Crossing Allies

Last Thursday some Real Change people and friends camped out at the City Hall Plaza in the second such effort to draw Mayor Greg Nickels' royal attention to our call for an end to his inhumane and illegal sweeps of homeless encampments. I could go on and on about the fact that Greg Nickels gave every appearance of not giving a damn, and how that means we'll be back, and probably back again, and again, but there will be plenty of time for that later. What I want to do now is talk about cross-class sleeping.


[Above: A portion of the tents on the plaza that night. Photo stolen from catherd Doug McKeehan by way of a post on Apesma's Lament.]

My first experience with cross-class sleeping was the rebound whose Father owned a multi-million dollar chain of laundromats back East. Daddy gave her a red Corvette for her graduation present. She owned so many clothes she had to buy her own commercial size clothes rack. Her clothes rack was bigger than my whole apartment. We didn't get along very well. I came to believe that cross-class sleeping would not bring classes together, politically.

I now realize how wrong I have been. There are ways to make cross-class sleeping work. Those ways involve insomnia, coffee, and wet tents.

Get people together to try to sleep in wet tents! They will not be able to sleep! They will then be forced to talk amongst themselves, causing social glues to exude from their pores, sticking them to each other! It worked last Thursday between myself and a bunch of strangers. If I can bond to a bunch of strangers so can almost anyone.

The classes I have bonded with so far include various intern-classes and legal-aide-classes. In the future I hope to bond to other kinds of classes.

One very promising class is the class of clergy. I came literally within inches of bonding with representatives of the clerical class during the camp out. I actually felt their silky vestments! How many of you readers have ever come so close to bonding with clergy that you felt their silky vestments? (Just a raise of hands will do. Details aren't necessary.)

It turns out these clergy were mostly morning people, so my plans to invade their tents and bond more thoroughly did not pan out. But I can plan better for the next camp out. I am looking forward to a night, three months from now, of cross-class alliance-ing with at least three ministers simultaneously. My plan makes room for a very early pillow fight. With proper timing, I should be able to get in, bond, and get out again in time to bond with some night people elsewhere. Lawyers or bartenders, conceivably.

Even the little bit of bonding I was able to do with the clergy at last week's camp out taught me a very important lesson about them. Clergy are human too. They have the same needs that we do. Some of them eat lasagna.

Another class I look forward to bonding to is the class of Seattle City Council Members. I only saw one city council member Thursday, new guy Tim Burgess, and he didn't join in the camp out. Next time I want to see all nine in tents of their own. I'm sure they all love camping, why else live and do politics in the Pacific Northwest? I'll bet Mr. Burgess skis, even.

Further into the future I foresee opportunities to ally cross-class-ly to all sorts of classes I now rarely have occasion to think about. The class consisting mainly of retired television repairmen. Whatever class acupuncturists belong to. The class of jewelers who are also former tugboat workers. The class of Times and/or P-I reporters.

Who knew that Times and/or P-I reporters valued their evenings so much that none of them could swing by after rush hour to see it? The lesson: If there isn't a riot or a conflagration going on, Seattle's mainstream reporters are going to stay home to watch Lost.

After socially allying with mainstream reporters, I may be ready for mayors.

[Below: High priority for mainstream reporters everywhere.]

The Truth Is Way Out There

Well, here we are again. It’s deadline time and I’m stuck, as always. I ask Cindy and she suggests “Write about why you are stuck.” I think, “Do I really want to talk about the X-Files here?” But I have nowhere else to go.

As I write this, Anitra L. “Net Mama” Freeman, fellow editor and proof that I am not the world’s biggest nerd, tells me that she wants me to get the following message printed.

“Mulder is a dweeb. He is a lovable dweeb, but he is a dweeb. And YOU, Scully, are an admirable woman in many ways. But you seriously need to enroll in a co-dependency program: ‘Woman Who Love Dweebs.’”

Apparently, how Scully conducts her life is very important to Anitra, and Anitra is certain that her advice will reach Scully. The theory seems to be that some paranoid schizophrenic will read the above paragraph and pass it on to Mulder (all paranoid schizophrenics have Fox Mulder’s unlisted phone number - it’s a union privilege), in the belief that it contains a coded message. Mulder will then show it to Scully, in the hopes that she will be able to decipher it. She will.

But that isn’t what is making it so hard for me to write this month. After sharing my problem with Anitra, she is very alarmed. She says I mustn’t talk about that in public. There are people, she tells me, sad, unfortunate people, who haven’t seen the movie yet! She pleads with me not to spoil it for those miserable people who might nevertheless still find the seven bucks to see it, someday, in a theater.

I’m sorry. Tell you what though, I’ll give you all a warning - WARNING, INFORMATION ABOUT THE END OF THE X-FILES MOVIE FOLLOWS.

OK, you’ve all been warned. So here’s my problem. There they are, BOTH of them, lying in the ice and snow, IN ANTARCTICA, at the edge of this huge crater made by the unexpected take-off of a previously buried tremendously huge alien YOU-KNOW-WHAT. The snow tractor that delivered Mulder to this site is somewhere nearby, BUT IT IS OUT OF GAS. The evil conspirators who brought Scully to this chunk of ice ARE LONG GONE.

So how did they get off Antarctica? What’d they do, thumb a ride on the back of a passing penguin? Walrus, walri? In the very next scene they’re doing their almost-but-not-quite-kissing act in DC, under blossoming cherry trees! What?! Did Mulder dial up the Chief Engineer of the Enterprise on his cell-phone? “Hey, it’s cherry blossom time! Beam us to the Capitol, Scotty!!?” On a continent that does not yet have cellular phone service???

Oh, but THAT can’t be. I forgot that Mulder’s cell-phone would have been in outer space at this point, since he had carelessly dropped it inside the alien YOU-KNOW-WHAT.

SEQUEL ALERT!!: ALIENS have Mulder’s cell-phone! The fun only starts there!

Speaking of evil conspirators...

Let me get this straight... Paul Schell deeply CARES about the plight of the homeless, so long as they aren’t visible? So long as they don’t put up tents? “I LOVE you homeless guy, cause you sleep outdoors without any shelter and you will surely die at that rate, but thank you anyway good buddy! - for not putting that nasty protective tent up!”

Once again, Anitra gets into the act. She wants me to “remember the hamsters”, whatever that means. I remind her that Mayor Schell is on our side. Yeah, really! This is a man who would never beat a dead horse - he LOVES dead horses!

Maybe Paul Schell would like to negotiate with SHARE and WHEEL et al to agree that they may put their unhoused people on the continent of Antarctica. Just so long as they don’t put up any unsightly tents that might offend the eyes of those who may have voted for Mr. Schell, or that might do so in the future, or that might be artichokes.

“Tents are not only ugly, but they are a fire hazard. Snow is much safer.”

And, surely those homeless wimps can’t complain about being isolated, by being put there in Antarctica. For one, they’ll have evil conspirators everywhere around them to keep them company. For two, they will be able to get to DC within minutes (at cherry blossom time).

For three, Mark Sidran himself, renowned humanitarian, is prepared to provide the initial transportation at no cost to the general public (he can write it off as a campaign expense.)

Great, now my spell-checker is telling me to change “unhoused” to “unhorsed”. Some things make no sense, others too much. How’s a guy supposed to concentrate?