Nickels Makes History Repeat

I have a column due by 9 AM this morning, and I've also promised Anitra "Not Acting On Behalf Of Anybody In Particular" Freeman that by the same time I'd read a book-length manifesto on Nickelsville that she wrote with a committee. Not being inclined to do needless work, I shall now attempt to combine the two efforts into one glorious slack-off.

[Above Left: Anitra with acquaintance.]

I've talked about Nickelsville here before but I've never spent an entire column on it. This is mainly due to the fact that it hasn't existed yet. I generally find that when I talk about that which is not, the results are even more obtuse than what you usually get when I talk about that which is.

But Nickelsville is poised to be, probably before the next column is out, so it has achieved a degree of concreteness analogous to that of The Melting of the Polar Icecaps and The Rise of the Oceans Due to Global Warming, or The Great Stock Market Crash of 2008 (both expected later today).

So what will Nickelsville be? It will be a Hooverville that is named after Greg Nickels, Seattle's mayor, rather than after Herbert Hoover, a former US President. In the Great Depression Seattle had a Hooverville, a shantytown built by homeless people. A lot of people then thought that Herbert Hoover was responsible for a lot of the Greatness of the Great Depression. So they named the shantytowns after him, the need for them being perceived to be partly his fault.

Today, we don't just think Greg Nickels has a lot to do with how hard it is to survive homeless in Seattle, we know he does. We have listened to him talk a good talk about ending homelessness, while at the same time chasing homeless encampments all around the city and destroying survival gear wherever found. The message from Nickels is, we, the City of Seattle, will end homelessness in the abstract by 2014 (only: not really because the plan isn't to actually end homeless, but hah, hah, that's what we say about it, even though the plan itself says something entirely different, read the fine print), but concretely we will strip all the homeless that are forced outdoors for lack of adequate shelter of all their property, and leave them to the elements.

So as those homeless people who wish to live band together into a shantytown, there is no question whose fault it all is. Nickelsville will be Nickels' fault. Without Greg Nickels and the homeless encampment sweeps he instigated, Nickelsville wouldn't be about to happen. As bad as George Bush is, there would not be a Bushville at this time. Until maybe next week, depending on how many multi-billion dollar financial greed factories file Chapter 11 this week.

As Anitra and Friends' manifesto ably and concisely points out, Nickelsville will cost the City of Seattle nothing. To be less concise: it will not take money out of the general fund. It will not be built by city workers paid by taxpayers. The residents will build and maintain it with assistance from private donors. The city will not be billed for the labor.

People are always saying, "Why don't homeless people ever do anything to help themselves?" Well, they do, everyday. They help themselves by barely surviving in spite of all the obstacles and all the persecution. It's understandable that people can't see that work of surviving, because it's scattered among thousands of personal stories.

Nickelsville should make matters clearer. "What are homeless people doing to help themselves?" Nickelsville, for one thing.

And if, as feared, the city tears Nickelsville down, that would help answer the follow-up question, "Why, if they are helping themselves, are they still homeless?"

The first step in getting out of homelessness is finding a way to maintain and survive every day. If that first step is continually tripped up by the police power of a mayor, then there can never be a second step.

Superior Kachiku

I get the Seattle Times every day for the sudoku. The P-I has one, but the one in the Seattle Times has superior "kachiku" ("cattle.")

"Sudoku" means "pointless." You fill a grid with the digits 1 through 9, so rows, columns, and some 3x3 blocks have no repeated digits. When you're done, it spells a magic word! Ha! No! When you're done you have a grid filled with digits.

Also pointless is arguing with Seattle Times editors. It's like arguing with beanbag chairs that blow when you sit on them. But they blew smellier than usual last Thursday with an editorial entitled "Tent City: pointless," and the stench propels me. There are misleads and lies throughout.

In the first paragraph we're told 100 people live in the Eastside Tent City ("Tent City 4", managed by SHARE/WHEEL) "rent-free." The mislead: In fact, the residents pay rent in labor to maintain the grounds and keep them secure.

The second paragraph is a piece of propaganda worthy of Goebbels. They say the small size of Tent City 4 proves "This is not New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina." From that they conclude "there is no public emergency here."

No, there is a public emergency, with more than 2600 people unable to find either housing or shelter every night. The fact that Tent City 4 is so small is not proof there is no emergency, but more evidence of the nature of it. It would be much larger if the response to the emergency were adequate. But, just like New Orleans after Katrina, the government has failed, and SHARE/WHEEL can only do so much in the face of community opposition, such as the vicious, poisonous, lie-laden opposition of the Seattle Times.

"There are always people with private emergencies, and we help them with shelter beds." The Seattle Times is a newspaper. It reports fact. The Seattle Times editorial staff has the job of reading their own paper. Their own paper has kept them informed of the fact that there are shelter beds for only half the homeless in Seattle. I know they do their job well so I know they know that. So when they say, "and we help them with shelter beds," they are purposely lying. Shame.

"We don't need to use tents — and nobody thought of it until some political activists at SHARE/WHEEL devised Tent City eight years ago." The Seattle Times editors don't need to use tents, I'm sure, but when they use the editorial "we" in this case they are knowingly (they're writers!) and deliberately implying the public "we." It's a propaganda technique designed to divide those who do need tents to survive from the rest of the public. It goes along with defining their emergencies as private.

SHARE/WHEEL didn't invent tents. They were needed long before Tent Cities were invented. SHARE/WHEEL brought them together to help each other be safe, first and foremost.

[Above: Maybe Mathew Brady invented tents.]

"The point of it is politics. It is to have homelessness in the face of well-housed people to make them feel guilty." Politics to call attention to an emergency is no vice. The people need to do politics to be heard. The powerful, like the Seattle Times management, would silence the politics of the oppressed. The purpose of Tent City isn't to create guilt but to educate and inspire further action. AND to survive.

"Now... There are shelter beds. There are opportunities for work." The majority of Tent City residents are employed, and still can't afford rent. There are NOT shelter beds enough. (To the Times: You keep on repeating lies, and we'll keep on repeating the truth, and we'll see who wins in the end.)

"Itinerant tent camps are not acceptable in a modern city." Homelessness is not acceptable in a modern city.

Questions To Question By

1. "Why don't you say what you mean, Wes?"

2. "Kachiku?"

3. If homelessness were private would it be homelessness?

4. Exactly how are private and public opposites?

Whereas, Sniggling Happens

I just spent way too much of my life rooting through 7 recently released city documents concerning "Unauthorized Camping on City Property" looking for the pony they promised, and all I found was manure.

Greg J Nickels has done it again. Another fine act of propaganda backing up a policy of cruelty serving greed.

If you've been overseas for fifteen months and just got back, here's a refresher. Sometime a year or more ago (nobody's quite sure when) Greg Nickels decided the old protocols for clearing homeless people off city land weren't good enough. So he instituted new protocols without telling the public that hired him and pays him, and without telling the city council that has a duty to oversee city affairs. When the public found out, it was only because reports of excessive sweeps prompted resort to the Freedom of Information Act, not because Greg Nickels was suddenly struck by a sense of duty. The information had to be forced from his administration, and details are still missing, and we've got no apologies yet for the trouble of squeezing what little we got out of them.

So anyway, people found out what the new protocols were and a lots got angry, and demanded answers. So Greg Nickels arranged for them to vent at city department heads. People packed a big room at the Seattle Center and one after another stood up and voiced outrage at the homeless sweeps procedures. Nickels himself didn't have the decency to be there. No apology for that either.

It was part of a belated "comment period." The comment period ended almost as soon as it began, time passed, and now, New and Improved Homeless Harassment!

It's "better" because it takes longer! That's the whole improvement. It's like "Please don't run me over with that truck!" "How about if I take three times as long to run you over with this truck?" "Oh yes!! Thank you, kind sir."

NO THANK YOU!! The whole new protocol starts out with a bunch of Whereas-s that put out the same lie that the old protocols put out. The city is doing enough to end homelessness to justify cracking down on campers. IT IS NOT.

The big propaganda: The city will add 20 new shelter beds right away.

Brilliant. That's a whole 1.7% increase in shelter beds, in Seattle. The King County Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness, which the city has bragged endlessly about signing on with, requires King County's shelter bed count frozen at 2006 numbers, so I suppose those 20 beds will have to come from Renton or Burien. Meanwhile, January's One Night Count found over 2600 people sleeping outside. If they all had to use the city's generous new shelter beds, they'd each get to lie down 11 minutes every day.

You'll be hearing about the city's new definition of encampment that comes along with its New and Improved Homeless Harassment. That's because it defines a homeless encampment using such exacting legalistic language as "identifiable area" and camps being within "approximately" 300 feet.

I can't resist sniggling like the nerdy mathematician I am and pointing out that any one pair of nearby campers in Seattle, combined with any other one pair of nearby campers anywhere else in Seattle, would meet the city's idiotic definition of an encampment, because the rule only says each camper has to be close to one other in the group, not close to all in the group, and Seattle itself is an identifiable area. (So's planet Earth.) And, oh yes, two pair makes four, which is more than three.

This says it all: The Human Services Department ("Investing in People") has provided directions to the Westbridge storage facility, where those homeless people will have to go to retrieve their confiscated belongings. The protocol specifically excludes car campers from the procedures it lists. But the directions are solely for drivers.

What a failure to imagine the real lives and hardships of the people they are abusing.

Choose wisely, Reykjavík!

Let's do a homeless news roundup! We'll rope'em, tie'em, and brand'em!

Here at Adventures in Irony we make it our duty to leave the local homeless news to the paid professionals. We will have nothing to say, for now, about the SHARE/WHEEL occupation and subsequent arrests at the Lora Lake Apartments which were a big deal of last week's homelessness-related news in the Seattle area. Except, "gross misdemeanor, my ass." The gross misdemeanor was shutting down the apartments.

OK, moving onward and outward. A wheel-chair bound homeless woman in Fresno was arrested and cited at a McDonald's restaurant for attempting to use the restroom without first making a purchase. And rightly so!

Think about it. Let's say you want to start up a McDonald's franchise somewhere. How do you choose where to put it?

What I would do is ask myself, where would people get the most benefit from my placement of my McDonald's? I would take into account all that McDonald's franchises have to offer. There's greasy, over-salted burgers. There's tastes-like-chicken sandwiches. There's parking. There's air-conditioning. There's 30-minute seating in tiny little chairs made for people with one buttock each, in a room with walls painted in scientifically calibrated "move-along" colors. And there's bathrooms. I should site my new franchise someplace where one or two of these items of attraction will be a big draw. That means a place in a warm climate with a severe shortage of public bathrooms. Sounds like Fresno to me!

So I can totally sympathize with the management of that Fresno McDonald's. That wheel-chair bound homeless woman was trying to use her full bladder, or whatnot, as an excuse to steal one of the only two good things their store has to offer. If they didn't draw the line with her, then, pretty soon, everyone would know that you didn't have to buy the food at their McDonald's to use the can, and then nobody would buy the food there, 'cause the food sucks!

In more abstract homeless news, but still out of California, an article on homelessness and health care by Margot Kushel, MD, of the University of California at San Francisco says that, "Since the early 1990s, the average age of the homeless population has risen approximately eight months each calendar year."

Combining that with statistics which show that the average age at death of homeless people is under fifty, and we can now predict that old age, murder, and suicide, will assuredly solve the homeless problem in ten years after all, in spite of all our recent hand waving and hollering in the direction of the opposite conclusion. We are most sorry for having been so wrong.

The most interesting news this week is NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) news from the online Iceland Review, which says that the shelter that was planned for homeless men at Njálsgata 74 in downtown Reykjavík will open in October, as previously scheduled, over the objections of neighbors, but, by way of compromise, would house only 8 men rather than the 10 that were to originally have been sheltered.


[Above: Y'all's gotta see this picture of Njálsgata Street!]

My concern is, what are the odds that the two guys that are excluded are going to be just exactly the two bastards that the NIMBYs were trying to keep out?

Out of any 10 people, statistics shows that two of them will be saints, and another two of them bastards, whether the ten are homeless or not. Studies have repeatedly shown that two out of ten of all human beings are worthless scum.

But if you pick 2 people out of 10 at random the odds that the 2 you picked will be the 2 bastards of the bunch is only 1 in 45. That's just simple math!

Choose wisely, Reykjavík!

Like Nipples on a Dude

Let's take some time off from News We Can Use and have us a short helping of Useless News!

I enjoy useless news, and what could be more useless than learning that, recently, a homeless 17 year-old Kenyan found a more than 5000 dollar treasure hunt prize while urinating in a Nairobi park? Evans Kamande found a small box, with a piece of paper inside, between the forks of a cactus. The paper turned out to be a voucher for the prize, which Mr. Kamande later collected from the local radio station that had been conducting the treasure hunt.

What possible use could we get from that? Maybe if we played the lottery we could conclude that we might be better off urinating in city parks. But, realistically, what are the odds that a Nairobi radio station would leave a voucher for a cash prize in Denny Regrade Park? So all we get is an excuse to use the word "urinating" repeatedly. But we could have done that without the excuse!

Here's some useless news from Graz, Austria. Professors from the Karl Franzens University there are taking part in a project to bring the news to the homeless of Austria's second largest city that laughter is the best medicine.

That's right. Frolicking, happy-go-lucky, Austrian university professors are spreading the word to homeless people in shelters and drop-in-centers that if they would just laugh more their immune systems would work better. Here is an actual translation of an actual hilarious quote from the "act" of one of these professors: "Phrases such as laughing yourself sick should actually be turned around to read laughing yourself well." STOP, I'm NOT in stitches! I'm well!

Sure, it would be useful if homeless people learned to laugh better. It might also help if they got plenty of sleep and avoided sweets. But how about getting them shelter?

OK, that brings us to news concerning world-famous Australian architect Sean Godsell. This guy designs cheap housing intended to shelter the homeless. His works include a converted shipping container that has been on display at the Smithsonian design museum in New York, and a bus shelter house – a bus shelter by day, a homeless shelter by night.

How does that qualify as useless news? Well, ask yourself, why are these things always in museums and never in use? In order for a shelter idea to be useful, people have to permit it to be used. What good is a bus shelter house when every transit system in the world is so hostile to the homeless that they not only wouldn't want to install Godsell's creations but they would furiously destroy existing bus shelters wherever homeless people rest at them?

Godsell also has designed a park bench shelter. It's a park bench by day and a safe home out of the weather for someone at night. They say the only problem with it is, no city will have it. And when cities don't want something that tends to be the end of it. Except for homelessness itself, of course. That, you can't legislate away.

Which brings us to the least useful news of all. No more useful than that the sun will rise tomorrow. No more useful than that George Foreman has a kid named George. No more useful than my left nipple: knowing that the neighbors N don't want a shelter in neighborhood X. (X can take on any value in the universe of all neighborhoods, and N can be any subset of the residents of X.)

Like, duh.

Guess what, some Kirklanders don't want Tent City 4 in Kirkland! Wow. You could knock me over with a feather. A twenty-pound feather with a three-foot handle.

Useless: "Not in my neighborhood." Useful: "What can I do to help?"

Useful is rare, useless is everywhere.

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

The Bigger the Houseboat, the Better

I hate the thought of staying in a shelter. In fact in all my time being homeless I never once stayed in one.

Gym locker rooms, libraries, marches, square dances, mosh pits, sports stadiums, crowded buses, crowded sidewalks, packed subways, shelters, they're all the same. Places where there are too many people.

If I wanted to sleep six inches on each side from two strangers, I would be a lot friendlier than I am. People who don't know me think I'm shy, because I don't talk much around them. What they don't know is that I'm just keeping quiet to avoid encouraging them to talk to me. Why would I want total strangers to talk at me?

I'd rather sleep in a patch of nettles or poison ivy or on rocks than have to talk sports with some Biff on the next mat.

But today the subject of shelters forces itself on me. I just can't ignore the fact that New York city officials just visited the Bahamas to check out the possibility of buying one or more cruise ships, TO USE AS HOMELESS SHELTERS.

It seems a New York State Supreme Court Justice over there is actually threatening to jail city officials if they can't shelter homeless families within 24 for hours after they apply. So immediately they got the idea to buy one-way tickets to the Bahamas.

No, that's not true. First they tried other things, like putting the families in gyms and defunct hotels and even jail. Some of these ideas worked. Others drew criticism. You had your NIMBYs. You had your whining homeless advocates complaining that housing people in jails is callous and cruel. City governments hate criticism. So hey, let's check out putting them on cruise ships, they thought. Then they thought, oh, there are defunct cruise ships in the Bahamas, let's go look at them. So they did.

Now they actually have some homeless advocates ripping them for this idea. No, I don't know why.

I've got to break ranks here. I think sheltering homeless families on defunct cruise ships is a terrific idea. I would especially like to see it done here in Seattle. I would even consider becoming homeless again if I were sure of getting a suite for myself and Anitra "On Whose Kitchen Floor I Have Sometimes Slept" Freeman, whom I would pass off as family for the purpose.

Think about it. People love houseboats. Houseboats are an integral part of Seattle's tradition. Why should just Tom Hanks get to live on a houseboat? Why shouldn't homeless people live on houseboats, too? OK, so you can't have a separate houseboat for every homeless person or family. So you do the next best thing. You spend a measly $20 million (that's around what the cheaper of the ships in the Bahamas would cost) for a cruise ship. You spend another few million to rip out stuff you won't let the homeless have, like the bar and the disco and the pool. Then you've still got a hell of a houseboat! I would be proud to live on one of these.

The ships examined hold thousands of people. Of course some space would have to be reserved for the crew and the all important activities director. Even without the bar people are going to need activities. It would be cruel to deny people shuffleboard under the circumstances.

Even when you add in janitorial and other maintenance I'll bet the whole thing could be done for a mere thirty million down plus a few million a year. Where can you find a housing bargain for that? And no NIMBYs except at the end closest to shore!

Maybe we could snag some old surplus battleships or submarines to use for shelters, too. The Navy just uses the old ones for target practice anyway. I bet Seattle could get a bunch for no more than what we would spend for one lousy skyscraper. And they already have beds in them. Imagine the savings that represents.

All in all, a sound, realistic, proposal. Let's get started!

My Girlfriend's Loose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'69 Rambler

Divided Highway Ahead

My Girlfriend's Behind

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

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

Duck Trouble

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shelter Canaries Needed

It Also Rhymes With Hoots

Or Opus 222, Pity Our Poor Proofreader

there's a kind of thing i need to say

i'd like to say it if I may

there's a little talk i'd like with you

if it's something that you'll let me do

there's a subject i need to talk about

i hope you'll hear me and you won't run out

it's a subject that requires the utmost arts

i need to talk about our --

-- how can I be delicate here? People make certain smells. The smells are accompanied by certain explosions, sometimes. At other times, they are silent, stealthy. Once, I could swear I felt one crawl up my back before it circled my neck and tried to strangle me.

I love cheese. I love beans. If I weren't a social creature I would eat rice and beans twice a day, covered with cheese. I would have eggs and cheese for breakfast, beans and cheese for dessert, eggs and cheese when I get depressed, beans and cheese whenever I wanted to celebrate. I would be so full of methane I'd have to wear one of those triangular "inflammable" signs you see on gasoline trucks.

It's not just because I'm eight days older than Anitra "too bipolar for you" Freeman that she refers to me as "her old fart". She is also using synecdoche. That's a poetic term that means allowing a part to stand for the whole. Anitra should know, she's suffered all my parts. Still, with all that, I must say in all modesty that I am not the fartiest old fart there ever was. Not by a long shot. I could introduce you to some guys that'd blow your nose-ring clean off. And they're not all that old. Some of them are just in their twenties, living lives of unpromising futures.

Flashback to four years old: Mommy and Daddy are going "out" and everybody gets in the car except the dog. It starts out being a big adventure ("we're going out! yay!") until the car rolls up to a one story puke green building connected to a playground surrounded by chain-link fencing. You find out that while Mom and Dad will be "out", you will be "in", in a prison they used to call a nursery. Since your parents have done what you thought at the time were far worst things, you imagine that they are abandoning you to this place, to spend the rest of your life there. In other words, eternity.

You scream, you kick, you threaten to stop breathing, but nothing works. They drive off without you. It's only after they are gone that you start to notice the smell. It's the smell of rancid milk mixed with essences of diaper pail, Pine Sol, and Clorox. But that's just the beginning.

Three hours later you're still there, and the wardens inform you and all the other inmates that it's beddy-bye-time, and they set up the beddy-byes, and there be the wailing and the gnashing of teeth. For the beddy-byes be only six inches apart from each other, and it be Poot City in that hell-hole. You try to sleep not because you want the rest but because you know that sleep, the little death, brings a deadening of the senses, and Oh do they want to be deadened.

But alack, sleep never comes! Oh, it comes for the OTHER, with their stinking extroversion, their relaxed approaches to social mores, their loose sphincters. Sure, THEY sleep. Not you, not the sensitive one, not the one in agony, the one who really needs it.

Back in the future: you've been homeless for weeks. Someone finally tells you about a homeless shelter you can go to. Something in the back of your mind tells you to be wary, but you go anyway. They make you sit through a sermon to get dinner. While you wait for the sermon to start they hand you a sheet detailing the rules. You find out you will be sleeping on mats.

You get a peek into the room where all the mats are laid out, six inches apart from each other. Then you hear the others, whispering the bad news.

"Bean stew for dinner tonight. Again."

-- Why shelter is not enough.