Bored Silly

Looking on page two of this rag you can learn a lot of things. Like for instance that Real Change is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, that we don't consider publishing libel, that we have hotshot friends, and that in addition to being on the "Editorial Committee" I am also a Board Member. Or as we like to say, a bored member. Ha.

What does being a Board Member mean, you ask? It means a two hour meeting every month that almost always runs two and a half and feels like eight. It means sheepishly agreeing to man the phone banks periodically and then begging Anitra "talkmama" Freeman to go in my place. It means licking stamps. It means always having to be reminded which way is "in the red" and which way is "in the black." Port, starboard, port, starboard, how should I know?

It also means obeying the law. It turns out that Board Members have to not only NOT break laws themselves, but they have to keep the organization that they board legal too. What a pain! This is why, during Editorial Committee meetings I am always a dorky loser saying, "we can't say that."

Back before we got the 501(c)3 status we could endorse candidates. Those were good times. They would have been better if we really were high like people said, but we had fun anyway. Remember when I endorsed myself for mayor? If only there were a loophole in the law that lets us have that kind of fun again…

Maybe there is! I've been doing a lot of thinking about this, and I have been comparing the situation vis-à-vis various other federal rules. Let's consider the Prohibition of Assassination.

When it was learned that the CIA had planned to assassinate Castro, Jerry Ford issued an executive order that said, "No employee of the United States shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination." This order made no freaking sense whatsoever, since murder was already illegal, but Ford wasn't interested in making sense, he just wanted Castro to play nice in return.

But now George W. wants to say that Clinton screwed up by not ordering the assassination of Osama bin Laden when he had the chance, even though Bush himself didn't get around to modifying the Prohibition of Assassination to exempt Osama until Oct. 21, 2001.

What's interesting here are the grounds given for the exemption. One: we're at war. This justifies, apparently, not only murdering political leaders, but also murdering innocent people (AKA collateral damage) and imprisoning people (AKA enemy combatants) without trials, indefinitely.

Another reason that has been put forward is that Osama bin Laden is said not to be a political leader in the sense that Ford had in mind. They are actually saying that it is OK to engage in political assassination if the political figure in question doesn't rule over territory! The assassination by Israel of three-quarters blind quadriplegic Sheikh "not a real Sheikh" Ahmed "the Bomb-ed" Yassin has been offered up as an illustration of this new principle. He was leader of Hamas. Hamas wanted to control Palestine, but didn't. Ergo Hamas is not a government. Ergo the murder of Yassin, a political leader, is not political assassination. It is something else.

So there's the key. Maybe I can beat this 501(c)3 prohibition against endorsing political candidates by being very careful to only endorse people who aren't technically political candidates at all.

At first I was toying with the idea of endorsing a dead person. I've always had an appreciation of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas. How about a Thomas/Debs ticket? (I'd put Thomas first to draw the youth vote. He's been dead less long. )

But now I'm thinking that any non-candidate will do, even if they're alive. And I was thinking, it's about time we had a female president.

For that reason, and because I feel like it, I hereby endorse Anitra "I'm Alive!" Freeman for president of the US. I have just informed her of my endorsement and she says she would like Alice Walker to be her running mate. So there you have it: Freeman/Walker. They're something else.

I Feel His Pain

I've always been one of those people who are most happy getting away from everybody and entertaining myself in solitude. But I am not completely asocial. I want to remain in touch with my fellow man and my fellow woman. Mostly my fellow woman, but I don't want to get off the subject with that.

What I'm saying is that one of the ways I keep myself entertained is by Trying to Relate. Trying to Relate is this solitary game I play where I try to keep in touch with the rest of the species by trying to relate to things that I hear or read about them doing. It is a fun game that can keep me busy for hours and hours.

Take for example this guy Aron Ralston who got his arm caught under an 800-pound boulder and chewed it off to get away. The news said he cut it off but when you read the details and find out how dull the knife was and the fact that he had to break both forearm bones first you realize that the "chew" metaphor is more appropriate than the "cut" metaphor. He chewed his arm off with a piece-of-junk knife. "Hacked" might work.

Trying to Relate takes me down many avenues of fun. I don't have to confine myself to trying to relate to Mr. Ralston. I can try to relate to the reporters, too. So right now I'm trying to relate to the guy who first wrote that it was an 800-pound boulder and I'm asking myself the question, "Who hiked back the ten miles from the highway with the scale and weighed the rock?" And I am imagining the reporter asking this question and getting a blank stare. This way I am relating.

But of course the story is about Mr. Ralston and most of my fun naturally gravitates toward trying to relate to what he did.

I am reminded at this juncture of the recent news of a study, done by actual scientists, that determined that (duh!) some people hurt more than other people. Now, "relating" requires just such comparisons between people. To be precise, in relating to Mr. Ralston I would be relating two people, namely him and myself. Therefore I must consider how much would I hurt, were I to hack myself.

Well. It so happens that I am the sort of guy who can't even touch his nipples with his fingertips without screaming in agony. For me, popping a pimple requires that a local anesthetic be applied by a qualified nurse. To remove a band-aid from hairy skin on my arm I shower frequently until it falls off or decays. I am not exaggerating one bit.

So the answer to the question of how much I would hurt if I were to hack myself is: gobs.

There is absolutely no possible way that I could chew, hack, or even cut my arm off, and then later say to the world, "I felt pain and I coped with it." The word "coped" would not be part of my description of what happened. I would say something like, "I felt pain and I screamed bloody murder." Or something like, "I felt pain and I passed out and bled all over myself and then I woke up puking and alternately screaming bloody murder." Or, "I started to cut myself and I couldn't do it and instead I passed out and woke up in this hallucinated press conference and now I'm going to die trapped under this rock."

What I am suggesting here is the heresy that Mr. Ralston was able to do what he did because he was constituted differently from some of the rest of us. He evidently does not feel pain as much as some people, namely me. I actually suspect that he is the sort who feels less pain than most of us. Why, I wonder, is it so important for him to climb every 14,000-foot or higher mountain he can, in cold weather no less? Could it be that he's desperately running around trying to feel anything?

But, hey, I'm not saying that what he did isn't still very impressive. Just because he couldn't feel his arm as much as most of us can feel ours, doesn't mean he wasn't attached to it. I'm sure that he's going through a grieving process now as serious as any I would.

Now, grief, there's something I can relate to, while we all wait for Paradise to fall on us.

Everything Reveals Everything

Last issue I talked about my cab driving history. Since then I have been met with deep, penetrating questions by my readers. Questions such as, "What?" and, "So how was it?" So I have decided to keep at it a while longer.

The nice thing about cab driving is that it's just like everything else. So if you talk about it enough, eventually you've talked about everything else anyway. That's why poetry works!

Take fear for instance. Fear is a big subject these days, what with Home Security, snipers, Saddam, et al. Rather than talk about fear of Iraq I can talk about cab driving. It's all the same.

I began cab driving in fear of it. I was just quitting a job that had been making me ill, and I was looking for something completely different. That day, the newspapers were all about a cab driver who had been shot to death for the fun of it, in South Seattle off of Rainier Valley. The murderers were still at large. I read the stories and immediately thought, "That cab company will be needing a new driver," and I signed up with them that Monday.

There was training, and the next thing I knew I was set loose on the whole of Seattle to drive cab anywhere I wanted in the city, six nights a week, twelve hours a night. I was expected to work where the business was, but now a new fear set in. I found I had a powerful dread of working unfamiliar neighborhoods. I lived in the Rainier Valley dispatching area. That was the area I knew, so that's where I worked. Even though the murderers were still out there.

Isn't that just the way it always is, folks? You back away from one fear and another one is breathing down your neck right behind you. I think a grand unifying philosophical principle is involved here. Some day vinyl may be implicated, also.

But back to the fear. The thing we all do in cases like this is ask, "Where are the police? We need police to catch these murderous thugs." All right, I'll tell you where the police were. They were all over Rainier Valley doing their drug busting and breaking up domestic violence, all the stuff you see them doing on Cops.

And guess what the police do when they are breaking up a fight in a family and they need to get one of the parties out of the area? Do you think they haul them out in a patrol car? No way. They put them in cabs and ORDER the cab drivers to take them somewhere, and don't pay the drivers.

One day I was ordered to take a teenage girl who had been beaten by her father to Harborview Hospital. Trouble is, she and her sister who came along didn't want to go to the hospital.

Well, I shouldn't commit kidnapping just because the Seattle Police order me to. The girls wanted to go to a 7-11, so that's where we went.

Wouldn't you know it? The father drove up in his Caddy right after we got there, and the sisters proceeded to fight over which one of them would have the honor of shooting him in the face with a pistol they were carrying.

After one of them waved the gun in the father's face and after a passing gang (I'm not kidding) intervened and took away the gun, the police showed up and lined everyone up against the wall but me. I was the only witness willing to cooperate. Without me the police couldn't prove anything.

I was all set to witness the whole thing when the officer put the girl who had brandished the gun back in the cab sitting right next to me, in the front seat, and she pretended her finger was a gun and stuck it in my ribs. Or I thought she was pretending. But I couldn't be sure so I started to get out of the cab, to get a little away from her, when the same officer karate kicked the door on me. In that one blinding instant I learned always to fear the police.

Suddenly I couldn't remember seeing anything. There's poetry at you again.