offended African-Americans everywhere are by the man’s language, but how hurt were these two guys in the audience, and how much would it take to make it better. What we have here is a triumph of the individual-right perspective over the group-right perspective. The hecklers are individualizing the common demand for reparations.

I’m warming to the idea slowly. I’m seeing possibilities, as my individual sensibilities are pummeled wherever I go.

Just the other day, a motorist gave me the finger for delaying him while I used a crosswalk. I’m thinking, that could be $5, right there.

If Benedict XVI sets off World War III by stirring up trouble in Istanbul, I am personally holding him responsible, and I will sue him and the Vatican $100 for each day I am made miserable by the consequent global conflagration. After all, I can’t leave for another planet.

Hmm, money.

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 Good, The Bad, The Chronic

Here at Real Change, we’ve told everyone for years that homeless people don’t all fit the stereotypes. Now it’s the government line. The stereotype is officially referred to as The chronically homeless, and the whole point of the government line is that The chronically homeless isn’t typical. So we have made progress.

Speaking of what’s typical, did I mention that I am a mathematician? We mathematicians love that people use “typical” and “average” interchangeably. We would like you all to also use the words “typical” and “median” interchangeably, the words “typical” and “mode” interchangeably, and the words “typical” and “kangaroo or, alternately, [insert optional crude expression]” interchangeably, so we can hear you call everything a kangaroo or, alternately, [optional crude expression.] Just for the fun of it.

Also I like to hear the word The whenever possible, even if it doesn’t belong somewhere, and even if its use is deceitful, misleading, or shovels policy goals under the rug. Because the word just makes everything it touches sound so Special.

In this case we are speaking of The chronically homeless as opposed to speaking of some people being more chronically homeless than others, or so-and-so is 7.5 chronic while his brother is only 3.8 chronic, etc.

It’s like talking about The up. Once you’ve decided that there is a The up, you don’t have to say how up is this or that up. Some up isn’t more up than other up. Everything is either up or not-up. The fact that all up is the same simplifies thinking about it, which is useful for people who don’t like thinking or don’t know how. “Which way to the ceiling?” “Up.” “How high is the moon?” “Up.” “How screwed are we?” “Up.”

In reality, though, there IS such a thing as how chronic is chronic, but it’s buried in policy papers if it’s been decided at all. The distinction between being chronic enough to be called chronically homeless, and not chronic enough, is not however made by looking at the homeless people themselves. It’s made by looking at budgets and figuring out how much money is available to house and serve people.

In other words, the distinction between the chronically homeless and the non-chronically homeless isn’t a discernible fissure running across the landscape. The chronically homeless don’t have “tells,” like nervous ticks or unusual fashion choices that give them away. They’re separated from the crowd by the fact that they have a history of costing more, by an amount to be determined.

It’s that “to be determined” that makes the use of the word The a lie. There should be a different class of chronically homeless for every different budget. But the policy makers want to shovel that part of the discussion under the rug. First you have to agree with everything they say about The chronically homeless. Then when the budget numbers are crunched they’ll tell exactly you who they’ve been making you talk about. Or they make an arbitrary definition of chronically homeless up front and don’t tell you that the definition was selected with an eye on future available funds.

The biggest problem politicians seem to have is figuring out that everything they have government do to fix a problem changes the problem.

If you spend all the money you have housing and serving The chronically homeless, denying funds to short-term fixes already in place, like shelters and public free meals, then the whole system will turn into an engine that creates more chronically homeless people by whatever definition you end up choosing.

Meanwhile, in real estate news, the word is that prices for homes will be heading up for the foreseeable future. This is called good news by our major local daily newspapers, as if there were an absolute or objective good in inflation, so long as it enriches the right people.

And politicians read about it in the Sunday paper, and think all is going well.

This Is Sheer Torture

“Homelessness is bad. War hurts people. Starvation is wrong. Poverty sucks. Pollution ruins the Earth.” These are just some of the messages that we here at Adventures in Irony detest bringing you week after week. It isn’t that we don’t agree with these messages, it’s just that we get tired of repeating ourselves.

Recently we have been forced to repeat, over and over again, “Torture is cruel and inhumane, and information obtained from torture is unreliable.” Please don’t make us say it again! We’ll tell you anything else you want to hear!

So we were ready to eat our own brains from the inside out when we read some news that offered an end to our agony. An AP-Ipsos poll determined that 61% of Americans along with a majority of people in Britain, France, and South Korea, think it’s OK to torture terrorist suspects under some circumstances. However the British, French, and South Koreans, are hypocrites: even though they’re for torture, they say they don’t want it in their own countries. Whereas the Americans, by a sizeable majority, don’t have a problem with it happening right here in the good old U. S. of A.

We have been protesting torture here unnecessarily. If the majority of Americans want to be able to be tortured just because someone suspects them of being a terrorist, who are we to stand in the way of democracy? And if the rest of the world is for torture but doesn’t want it in their own backyards, and Americans do, then excellent opportunities open up for American enterprise.

We hadn’t been thinking creatively about torture. We need to think outside of the box, about the box. It isn’t simply that, “if torture is outlawed, only outlaws will torture.” It’s that outlawing torture is bad for business, for the economy, and costs us a valuable tax base. If we legalize it, we can regulate it. We can tax it. It can help pay for our prisons, our jails, our schools, and our other centers of indoctrination and discipline.

We can stem the tide of out-sourcing of American jobs overseas. We can make this country a leader in torture throughout the world. Let the British, the French, the South Koreans beat a path to our door. We can’t provide technical assistance over the phone as well or as cheaply as Indians or Malaysians, but we can water-board better than anyone else, and we’re willing to do the dirty jobs that those others think they’re too good for.

Let’s let Americans do what Americans do best: innovate for the sake of progress and financial reward! Why should torturing be limited to the CIA, the military, and Iraqi intelligence officers? We need to license ordinary American businesses to do the business of torturing.

When we have permitted the franchising of torture to creative American corporations, the rest of the world will gladly send us their business. As an international leader in a newly invigorated industry, our businesses will be able to define and dominate the world market. Just as, centuries ago, the word “China” came to mean dishes, just as the word “India” came to mean ink, so the word “America” will come to mean torture.

Torture can reverse our trade deficit, and tax revenues from torturing the suspects of other countries can help us pay off the national debt. At a time when we owe 2 out of every 5 of our United States to Germans, Arabs, and Koreans, we can, ironically, regain full ownership of our own land by letting Germans, Arabs, and Koreans pay us to torture other Germans, Arabs, and Koreans.

Then, twenty or thirty years from now, when those of us who haven’t been tortured are all fat from torture money and our government coffers are over-flowing with torture revenues, then we can ban torture from public places, and 25 feet from their doors and windows.

While still keeping it legal, of course.

Letting Time Go

Let's talk about Edward T. Hall, why White People can't dance, and panhandling!

Why does panhandling seem wrong to so many of us? I'm going to go out on a limb here and propose that it feels wrong for the same reason that moving more than the feet to music feels wrong to straight White men over fifty: our parents never taught us to do things like that.

My parents said there's a time and place for everything, and they were very specific. Edward T. Hall, a cultural anthropologist, came up with a pair of words to describe the results of these kinds of teachings. He identifies two broad categories of styles of cultures, the monochronic and polychronic, arising from two ways of relating to time. White American/Northern European cultures express monochronic styles. The rest of the world, pre-MacDonalds, have generally been polychronic.

Monochronic styles require one-thing-at-a-time. Polychronic styles allow and expect lots-of-things-at-once. In monochronic cultures there's only one time. Your watch has your time. In polychronic cultures they may not even have a word for time. Talking about when something will or should happen may be wildly inappropriate.

How can this affect our panhandling behavior? (Note: By panhandling behavior we are talking not just about panhandlers but also panhandlees!) Let's say you're White, your name is Chris, you're walking to work, and as you pass the MacDonalds another White Person holds up a cardboard sign saying "Hungry/homeless, please help" and sticks out a Styrofoam cup. What might you think, Chris?

Well if you're like me, Chris, you think, "Hey, this is my walking time!" You think, "I didn't come out here to give my money away. I do that at the appropriately designated times. I give to United Way at the office. I pay my taxes every April." You think, "This person isn't supposed to get money now. They haven't just completed work. That's the time you're supposed to get money. Don't they know that?"

It's just like when White People first saw Chuck Berry dancing on a stage. "You can't move that body part like that now! You have to wait until you're in bed alone with a woman!" So over the years it has been necessary for African-American musicians to slowly, step by step, introduce White People to more and more movement, a project that began with the Twist and gradually proceeded through the Funky Chicken, Disco, culminating to date in whatever it is that Britney Spears does.

Now let's imagine someone from an unspecified polychronic culture. Still walking to work, let's say his name is Rongo Diego Yoko M!fumi, and another representative of his same culture appears, panhandling. Same sign, same Styrofoam cup. What does Rongo think?

The answer can vary from one polychronic culture to another -- Mr. Hall's categories are very broad -- but here are some possibilities: "Sure why not? My money came from everyone and so it belongs to everyone." Or, "I'm sure that if this fine person had money, and I needed some, he/she would help me. People have always helped me." "Maybe we could go have a coffee and sandwiches somewhere and talk. I can go to work tomorrow." "I feel like dancing." "Whoa, look at all those stiff White People staring at us."

To Chris, we work and THEN we deserve pay. To Rongo, we can always be deserving. "Work? Sure we do that. We give, we take, we work, we rest. What's the problem?"

Do you know for a fact that the panhandler HASN'T worked? What if the panhandler worked years for an exploitative employer who paid him less than what his work was worth? Now you have extra change in your pocket. Could that mean you've been paid too much lately? You could help to even things out. Or you could hurry to work, letting the universe run by itself, like a clock that never has to be wound, even though there are people stuck in it.

Mammary Metaphors Amok

For a long time I've been hearing about the "Continuum of Care." The expression only seems to come out of the mouths of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) officials and people who are busy trying to suck money out of them. As best as I can determine the Continuum of Care is meant to be like the Space-Time Continuum, all smooth and easy to swallow in every bit, but in reality it's much lumpier and full of big chunks of cockroach butt and old tennis shoes.

Here's how it works. First, we pay taxes. Yes, even I have paid taxes. My taxes may not have been as much as yours were, but I'm sure they hurt as much. Second, the federal government allocates a fraction of your taxes to HUD. Then HUD turns back around and gives your money to your local community in order to provide a "Continuum of Care."

Now, here's the tricky part. Let's say that HUD has decided that, after giving your own particular local community money to provide a "Continuum of Care" last year, your local community did not in fact fully achieve the sort of "Continuum" HUD had in mind. Then HUD withholds a whole bunch of your money from your local community to punish it for having such lousy services. This then in turn guarantees that your local community will have even lousier services next year, hence less of your money, hence more cockroach butt, more old tennis shoes, on your horizon.

Or, you could move to California.

California has just seen an increase in HUD funding for homeless services. Arnold Schwarzenegger takes credit for this, saying that he is the "Collectinator" for the state of California. He also says he has succeeded in sucking more money out of HUD because of the way he has been "nurturing" the relationship between California and the federal government since gaining office.

The whole situation has me confused. If Arnold is a better nurturer than the rest of us, doesn't that make him a girlie man? On the other hand, if it's sucking he's doing, and it is, shouldn't we understand that the nurturing is being done by federal government? Hey, let's run with that analogy!

In fact, HUD has the nipples. There are two. There is the Continuum of Care nipple. There is the Emergency Shelter Services nipple. And the rules as they stand now grant access to the nipples only to the strongest babies. Let the weak get weaker, until they starve to death.

For example, Louisville, Kentucky, is a weak baby and HUD will starve it. Louisville is weak because it only got 81 out of 100 points for its latest HUD grant application, in part because HUD has determined that the city has failed to move families quickly enough from temporary shelters into permanent housing. So Louisville had its funding for homeless programs cut by more than $3 million this year, amounting to a 55% reduction from last year's funding.

That's supposed to teach those slackers in charge of homeless services in Louisville that they should be moving more people into permanent housing like the federal government told them to do. But, aw shucks, turns out there never was any permanent housing to move people to. And now the situation has just gotten worse. The weak baby will get weaker. Thank you HUD, Mommy Dearest.

Meanwhile, Bush wants to cut HUD grants drastically over the remainder of his term. In particular he wants to cut Section 8 funding by a third, on top of recent roll-backs. But the Section 8 program is the only program that actually creates the kind of affordable housing that's needed in order for cities like Louisville to get a decent score on their HUD applications. So the cutbacks proposed will guarantee failure for every other city and state.

Except maybe California, because the Collectinator nurtures so much better than you do.

Get Rich Quick

Last time we mentioned the homeless Kenyan teenager who found a roughly $5000 prize while urinating in a Nairobi park. As we said then, our motivation in mentioning that story was mainly to be able to use the word "urinating" repeatedly. As you can see, it can continue to serve that purpose.

But just when we were thinking that the Kenyan's story was one of a kind, we saw this one concerning a homeless Dallas man. Jay Sherman found out that a plate that his great-aunt passed on to him really came from the Titanic, the sinking of which she survived. The Czech company that originally made the plate has corroborated the story of Jay Sherman's great-aunt, certifying that the plate is one of theirs and one of a set made exclusively for use on the Titanic. So Mr. Sherman put it on E-bay with an asking bid of $49,995. As of this writing we don't know if any bids of that magnitude have been made but we are definitely rooting for Jay.

We are so happy for him and so much want him to succeed that if anyone out there were to come up with $49,985, we would kick in the last ten dollars to make the sale happen. That's a promise from me, Wes "Always Poised to Help in a Token Way" Browning. (I am subtly acknowledging a failing. Please forgive.)

In my own experience the finest way to get out of any one particular bout of homelessness is to have someone related to you die and leave you money. I highly recommend that the inheritance be in the form of cash, preferably small bills, personally handed to you in a sack by the dying relative just at the last moment, so they can hear you graciously thank them before you get the hell out of there and rent an apartment.

In my own case I didn't get cash. The money was held up in probate for three years. It came in the form of a check from a lawyer and I had to split it 50-50 with the ex as per the divorce decree or I wouldn't have been allowed to cash it at all. But my half paid for a deposit and a month's rent, new clothes, and three month's worth of groceries, so I didn't complain.

Another technique that you can use to get out of being homeless is to have a close friend leave the state and bestow upon you his apartment with the deposit and a month's rent already paid, just because he thinks you’re a cool guy who deserves a break. It's not as good as cash from a dead person because you don't get to choose the neighborhood, but it beats the freeway underpass, on account of the extra walls.

Some people get out of homelessness by selling drugs. I don't recommend this technique at all because it is not only illegal but puts you in dangerous company. I only mention it in passing here because I hear a lot of people say that they're afraid of homeless people because they're all "drug dealers and prostitutes." I guarantee you, if anybody you meet is a drug dealer or a prostitute, and they're any good at it, they're making enough for a room. The same goes for diamond smugglers and professional car thieves. In fact, the only diamond smuggler I ever met owned a house near Wedgwood outright, with a huge yard and cherry trees and a turn-around driveway. People like that don't get rained on.

Another way to get out of homelessness is to have the incredible good fortune to live in a society where the general public understands that (a) homelessness is the result of long-standing public policy decisions that have over time eroded the supply of affordable housing causing hundreds of thousands of people to be priced out of the housing market and to thereby lose the means necessary to maintain their employability and make themselves viable consumers of commercial housing, and that (b) the same public (the general public who originally stood by and allowed those public policies to go into effect and in some cases even clamored for them) has the moral responsibility to correct the effects of those public policy decisions, even to altogether reverse them.

But we've got a long wait now before anything like that will ever happen. In the meantime, let's keep our eyes open while we urinate in parks used by treasure hunts to hide prizes, and let's inherit plates imagined to have great historical value by folks with more money than they need.

Seattle Likes Shiny Things

What is it about this city that makes us the perfect final resting place for Captain Kirk's command chair?

What other city is so enamored of 1960's-ish retro futuristic junk? Think of it: it's basically a big glorified swivel chair. Does it recline? Does it have a vibrator? Does it wash your feet? I don't think so. So what good is it? It was Captain Kirk's glorified swivel chair, that's what.

Of course, even though Seattle has the stupid chair, and even though I hang in Belltown within walking distance of it every day, I will never be able to confirm that it doesn't do those things. That's because Seattle isn't Star Trek world, where they eliminate money and people fight Klingons purely for self-fulfillment and the opportunity to have sex with space aliens. Instead, Seattle is Paul Allen world, where you need money more than ever, and I'm several billion dollars short.

I'm not blaming Mr. Allen for it, just holding him up as an excellent example of a Seattle-variety futurism junky. He embodies the disease, what I like to call futuritis. That would be, namely, the desire to immerse oneself in a world full of toys that would have represented the future if found lying around the place in say, 1962, while not even bothering to try to realize any of the social advances associated with the science fiction that popularized said toys.

It doesn't matter if the toys are really advanced technologically or not. They only have to be associated with futurism. So, for example, a monorail is just a pigeon-toed articulated bus driven back and forth on a dedicated, narrow, elevated, road. The technology is more than 80 years old. But make it shiny and run it through buildings instead of around them, like those transport tubes on the cover of 1940's science fiction magazines, and you've got something that scratches the futuritis itch.

What concerns me is that in the future there's a handful of ace pilots, engineers, and rich space-tourists, but nobody's sweeping the streets. Paul Allen is going to be able to rocket-man himself from West Seattle to Ballard in less time than it takes to fry an egg, but the rest of us will be living in the cardboard boxes the rocket packs come in.

Five beautiful illustrations of what I speak are provided by our new space-age gleaming robot toilets.

They're self-cleaning, when they work. When they don't work they need to be fixed. This can keep maybe a handful of specially trained hotshot automation maintenance experts pulling down the big bucks. That's great, until you consider that if the toilets didn't clean themselves we could spend the same money supporting a team of 15 or 20 janitors and their supervisors to clean them around the clock after every use.

But no, that wouldn't be futuristic. Janitors don't gleam. Anyway, we're Seattle, city of hotshot engineers and technicians. You have to care for your own, right? Let the janitors get work in Pittsburgh.

Besides, in the future we're creating, anyone working here as a janitor won't be able to make enough money to live. That's because we'll make sure that all necessities come only in shiny, gleaming, expensive, packages. So if you're not one of the highly paid professionals we favor, you won't be able to afford the life we shaped for you. No problem for us professionals: the toilets will clean themselves.

In Star Trek it all works because the Federation passes out energy-matter materializers like our government used to pass out cheese. Give a man a piece of cheese, he eats for a day; give a man an energy-matter materializer and an endless supply of dilithium crystals to power it, he can eat for life and also materialize slippers and jockey shorts whenever he needs them.

It's just the opposite of what futuritis gets us. In Seattle, science costs money, and technology doesn't make slippers.

It's all about priorities. We'd rather spend millions connecting West Seattle to Ballard, than making them each better places to be. We'd rather pay one technician than five unskilled laborers. We want a future full of toys, with no more people than absolutely necessary.

Dances With Squirrels

Like many of you I was fascinated this week by all the news about the Northeast electrical blackout. Who could have imagined that one night thousands of New Yorkers would have to sleep on sidewalks?

Seriously though, the numbers in the news are staggering. According to one report, 50 million people in the US were without power at one time, along with another several millions of Canadians the report didn't count.

Let's put that into perspective: That means 1 out of every 6 Americans had no power for many hours, which makes more news than if 1 in 6 Chinese were out of power for an entire century! To put it in perspective another way, 50 million Americans being without power is just like if all of France were out of power, except that Americans care!

Let's turn our attention now to reasons why the Northeast blackout occurred. We might as well since everyone else has, and we have nothing better to do with our time.

Experts and politicians (different people) have weighed in on this subject, beginning with Prime Minister Chrétien's bold assertion that it was New York's fault. Since then the arguments have been mainly over whether it was New York's fault or Ohio's fault. There are still some people though who think it could have started in Ottawa. Ha, ha, that was a joke. We all know Canada couldn't have done it. You have to be a superpower to screw up this big.

All I know about electricity I learned using a model train transformer to fry things, and by sticking one of my fingers in a light socket. Also, my Uncle Fred was a City Light lineman. He found fried squirrels all the time in his work.

So this is my main advice for people looking for the cause of this thing: Look for extremely dead squirrels. You may have to look several hundred yards from the power lines because Uncle Fred said sometimes they go airborne.

Once dead squirrels are found, one specific question invariably arises, "Hey Mister Technology, how can roasting and orbiting a squirrel result in so much loss of power?"

Answer: I'm not Mister Technology.

Still, I'll give it a shot. The electricity in an electrical grid system the size of what we are talking about (the family size) is like a long freight train loaded with, I don't know, french fries, coming down the tracks at a relativistic velocity. It all wants to go somewhere and you aren't going to be able to tell it, "No you have to sit here and wait while I look for this poor squirrel's next of kin." It will knock you out of the way to keep going on down the tracks.

OK, that explanation went nowhere.

Let's try again. Since electricity was first discovered, when Ben Franklin rubbed his hair with his rubber kite, electricity almost never gets rubbed anymore. So when the electricity finds the squirrel it gets all happy because it thinks it finally has a "friend" it can "dance" with. Unfortunately, we all know what happens when electricity "dances" with squirrels. So the squirrel goes bye forever and ever. That makes the electricity sad so it goes all mental…

Sorry, that one was going down a dead end, too.

I'll give it one more try. It's like this. Say you've got a system where all the money that gets poured into it just goes to make a few rich people who are pretending to run it a lot richer. Then it doesn't matter what happens, every couple of decades a squirrel is going to sidetrack your system, because it's going to be one gigantic piece of junk.

That sounds about right.

18 for the Third Time

Let's whine about getting old!

Aging stinks. I just found out I've been eligible to join AARP for four years already. Gack.

At least I've had plenty of practice getting accustomed to this situation. It all started back in '84 when I was driving a cab and sleeping in the '69 Rambler. Something about sleeping on the front seat of a Rambler plus malnutrition plus nearly dying of exposure plus being rejected by normal society for months at a time resulted in premature gray hair.

So it was that when I was 35 a little back seat 6-year-old passenger of my cab said to me "You're old, aren't you?" Aren't little brats just adorable? I think so.

Immediately I looked for ways to cope with my new-found old age and I've been coping ever since.

Coping Mechanism Number One: Surrender. Not being able to do anything at the time about the sleeping in the car and the malnutrition etc. I decided to accept my new senior status. My first act of surrender was to go to a movie and announce proudly -- without being asked first -- that I wanted an adult ticket, because I was sure now that I was indeed an adult, finally. (If I was going to be a senior, I figured I had to pass through the intermediate stage.)

My second act of surrender occurred at the Jack in the Box, when the pasty-faced teenager behind the counter offered me the senior citizen discount. I took it. He didn't check my ID; I didn't check his IQ. Happy times.

Coping Mechanism Number Two: Avoid hitting up on 18 year olds. We all have a tendency to react against our old age by trying to curl up with someone who lets us forget it. This, I have learned, is a huge mistake. Besides spending money too fast, the young ones take too long to train and they don't remember anything important. That is why I now happily belong to Anitra "only 8 days younger" Freeman. My problem with her is just that, being 8 days younger, she can't remember the days from July 9 through July 16, 1949. Also, she refers to me as "the old fart." Also, she spends money too fast.

Coping Mechanism Number Three: Denial. A lot of people tell me denial is a bad thing, but I think it's peachy.

So for example, I have not just turned 54. Instead, I have turned 18 for the third time. Another fun form of denial is to skip celebrating birthdays altogether and start celebrating birth minutes each day. Not only does this mean you get cake and ice cream more often (or in my case more beef and bean burritos), but it spreads the pain of aging out thinly. "Oh yes, I'm older, but only by a day."

Of course the drawback to that last technique is that I am now at least 19,723.5 days old as you read this. I'll be twenty thousand in about 9 months. Ouch.

Coping Mechanism Number Four: Schadenfreude. Hey, it could be worse. I could be Strom Thurmond: 100 years and no longer counting. Or even unimaginably worse, I could be Chante Mallard, and be spending at least the next 25 years of my life, if I should live so long, waiting for parole on a fifty year sentence for killing a homeless man by neglecting to get aid for him after hitting him with my car because I chose to drive while being drugged out and stupid and not caring about any other human being except myself. I'd rather be 54 than be her any day.

Coping Mechanism Number Five: Whining.

Why does whining get such a bad rap? It's a victimless crime. (Anitra says this is not true.) It's like self-gratification: we all do it, if we have any sense. It relieves tension almost as well as watching reruns of our favorite TV garbage. Let's show whining the respect it deserves. Our mental health depends on it.

African Wild Metaphors

Having been homeless a bunch of times has warped my conception of a good time. It used to be that a good time involved some activity. There had to be a convertible and a woman. I expected some state and federal laws to be broken. Two or three weeks' worth of spending money had to be thrown away within minutes. My idea of a good time is now and probably always ever will be to sit indoors someplace where I belong and not have to get up and move.

That's what I like about the zoo. What I can do at the zoo is pay my money (or someone else's money, I don't care) to get in, then find my way to the food pavilion, sit down with a burger and a drink and watch the other people at the zoo who are running around looking for animals to watch.

As many of you know, I am no longer homeless but live in a subsidized apartment building, the Union, run by the same people who run what's called the Downtown Emergency Service Center. These people, who also call themselves DESC, don't want me to just sit in my room and not get up. They try to entice me out of my room with ping-pong, bingo, parties, and games. Nothing much works until someone mentions a field trip to the zoo.

The zoo is wonderful. You've got your animals. Animals are cool. You've got your basic zoo paradigm: the animals are mostly locked up, but it's made to look like they aren't, if it's a good zoo. Every time I go to the zoo I think there has to be a wealth of political metaphor there. I think of Walden II, Brave New World, and lately the Matrix, and I'm sure I will have something insightful to say in this column about such metaphor, perhaps having seen the orangutans.

So last week I went to the zoo with a bunch of fellow residents of the Union. I couldn't wait to get my hands on some of those hot political metaphors I was going to write about, and then I would check out the snow leopard, and then I would retreat to the food pavilion to sit and not get up.

First we all rushed to see the tiger cubs. We studied our maps carefully and found our way to the tiger cub display. As we approached them I thought of all the injustices of child exploitation around the globe that I had ever heard of. I was thinking, boy, these are going to give me terrific insights. Finally we arrived to see them stretched out on some fake rocks in front of us. What a dearth of political metaphor they represented. I have never seen such a paucity of metaphor in a pair of cats as in those two. I have more political metaphor in my little toes.

Then we went to see the snow leopard. Whenever I had looked for the snow leopard in the past he was almost impossible to find thanks to his camouflage. There'll be a metaphor in that for sure, I thought.

Well, guess what. This year the snow leopard was out in plain view putting on a show for all the visitors. He wasn't hard to find. You could see, hear, and smell him as easily as an incontinent Great Dane. Not much political metaphor there.

There was a little relief in the form of the one neurotic porcupine. But I do neurosis all the time. I was hoping I'd find a metaphor that was more out of the way, a little less common. I can find neurotic at 3rd and Pine.

Finally, just as I was about to give up, our group approached the African Wild Dogs. As we walked up to them I could see four wild dogs running around their area in a single file, nose to tail, always in the same order. I shouted something stupid like, "Hey, everybody, look! Puppies!" Or something like that. The lead dog then made a beeline for me with his three buddies following him in their constant order, and he stood in front of me and said: "Hoo."

Then, when he was satisfied that I was nobody, the lead dog took off with the other three to look for other potential challenges to his power in their territory.

That made my day – I'd seen politicians themselves.

What Wes Won't Do by Anitra L. Freeman

I have once more volunteered to do Dr. Wes's column for him, because he's tired.

Wes wants to take this opportunity to have me write about all those things that people want him to write about that he doesn't want to write about, because he's tired.

For instance, a reader would like Wes to write about the permanent adolescence of George W. Bush. This makes Wes very tired indeed.

Now other than thinking that this sounds like a very poetic title, "The Permanent Adolescence of George W. Bush," I wasn't sure that I agreed with the premise. Even when I was an adolescent female, I never despised adolescent males that much.

Would an adolescent male deal with his unpopularity by picking a fight with the first person who gave him an excuse? Well... But would an adolescent male be so determined to have a fight that no matter what the other person did to keep the peace he'd make up a new reason why it wasn't good enough? Well...

Okay, but do you really think he's going to grow out of it in a few more years?

Michele "For God's sake, Anitra, you've known me long enough, you'd better be able to remember that it has only one L" Marchand would like me, or Wes, or me being Wes, or Wes being me, or somebody anyway, to write about Ruth Lilly leaving a hundred million dollars of her pharmaceutical daddy Eli Lilly's fortune to Poetry magazine.

There are several possible reactions here:

• "Why did she leave that much money to POETRY!?"
• "Why didn't she leave the money to Real Change? WE publish poetry."
• "Why is everyone so shocked at big money being given to poetry?"
• "So, is the magazine going to pass any of that on to the poets?"

Let us cut to the chase here. As the purported purpose of this column is advice to poets, I would like to advise that in my opinion the time for the unionization of poets has at last come. Somebody who publishes poetry finally has some money. Since, under the administration of a permanently adolescent male, people who read poetry are soon not going to have any money at all, selling self-published chapbooks is no longer the lucrative gig that it was supposed to be. Getting paid by a rich publisher is much more dependable.

Stan "A Published Author" Burriss would like Wes to write about the quotations etched in the stone of the triangle at the Second Avenue Extension. He believes that Wes could say something about these quotations that would touch you, the readers, warmly.

Wes is against touching people warmly without their prior permission. And he doesn't know where you've been.

My objection is that if writing can't speak for itself, it needs to be rewritten. So next time you are at the Second Avenue Extension, look. I didn't realize the writing was there myself until Wes told me.

Don't ask Stan about this. He won't remember. Ask him about Rumi.

Then there are the standard things that Wes is asked to write about regularly.

The inside scoop on everything wrong at "fill in the blank" shelter:

Folks, homeless people have been murdered on the streets of Seattle at the rate of one every three months this year. Nobody has been murdered in a homeless shelter. Like sex, as long as shelter is by consent, the worst there ever was wasn't really bad at all. Compared to the alternative.

Every rally in Seattle that ever was:

Like poems, these speak for themselves. Like poetry, they could always use more attention. But for us to tell you how great they were is preaching to the choir. I have another suggestion: how about for the next rally (you can find it in the calendar section) you take along one or two friends who aren't convinced of the cause yet?

I don't want to write about any of those things. What I want to write about is Congrescent Singulitarians. I have just discovered that there is a website for Congrescent Singulitarians. I would like to announce that, in retaliation, I am beginning a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Words.

Write On!
© Anitra Freeman 2002