Februaries Suck

[from 2/3/10]

Have a Happy February, everybody, if you can. Februaries are my least favorite months. Oh, they start well, with the cute groundhog and all he represents -- brides, candles and pregnant sheep -- all wonderful things. And they end very well, namely soon. But the middles of Februaries don't agree with me. They're like celery and peanut butter with a side of sauerkraut, washed down with runny ketchup.

Other people like Februaries. Why else would they have their annual supreme pointy-ball rite in one? As you know by now, this Sunday millions of American Footballists will imbibe sacramental beverages while watching Super Bowl XZLVIIW, to be held in the Great House of the Dolphin this year, featuring the Indianapolis Ponies and the New Orleans Sandbaggers, or some such (who cares, they're not from here). The winning team of those two will be honored by being fed to the Dolphin God. But really, it will be the people at home watching, who will be the true sacrificial victims.

Februaries are months I have to buy the woman chocolate. I can't escape buying her chocolate, it is my fate. Likewise, it is my fate to have to hear about how great Lincoln and George Washington were, even though it would have been fine by me if now Florida were in another country, even though George Washington died with 357 more slaves than he inherited from his Dad, and even though I am convinced that if the secessionists had their way slavery still would have ended, almost as soon, and with far less bloodshed, but, hey, I know, too late now.

The Washington State legislature continues to meet in February, and that fact continues to be a source of agony. I can't describe the pain that I feel every time someone tells me about current legislative activity. I can't tell you how much it hurts knowing that they are going to cut social programs which save the state money in the long run.

In fact, this year I feel like February started in January, that's how ugly the news out of Olympia is.

The worst day of February so far was January 29, when the newspapers reported that we had counted 5% fewer people sleeping outside in King County this year and it was proclaimed another proof of the ongoing success of King County's Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness.

Let's recall what the Ten Year Plan to etc. is. It's a process that is driven by committees that formed in and following 2004 and will complete its tenth year in 2014. So it has only four years to go. A lot can happen in four years. Look at 1861-1865. But if the idea is we can get to close to no homelessness at all in four years by a gradual process, we won't make it at this rate. We should have dropped 20% this year at least, to be on schedule.

What's really aggravating about the news of the One Night Count is that I know that the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness is fraudulently named. It has never planned to end homelessness, only to end the most visible homelessness. A correct name for it would be the King County Ten Year Plan to Cut Chronic Homelessness in Half, Where By Chronic Homelessness We Mean Whatever We Say We Mean, But Rest Assured That When We're Done, Middle-Class Shoppers Won't Complain So Much About Having to Share Downtown With So Many Really Gnarly People.

On those terms, those cynical terms, a 5% drop would be just peachy, if it were statistically significant. We'd be on our way not to ending homelessness, but making it look that less bad by 2014. But, guess what? It's not statistically significant! And the "planners" know it! It's just spin!

To sum up: Februaries suck. January sucked so bad, February started during it. The King County Committee to End Homelessness is a virtual never-ending February of sucking, fraud, and spinning arrogance.

Famous Lamous

OK. I was in a really foul mood when I was writing this column for last issue, and that may have caused me to froth excessively. But to refer to it as "my lamest column ever" as one person did is simply ignorant. My lamest column ever was in fact the Sept. 1, 1997 column, which opened with the words "In a world of Labrador Retrievers, I am a duck!! (OHHH YES!! OH YYESSS!! A DUCK, I AM, a DUCK, oooooooh yesss!)," and ended with the sad admission that I was not a duck after all. When I think of lame, I think of that column, which forever set the standard of lame for all columns everywhere.

There is absolutely no possibility that any new column I write will ever be as bad as the duck column, owing to the superiority of my current anti-psychotic medication. Still, I want to try. Because, what is life without hope? If we don't challenge our challenges, what will we challenge? I, for one, vowed long ago that I would not surrender to a shallow, vain, pursuit of excellence.

I could just write "I suck" 400 times and turn that in as a column. The management of this rag has assured me that they are prepared for that eventuality. There is in fact a not-very-secret document in a file cabinet in the back room entitled "Wes sucks" that provides no less than two plans. Plan A is to run an old column (preferably the duck masterpiece.) Plan B is to go ahead and print "I suck" 400 times and to sign my name to it.

But that would be too easy not only for me but everyone else involved. It would give the proofreader too little to do. I would not feel as though I had earned my complimentary copies. Homeless activists everywhere would be disappointed because I hadn't been active enough, they want me to break a sweat. At least every other line I should insert the words "and homelessness sucks too" in order to stay on topic.

So I am always on the lookout for creative new ways to suck without merely saying so. That's why I need television.

Without television and the great communicators that communicate to me on television, I would not know how to be as lame as I am. That's why I have shacked up with a sexy rich woman, Anitra "Pay-Pal" Freeman. I sweep the floor, buy the groceries and do the dishes. In return my woman buys TV and TV access for me. It's all so I can watch Andy Rooney and learn. ("Have you ever noticed how bourgeois I am?" is an actual quote. So is "Why do you think my head is so big?" and "Have you ever noticed lots of people call themselves people-persons but nobody ever calls themselves a thing-person?" )

Thanks to television and to its cousin the internet, I have learned that the only thing that matters to most Americans is the quality of middle-class life. Even poor people in this country don't really care about what other poor people are doing or how things are going to get better so that there won't be any poor people. All they care about are the latest adventures of middle-class people like they wish they were.

But I digress. What's important here is finding creative ways to be lame. So what I want to do today is to join the chorus of hand wringing over the fate of the middle-class in America. How about if I call attention to the tragedy of middle-class homelessness? Here we go:

"That's right. This is a huge problem, people. Every day tens of middle-class people become homeless. I'm not talking here about people who were middle-class who suddenly became poor and are now living on the streets. I'm talking about people who still are middle-class and are now living on the streets.

"OK, they aren't really living on the streets because no one with money would do that. But they're living in motels and hotels and RVs. Some of them are even living in Mexico, being forced to read Spanish for Travelers dictionaries and listen to Berlitz tapes at night.

"It is all the more a tragedy because these people pay the taxes that pay the truck drivers to deliver our government cheeses, and yet no one considers their plight(s)."

Yes! As lame as the campaigns!

Squawking the Squawk

Lately we have been musing much upon the distinction between the rant and the rage.

Well actually, I just lied right off the bat in my first sentence there, since one muse doesn't amount to much "much", and really what I've been doing is ranting. But "much" is such a nice monosyllable, how can I resist it?

Then again, hey, if I muse at all, that interrupts the flow of my rants, so it's a big deal, right? Maybe that was a lot of musing after all. Yeah, that's it. I mused once. For 30 seconds I stopped yelling at the insane idiots presented to me in all their glory by CNN. So now I'm a regular philosopher. Pretty soon I'm going to be so thoughtful, I'm going to read a book. I'll show those idiots what "much" can mean.

"So, Dr. Wes, you say you mused. What, pray tell, was the content of your musing?" -- you might now be asking, if you were someone who talked like that.

Here's what I think is the difference. Let's say an idiot says something idiotic on the television. Subsequently throwing my shoe through the screen at the electronic image of Tucker Carlson, a right-wing CNN opinionator, would definitely be indicative of a rage. Merely uttering long strings of verbiage suggesting that Tucker Carlson had to be raised by whores because his real mother wasn't house-trained, or suggesting that Tucker was named for an alarming personal habit he developed when he was two and still hasn't kicked, or suggesting that Tucker Carlson "sleeps" with a ventriloquism puppet called "Sleeper" Carlson -- none of that would necessarily indicate rage (unless, of course, it was mean-spirited.) But it would definitely be a rant, because it would consist of words coming out of my mouth. OK, that wasn't a good example.

Let me illustrate it another way. Let's say I were a Vietnam War Vet, which I'm not, and suppose that some other Vietnam Vet in 1971 said some things that I interpreted as casting aspersions on me and still other fellow Vietnam Vets as yet undetermined. Were I to say that what that guy said in 1971 was a crock (which it wasn't actually, when you hear it all in context, but I'm being hypothetical here) and therefore he is now and will forever be a poopy-head, that would be me ranting. But if I were instead to insist that John Kerry didn't deserve his Purple Hearts and that he somehow committed fraud to get them, that could very well be slander and I might very well be accused of rage.

Rage is when I think I've been hurt, so I try to hurt back. Rant is when I'm just mouthing off. Or to put it another way, rage is when you do it; rant is when I do it.

No, just kidding there. It's possible to be a little objective about it. Take for example Bob Dole's incredible idea that Kerry didn't deserve his Purple Hearts because he wasn't wounded enough.

We all know that Bob Dole was wounded enough. But we also know that you don't have to lose the use of an arm to get a Purple Heart. Bob Dole knows that. Bob Dole also knows that if he has a problem with the Navy's policy concerning who gets Purple Hearts, he's a very powerful man and he can take it up with the Navy. But Bob Dole isn't interested in the Navy's policy. He thinks he's been personally slighted and so Kerry has to pay for it. Bob needs to SUCK IT UP.

See? That was a rant. No one got hurt, the dog doesn't have a broken leg, there's no food on the floor or the walls, and nobody is on their hands and knees picking pieces of prized Japanese earthenware out of the carpet.

Now let's contrast that with what's going to happen if George Bush continues to insist that there is no way he can lose the upcoming election. I am going to start hurting deep down in that place I hate to go, that Floridian-Harris-chad place. I am going to start saying, "Oh yeah, and how would you know, Mr. Bush, would it be because the election is already fixed?"

Somebody better hide the tea set.

Pigs Deny Sucking

My favorite line from all the movies put together: "It's not my fault!" – as said by both Han Solo and Lando Calrissian in Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back.

I've always dreamed of an opportunity to say that, dramatically, while a wookie moans behind me. Other things I've wished I could say, dramatically, with or without a wookie on hand, are, "I sense a disturbance in The Force," and, "You still have much to learn, my young apprentice." I don't think I'll ever get the chance to pull those off convincingly, but surely I should be able to manage "It's not my fault!" at least if I drop the requirement of a wookie accompaniment.

What started me thinking about this recently was the announcement by Prince Charles' royal personal secretary that His Royalness didn't do it, "it" being unspecified.

Why didn't I ever think of that? All this time since Empire Strikes Back I could have been shouting "It's not my fault!" at random intervals without ever indicating what it was that wasn't my fault.

I'm going to do it right now: It's not my fault! And I'm not telling you what it is I didn't do. All I'll tell you is that someone may have said I was witnessed in a compromising incident, which is all England will let you know about Charles. By the way I don't know what Charles and that other man were compromising about, although I think it had something to do with the placement of their genitalia, and I scarcely see how you can call that a "compromise", but I guess to some people it's all about the art of negotiation. Anyway, I didn't do it either.

I also never said I wanted to come back in my next life as a feminine hygiene product. But I would like to come back as a rich prince of a constitutional monarchy.

Speaking of not doing anything, in the very same paper where I learned that Prince Charles didn't do it I read that the City of Tacoma didn't do it either. When it rains it pours, and when it doesn't rain all the water everywhere gets sucked up into space by giant planet-sucking pigs, right? That's what I've noticed.

The City of Tacoma has been sued for not protecting Crystal Brame from her husband and Tacoma's police chief David Brame, who had threatened her and physically abused her. You may recall that last April David Brame eventually murdered Crystal after Tacoma apparently did precisely nothing to protect Crystal, even though she specifically asked for help from Tacoma officials.

What Tacoma says now is, "It's not our fault!" Furthermore they say that if it were their fault it would also be other people's fault too, so there. For example the Seattle Post-Intelligencer wrote about the Brames' divorce one day before the murder-suicide. This proves that the P-I knew that David Brame was a threat to Crystal Brame, and yet the P-I did not do anything to protect her.

I mean, think of that! The P-I had almost all the same facts that Tacoma did (all except for maybe some that Tacoma was hiding, but hey, that's another issue), and yet the P-I didn't take David Brame's gun away from him, did they? No! And the P-I didn't suspend him as police chief either! So why isn't the P-I being sued, huh? That's what Tacoma wants to know.

Other entities whose fault it could be as much as Tacoma's include Pierce County and Gig Harbor, because the Brames lived there and they didn't take David's gun away from him, and an on-line publisher who didn't do all the same stuff the P-I didn't do.

I have a confession to make. I read the article the P-I printed the day before the murder. And I also did not suspend David Brame or disarm him.

So what do Han Solo, Lando Calrissian, Tacoma, Prince Charles, Gig Harbor, the P-I, and I have in common? We didn't do it, it's not our fault.

Mind Your Manners

It is now possible for any of us to be secretly imprisoned without charges indefinitely by making creative use of existing anti-terrorist laws. So what do people worry about? They worry that there's too much obscene language on prime time network television.

For one thing, there can't be too much. That's like saying there's too many Bulgarians. The Bulgarians aren't hurting anybody, are they? So how can there be too many of them?

OK, maybe some Bulgarian has popped you in the nose recently. So then maybe that wouldn't be a good illustration of my point. So instead of talking about Bulgarians, we'll talk about wide ties. Now I understand that a lot of you hate wide ties. Hell I hate ties altogether. But no one was ever injured by a wide tie, at least not by it's wideness. Therefore there is no such thing as there being too many wide ties, even if there may be far too many ties.

Likewise, there may be far too much prime time network television, but there can't be too much obscene language on what there is of it. Because none of it hurts anybody, no matter how much they whine and tell you it does.

Let me put it another way. If any of these prudes who don't like obscene language want television that doesn't have any, let them do what everybody else in this country has to do when they want something they don't have. Let them pay for it. It's called cable, and it's widely available these days.

Hey, I want to watch South Park on free prime time network TV and listen to weird little fat cartoon kids from Colorado talk about unnatural sex. Is Congress going to pass a law so that I can get what I want? No! I have to pay for South Park. So why should these obscenity-hating whiners get free obscenity-less TV? What makes them better than me?

Some of you are probably saying to yourselves right now, "Self, if Dr. Wes likes obscene language so much why doesn't he use it all the time? Better yet, why doesn't he go away to Obscenity Land or Obscenitrovia or whatever?"

Fair enough, except for one thing: this IS Obscenity Land. If you don't believe me go ride a bus. Get out and meet people. And no, it didn't just start being Obscenity Land when Berkeley Breathed started using the word "suck" in Bloom County. People were using a lot worse s-words years before that.

In fact, speaking of worse s-words and foul mouthed little kids, way back when I was 9 years old back in 1958, during the Eisenhower administration right here in Prudezuela, the other little kids on my block promised to beat the crap out of me if ever I uttered any single sentence that didn't at least once use the s-word that signifies "crap." The South Park kids would have gotten beat up all the time in my neighborhood, because sometimes they say sentences like "What?" Where I lived you had to say "What's this [s-word]?" or eight kids spent an hour taking turns scraping your face on the pavement.

So why don't I use the crap-signifying s-word all the time now? I'll tell you. I don't do it because I moved away from that insane neighborhood and those kids didn't follow me, and they all grew up and don't care anymore anyway, so now I don't have to say the s-word if I don't want to. So I don't.

After I moved out of the insane neighborhood I moved into another insane neighborhood. In the new insane neighborhood you were ostracized if you said the words "golly" or "heck" or "gosh darn it."

This is the one constant: wherever I have been in this country, people have tried to tell me what kind of language I could use, instead of being content with controlling their own mouths.

Why is that? And why are we imprisoning people without trials? That's offensive.

It's a Happ'nin!

Recently I was talking about how I am stupid. I was saying, actually, that everyone is stupid. The trick is to figure out, for each one of us, how. One of the ways that I am stupid is that I suck at history.

I don't completely suck at history. For example, I can be a part of history, no problem. You could in theory go back to certain of those old news tapes of events ("happ'nins") in the sixties and find me. OK, I would be the guy on the edge of the shot looking like I got lost on the way to the chess club, but I'm, like, there.

My problem is, I don't know where there was. In the case of the sixties this makes me good at history, because there wasn't any there there, actually. But it doesn't work for other times.

I first realized how much I was going to suck at history right at the beginning, when my third grade teacher was explaining to my class that history had to do with things like the Hundred Years War and some French girl who got herself burned at the stake and that that would be on the test. I looked around and I didn't see any charred remains, know what I mean? How should I know this girl got roasted? Then I found out that we were even supposed to know WHEN she got roasted, down to the exact year, and that it was HUNDREDS of years ago, and I knew this history thing was not for me.

One of my big problems with history was figuring out why, when we were talking about battles and what famous people were getting burned at the stake, THAT was history, but when we were talking about, say, ancient customs and what kind of culture they had, our history books were supposed to be closed because talking about culture was some kind of social studies. If history isn't social studies, what is it? I still don't get that.

Sometimes people come along with audio-visual aids that help. So back when Masterpiece Theater showed its TV version of Winston Churchill's book, the First Churchills, I learned a thing or two about history then. I learned, among other things, what papists were, that there were such people as Roundheads, that in the olden days (at least ca 1700) everybody was incredibly erudite, and that there might be worse things than just being burned at the stake, parts of you could be burned separately in front of you. Ouch!

The other thing I learned was that Winston Churchill, a former prime minister of England, who wrote the book, must have been incredibly erudite himself. Or else he couldn't have wrote it.

Speaking of audio-visual aids, I believe Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who also must suck at history but unlike me doesn't know it, has been watching too much of the History Channel. Mr. Rumsfeld is displaying all the signs of a man whose knowledge of the history of the world consists mainly in knowing how to make blowing up sounds. I wouldn't mind but now he's favorably comparing George W. Bush to the afore-mentioned Winston Churchill.

I mean, I didn't know Churchill. He wasn't a friend of mine. But shee-yeah, right.

I'd be less likely to scoff if Rumsfeld wanted to call GW Bush the William McKinley of the new millennium. Not that Churchill wasn't an imperialist in his own day, he was, he was, but I can visualize Bush being McKinleyesque without cracking up.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about in this column. What I wanted to talk about was the art of making blowing up sounds. I don't think it's wrong to be good at making blowing up sounds. I think it's a shame that more people aren't practiced at making convincing explosive noises with their mouths.

I firmly believe that the reason Rumsfeld and Bush want war with Iraq is because they have no buddies to play war with who can make good artillery and blowing up sounds.

I urge everyone who is adept at making blowing up sounds to contact the White House and offer their services in this regard. Thank you.

Duck!

"In a world of Labrador Retrievers, I am a duck!!

(OHHH YES!! OH YYESSS!! A DUCK, I AM, a DUCK, oooooooh yesss!)

When everyone else blows (be-lowws! YEAH! Ha -Ha -Ha!), I suck!!

(Suckity - suckity - SUCKITY -- SUCK! - YEAH)

A single ROtini in a plate of LINguini --

Or a lonely LINguini in a plate of ROtini --

(RotiNIni, TahiniNIni, RotininiNIni -- teehee - knee)

What the hell is I am is what I am?

is what by any other name

is --

(! - extraneous bang!)

-- is I couldn't ever -- possibly --

-- or could I? -- feel so lame.

Phththbbbbtt!!"

-- that was just one of the several fragments of writing found among Dr. Wes Browning's personal effects yesterday, as police collected evidence in the hopes of clearing up the month's long mystery of the missing homeless satirist and would-be poet.

Dr. Browning was a frequent contributor to the Real Change Homeless Newspaper of Seattle, "making a difference in people's lives right now, please leave your message at the beep, and someone will answer your call as soon as possible... "

Dr. Wes Browning, AKA "Copyright Dr. Wes Browning", was best known for his monthly feature entitled "Adventures in Poetry", which pretended to amuse Seattle readers with its supposedly subtle blend of political and poetical humor. He received his doctorate from, of all places, Cornell University, in 1979, for Mathematics. He received his "Copyright" from the StreetLife Gallery, 1994, where he had the audacious gall to make fun of another homeless artist, since deceased, for using the "copyright" symbol far too much.

But Mr. Browning had always laughed out loud at that sort of death, that is to say, the usual sort, the sort that doesn't repeat on you, the sort that doesn't come back and race you around the ping-pong table all night long. In fact, Mr. Browning has laughed at just about everything and everybody. Maybe it's best that we're rid of him. Who needs people like that anyway, always making fun of everybody, never taking anyone seriously! What a creep! Thank God he's missing!

As Anitra Freeman, fellow editor, and oft-time benefactor of Mr. Browning puts it, "He did a wonderful lap-dance. He had a very talented nose. I am not going to tell you what all he could do with his nose. What a probiscus! I'm going to miss his nose. Maybe, just maybe, I'll miss the lap-dances. But definitely his nose."

Think about it. Guys who write poems. Guys who lap-dance. Guys with prodigious noses. Do we need them? I say no. What do you the public say?

"What the hell is I am is what I am?

is what by any other name

is --

(! - extraneous bang!)

-- is I couldn't ever -- possibly --

-- or could I? -- feel so lame.

Phththbbbbtt!!"

Ahhh, ok, I am not in reality a duck. Sheesh.