Dear Copyright Doctor

Another satisfied reader writes:

Dear Copyright Doctor --

You know what's wrong with you poor people? You're poor!

I mean, what do you think? That you don't deserve it? You're exactly where Jesus flang you! You reap what you sow, and you must have sewn nothing but [deleted]! Why should anybody care about any of you!?

Since I know you're an artsy freak, I wrote an artsy freak poem to explain it to you:

You're a loser and it ain't no accident--

All your karma has come, and it has went.

You had free will

but ignored the drill,

so don't cry for me to give you a cent!

signed Billy "Biff" Pill (an assumed name).

Thanks Biff! I really love to hear from my readers, and I can't get enough of your poetry! .

Your letter also touches on a subject that is near and dear to my heart -- to what extent am I responsible for all the stuff people pile on me? Did I really bring it on myself? If so, should I flog myself, or should I seek help? If so, who would I know that's good with a whip?

That brings to mind Mike Riley, Superintendent of Bellevue Public Schools. Not the whip part, the piling on part. As has been widely reported, Mr. Riley is an educator with a vision, and his vision has entailed doubling the book load on middle and high- schoolers in Bellevue. Come to think of it, that does call to mind whips too, doesn't it?

So my question is, did the middle-school kids have it coming?

That is not a rhetorical question! If it isn't the kids fault that they have received this fate, why would the Bellevue Schools have passed rules depriving those same students the means they have of coping? I'm referring, of course, to the banning of extra large backpacks at several middle schools.

Let me see if I can understand this in terms of the Billy "Biff" theory that seems to be operating here. The school administrators see the students coming in with giant backpacks. They even know why the students are using the big backpacks: the immediate reason is that they have more books. The administrators know that the students are just dealing with the situation.

But, in spite of knowing that, the administrators conclude that the students are doing something wrong! They define what that wrong is by passing rules against the use of extra large backpacks!

So the blame for carrying too many books around ends up heaped on the students. Why? Because the additional books prove they had evil thoughts when they were six? Because anyone unfortunate enough to grow up in a district where a Mike Riley is superintendent must be working off bad karma from their last life?

Absolutely. Biff says so. That's how Biff's theory works.

You may not even have a complaint. You may be, for example, homeless but happy, just pleased as a pet pig in a butcher shop to sleep on public dirt and get rained on every night. You may have never even asked Biff for that cent he was talking about.

But say the government passes a law that says that, whereas it is bad for your health to sleep on public dirt and get rained on every night, and besides it's public dirt and we don't want to see you sleeping on it, and besides we don't want you breathing our air anyway, therefore you're going to get a ticket every time you get caught, and eventually go to jail when you can't pay the tickets.

Biff's theory says that the mere fact that your means of coping has been ruled criminal proves that you had it coming.

People need to believe that sort of thing. Otherwise they couldn't possibly justify holding the homeless responsible for the natural consequences of their homelessness. They couldn't justify sending them to jail, just for doing what it takes to get by.

And you can see just how hard it is to stop people thinking that way, when

they apply the same kinds of arguments to innocent children.

Thanks for the illustration, Bellevue! And I hope you kids out there have all learned your lesson!

Cheesed Five-O

Well here we are again trying to make sense out of a world spinning into new-millenium madness, riding the grand ever-surprising baby boom crest on its way to that big Jimi Hendrix theme park in the sky that Paul Allen can only approximate here on Earth, in spite of all his riches.

That’s right. I hit the big Five-O this summer. I’m bummed. And that’s not a word I use lightly.

You want to know why I’m bummed? You want to know what’s really got me cheesed? Whatever that means? No? Well I’ll tell you then.

The library has got me down. The new librarian has a Vision of a homeless-free library. It seems that the homeless folks using the library are bad for the donation business, according to the new management, who just discovered that pretty people sell.

Now I could rant and rail about how unjust this is. I could point out that homeless people are citizens too, and have as much right to use the library as anyone else. I could note the absurdity of people saying all the time that homeless folks should apply themselves to improve themselves and their situations, and then try to discourage them from one of the best ways to do so.

But I won’t do that this time. Because what I’m bummed about is that I know that when they say they want to get rid of the homeless people, what they really mean is, they want to get rid of the people who look homeless, and that’s this old codger.

All those years of being homeless in the past have taken their toll.

We’ve already established the fact that the Seattle police cannot tell the difference between me, an old, currently housed, eccentric, impoverished nerd with a jones for old math books, from an actual homeless threat to the otherwise thriving, viable, Seattle downtown boom economy.

So what will happen to me when the Library Police start making their sweeps through the library rounding up the “transients” for deposit at the proposed Seattle Library Drop-in Center? What will happen to me is I’ll be swept into that bin with all the other housed and unhoused poor people who don’t look pretty enough to attract donations.

So maybe you’re thinking, how bad could that be? A nice newly built clean dry indoor day shelter, isn’t that what all you poor people want? A nice clean dry place to get in out of the rain, be with your own kind, maybe get to watch some TV, drink some coffee?

NO! If I wanted that I’d go to a damn day shelter! I want to be able to use the library!

OK, I didn’t want to be that recalcitrant without actually checking out a drop-in center. Maybe they’re great places. Maybe they have better math books than the Seattle Library. Sure, that’s possible, the Seattle Library sucks, almost anybody could have better math books than the Seattle Library.

So I looked around for an appropriate drop-in center to sample, and naturally picked the one closest to home. I checked out the Lazarus Center. Close and so appropriate, because it’s restricted to old geezers just like me. The age of eligibility is exactly Five-O.

Getting myself through the entrance was the hard part. I am, as I have tried repeatedly to convey here, depressed about being fifty. However, I am not depressed about being dead. Lazarus was dead. I am not dead. I do not feel the need to be revived from a state of dead-dom. I am not a Lazarus. I feel very strongly about that.

But I worked through those feelings, and achieved a level of resignation that permitted me to enter the place. Once inside I was pleasantly surprised. It was clean, dry, and out of the rain, of course.

There were not one but two TVs set to different channels. There were laundry facilities, coffee, a smoking room, a couple of computers that some guys were playing games on. I was surrounded by people who looked just like me.

And there was a “library” consisting of what looked like about a hundred Reader’s Digest Condensed Books.

Can’t anyone out there feel my pain?

The Cheap Alcohol Theory

WHAT IS POETRY TO ME?

© Dr. Wes Browning

Your head, an orange,

a pencil up my nose.

A lost weekend,

found in my pants.

Chocolate cake,

vanilla snake.

The passing fancy,

the staying plain.

X marks the spot.

Anybody got an eraser?

Speaking of lost weekends, the North American Street Newspaper Association had its annual conference in Cleveland two weeks ago, and Real Change was there. Four of us, anyway.

I bet a lot of you wonder what we homeless and formerly homeless representatives of street newspapers do at these long weekend conferences. Do we exchange train hopping techniques? Do we share pigeon recipes? Do we drink gallons of coffee? Do we use these conferences as an excuse to have loads of wild anonymous casual sex?

Sure, we're only human, but there's more to it than that. That other stuff only takes so long and then you find yourself in the odd workshop listening to an ACLU lawyer or a labor pool organizer, and then Anitra "on whose kitchen floor I have sometimes slept" Freeman suddenly gets up and foments revolution.

That's right. Our Anitra, urging us all to help establish an alternative economy. Down with capitalism! Up with some other thing!

All right, I'm exaggerating. The closest we all came to fomenting revolution was when, in one workshop, after trading horror stories about the treatment of the homeless in our respective cities, we all agreed that "it's bad everywhere" and "we should make a list of common demands."

So now the street newspaper movement has a list of demands and principles, which includes such things as "people have a right not to be homeless."

Some other things we decided included "people should not have to accept illegal work (like prostitution, running drugs, transporting illegal immigrants) in order to survive," and people should not have to breathe asbestos in order to get a paycheck."

Radical stuff, huh?

OK, it was as boring as a Republican caucus in Peoria. The high point, for me, of the whole conference came when one of the organizers told us that our conference site (Case Western Reserve University) was the cultural center of Ohio, prompting me to ask, "If this is such a hot-shot cultural center where are all the 7-11's?"

You see I have this theory, that poor people are so essential to every economy that everywhere you go in the US and Canada it must be possible to find cheap alcohol. Somebody has to do the grunt work. Somebody has to clean the toilets, mop the floors, wash the dishes. And there have to be affordable drugs to make that all possible.

I go so far as to say that in every city there must be, within walking distance from city center, 40-ouncers of beer or the equivalent for two dollars or less.

So far I've always been proved right. I never found the 7-11 I was looking for near the campus in Cleveland, but found instead, right in the middle of the school, a drugstore selling 40-ouncers of Schlitz Malt Liquor for $1.60 including tax – score!

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against the poor drinking cheap booze.

On the contrary! My point is that the alcohol industry knows what it is doing. They know that poor people are a market. So they don't just sell expensive aged wine, they sell Thunderbird and Night Train.

So why can't we have the housing equivalent of Thunderbird? Why can't real estate developers see the market that is so plain and evident to Schlitz, and move in on it?

Your answers are anxiously awaited.

Bump In The Road

© Dr. Wes Browning

President Clinton says we did all right

To bomb Serbs eighty days and some nights

"We did it the right way," he says gleefully

"We'll finish the job! Take it from me!"

And you know there could be somethin' to that

We might have done right for an actual fact

I heard we bombed Serbians only with bombs

We didn't drop anything else on their lawns.

Sorry about that last rhyme. I meant it to be better but I came to a "bump in the road", such as the ones that slowed the Kosovo peace settlement and the end to our bombing. In my case the bump in the road was the English Language. In America's case it was real bumps in the road from the Macedonian coast to Belgrade.

Those damn bumps! Isn't that always the way it is when you're trying to bomb the bejeesus out of some people and forcing them to submit to your will? I know it is for me. People are always resisting. You're just trying to have a perfect little war with perfect airplanes where no one, absolutely no one, who was anyone important dies, is that asking too much?

But nooooo. There's got to be bumps in the road. I even heard some of the road was blown up! And even where it wasn't, there were actual enemy soldiers who didn't want us to march to Belgrade, and homes full of people lining the roads, that didn't want us to march to Belgrade.

And homes empty of people lining the roads, people who have already expressed their opinion about us marching to Belgrade in the most emphatic way imaginable, by laying their bodies down and dying, to be bumps in the road. It's just so very frustrating.

Speaking of frustrating bumps in the road, and aren't we always, you will find in this issue a story about how our city officials are looking into ways to improve services for the homeless, and incidently cut costs for those services, by tracking the homeless better.

The trouble with the way it is now, every time you turn a homeless person away from a shelter because there's no space left on the floor, you lose that person in the dark of the night, and wouldn't recognize her/him if you saw him again.

Why wouldn't you recognize her/him? Because there are thousands of her/him that's why, if there were only twenty or thirty, everybody could just remember what they looked like.

But I digress. The point is there are thousands of homeless not getting into shelters, and we all know that, but the funds needed to build more shelters are constantly being denied on the basis of the fact that no one knows who those people are.

I know who those people are, they are bumps in the road.

We will have shelters enough for everybody, trust us America, down the road, we are doing the right thing, we are doing it the right way, it'll be a little slower than expected, there are bumps in the road.

Well I got off on a tangent again. I meant to deliver a powerful polemic on the subject of software solutions to hardware problems and vice versa, but I got carried away by this whole road thing.

But what I really regret is that I have failed to make room for the deep sociological analysis that I was going to provide that was going to explain what the War in Kosovo and tagging homeless people in Seattle have each to do with what we all are really most interested in these days, the revelations in the press regarding Charles Kuralt's mistress.

Oh well. Meanwhile here's a poem I wrote in honor of dear Charles, may he rest in peace and good cheer, and may there be no more bumps in his road.

Late to the Wake

We've come too late t' the wake, I see,

The man's been dead two years or three!

His last word said upon his bed,

Was "Pat"! not "Rose Bud"! nor even "Dead"!

Who's Pat? all asked, around the room.

A long lost friend, they'd all assume.

But not so long lost as all that,

A fishing partner was fair Pat!

To be precise, Charles made the fish,

for Pat to catch and make a wish,

then put him back in his fish den

the Magic Fish to leap again

& again & again, for near thirty years,

for Fishing always gave Charles cheer.

Insert Column Here

Note to self: insert column below.

Dear Wes,

I won’t be around to help you with your column this time -- I am going to FolkLife instead. If you get stuck, why not write about the cat and bird? If that doesn’t work, you should try complaining about something again.

-- good luck, your muse, Cindy H.

ACK! Write about the cat and bird? I finally get on the cover after four years here and my own Muse says write about the cat and bird, like we’re running a cartoon series? This is my moment in the limelight, my four minutes and thirty-three seconds of fame, and I’m supposed to move over for a Siamese-Tabby with delusions of grandeur and an anti-social Green Singing Finch?

I’ll take complaining about something, thank you, it’s always let me remain closer to my favorite subject (ME!).

Now lets see what is there to complain about around here besides Musea who disappear into crowds of Hula spectators at deadline. Hmmm, hmmm, OH what is THAT I see on the horizon? Isn’t that a stadium that’s costing more than it was supposed to, and a baseball team that wants ME to pay for it?

That’s ME as in Wes Browning proud renter of a downtown subsidized apartment, who nevertheless pays rent, and rents pay property taxes.

That’s ME as in Wes Browning, who has to pay sales tax, because he just recently had to buy a pair of socks that weren’t covered by Food Stamps, and who very soon will also pay sales taxes buying a book, because he needs a book to stay sane?

Gee, when was the last time I or anyone else I know was on welfare,

and two and a half weeks into the month walked into the welfare office and said, “Hey pals, thanks a heap for that welfare check, it came in real handy the last two and a half weeks, but wouldn’t you know it? There’s been some cost overruns in the Wes (or insert name) upkeep department, so you guys will need to pay the extra.”

NOBODY does that! Even though they run out of money (AND Food Stamps) every single month before the month is up, people on welfare almost never have the bloated gonads to expect extra assistance on top of what’s already been arranged after usually weeks of dragged out applications and supplications.

Because that is what is going on here, in case anyone hasn’t noticed.

We issue welfare to people in need who supplicate before us for precisely the same reason that we publicly fund baseball stadiums when there clubs ask us to. We have reason to believe in the long-term benefits for the rest of us. Give them money now, so they can get on their feet, and we will gain down the road in increased revenues.

Isn’t that a compelling moral argument?

Come to think of it though, the cat and bird do have a certain charm that endears us all to them. Indeed they have a sort of an anti-Paul Allen appeal working for them that could make them even attractive to the Major League-oriented. Yeah, I could allow a brief discussion of their merits.

Firstly, it is impossible to be a member of the Real Change Board of Directors, and not to be made comfortable by Sid “the Real Director” Vicious. And, lets face it, that’s what being on a Board (any Board!) is all about, namely one’s comfort. “Should we do X, Y and Z?” “Well,” says the seasoned Board member, “I’m comfortable with us doing X and Y, but I just don’t feel comfortable with Z.” And, what do you know, but after the debate, if the average Board member isn’t comfortable with Z, and so Z doesn’t happen! HA! I love it!

But I digress. Sid makes us comfortable because he’s a furry beast. And who wouldn’t be comfortable while having a furry beast mark them as his exclusive property?

My Name Is Wes & I Lick Ducks

I might as well come right out and confess the ugly truth. I am still a duck-licker.

I thought I had the problem... uh, beat: It was almost two years ago, but it seems more like it was just yesterday, when I went on my last duck-licking binge and was even erroneously reported dead by our local Real Change Editor Deity, who was sure that I looked green enough to be dead -- BUT I WASN’T, and I’ll have more to say about that in a minute or two, thankyouverymuch -- it has seemed almost yesterday for all these nearly two years, and I was sure the immediacy of the painful memory would keep it from happening again.

But no, and I am so very ashamed. I awoke this morning in a pile of duck feathers, still wet with slobber, a fierce headache, my column still unwritten, and the deadline for this column waiting for me at the Real Change office.

There was absolutely no way that I could have a column written. So I have not written one, and I hope that you can all forgive me.

Ah, it feels so good to have that out of the way, I should do that more often. So, then, I was thinking well what should we do with all this space on this page, now that the column isn’t done? And I was making my way to the RC office to tell Timothy “Editor God” Harris the bad news, when a parade of loud unruly Column Ideas marched down Third Avenue, right at me.

It was like they were taunting me. Isn’t that the way it always is, I thought. You don’t see a Column Idea for a week, you break down and spend a night licking ducks, and then, when it’s too late to possibly write a column, three of the nasty buggers march up and down the street right in front of you, making rude faces and calling you names. Of course they also made me angry, but I’ll have more to say about that momentarily.

Well I suppose I can at least use the space I have remaining to describe the hideous things. They were, all three of them, different sized, different colored, and different shaped. The one in front was the one that was the most different sized, colored, and shaped of the three so I’ll describe him first.

He was, as best as I could make out (he only walked back and forth in front of me jeering at me fifteen or twenty times), Our American Repression of Death. He was ugly and greenish ONLY IN THE WAY REAL DEAD PEOPLE SOMETIMES ARE (Tim? Hear that?) and not in the way duck-lickers get. But nobody on the street noticed or paid any mind but me, because Americans don’t know what death looks like anymore. At all, no matter WHAT the color.

He was so ugly that at first I didn’t see that he was walking two dogs with him, one sleek young purebred Colorado Violent Video Gamer and one old and decrepit Kosovo Hill Cruise-Bomber.

While the Repression of Death was insulting me obnoxiously, a passing Armchair Liberal stopped to make uncharitable remarks about the dogs, going so far as to scapegoat Video Game Makers for the one and Our Violent Nature for the other. But the truth was plain to me, it was their owner who raised them to be so mean and ugly, pure and simple.

I said to the Armchair Liberal: “You hide death from your children, you even fear the sight of it so much you can only kill people you want dead from miles away, where you can’t see what you did to them. You already decided years ago that you would set aside those people who have seen death up close, treat them as tainted, you don’t want to see their faces on the streets now that they have been reduced to begging from you. You don’t want that to happen again, so even though you want to still have wars, you refuse to have soldiers.”

“Then, you hide death from your children”, I repeated myself rhetorically. “You hide death from your children”, I did it again, “so that they do not live real lives, because a real life requires a real perspective on life, which requires seeing and relating to death, something you have already refused to do yourself, that’s why you’re the Armchair Liberal, and now you would deny it to your children.

You are in fact by now so out of touch with the needs of your own children, that you can’t see that their need to know and relate to death is exactly what drives their interest in those Video Games in the first place.”

Well that just made the Armchair Liberal stomp away angry, without being able to express his/her anger, because the Armchair Liberal is also very Whitebread, and, well, there you go.

Which brings up what I promised I would say more about, namely the other two Column Ideas that were taunting me and making me very angry, the two less different ones. One of them in fact was a Red-faceless white-breasted spineless Liberal Denial of Anger, who was grabbing passers-by by the shoulders, viciously shaking them and then declaring that it was all done in the name of “process”.

The other one was the perennial World of Unspeakable Stupidity. The less said about that the better, you are probably thinking, but I will have another column to write in two weeks, so no one gets off that easily.

Happy Pills Are Here Today

Well! Good news, the med train’s moving again and this time we're riding first class. This new stuff is great. I can't stop telling people everywhere I go about ***** (brand name) pills. Hint: if it were Prozac, it wouldn't work for me. If it were Valium it wouldn't work for me. This is not your Grandmother's pill. This pill works for me!

No, it’s not Viagra.

Not that it can't work for anyone else. Just after two weeks of running around telling everyone about my wonderful new tablets, I found that two of my face-to-face friends were also taking them. We are pill buddies! We started talking about forming a *****-User's Society, where we could congregate without being transgregated by Non-*****-User's.

For isn't transgregation the greatest evil that humans are capable of? For doesn't it say in Barnabas 6: 6: 6: "O Lord forgive us our trespasses, but forgive us not our transgregations (if any) for if we are so totally lame, we deserveth no breaks?"

Yes, we don't need no transgregators. We don’t need no transgregators today. I mean if you aren't In you're Out, get used to it and stay there, right?

That was Irony, #11, combined with Obfuscation, #15. I'm actually compiling a little list of humor techniques. In reality transgregating is NOT wrong, hahaha , I only said that it is wrong in order to be "satirical" (#11b.) I used Obfuscation (#15) partly because it’s a hoot and partly because if I told you what I was REALLY talking about some of you might have been bummed out, and we can't have that in a humor column.

Speaking of bummers, how about those social workers who don't know the difference between anxiety and fear? Don't they just burn you up?

I'm sure you've all had this happen to you: you've gotten off the streets, into low-income housing. You've gotten Food Stamps. You've noticed that, due to an inability to concentrate on anything but the derangement of your own twisted mind for more than an hour at a time, your rent is due. And you don't have it. So you apply for uh, um, shame on you, so they assign you to a social worker. And you spend the first fifteen minutes with her/him convincing your new social worker that you are NOT there due to being psychotic, you have a good solid grip on reality, really...

And THEN you say to the social worker, who has a degree in this sort of thing, and is paid to use it, that you think maybe your problem is in part an anxiety disorder. And after you say that she/he says "Are you feeling anxious now" and you say "Yes" and she/he says “what is it you are afraid of?"

AAAAARRRRGGGHH!!!! Don't you just hate it when they do that? Well I do, & do you want to know what I want to say when I hear that question? Well, I’ll tell you what I want to say!

I want to say: "It's anxiety dammit! I'm not afraid of anything! You should see me drive! You should be sitting in the passenger seat up front! I'd be willing to pay the laundry bill just to have the fun of watching the look on your face as we rocket down Queen Anne Ave (20% grade, 25MPH limit) at 70-100 miles per hour and me saying what YOU are NOW experiencing is fear, this is NOT what I am experiencing when I talk about anxiety I know the difference why don't you it's your job look it up in a dictionary you ignorant &*^$#@*!" and then I would just barely come to a controlled stop at the busy intersection at the bottom of the hill and peel the dampened/soiled social worker out of the car, hose the seat down etc.

But I just want to do that. I don't do it because I am not psychotic.*

If you enjoyed that, thank #9 and #2’.

Now let’s try to use ‘Juxtaposition in Concept’ #4b. We have discussed and . We’ve backed ourselves into a corner this time, Cindy, haven’t we? Guess we’ll have to dance our way out of here...

Juxtaposition in Concept #4b

Or, Opus 4b, I’d Rather Not Have to Say So

“I’d rather not have to say so...

BUT it’s all about what we should know, y’know?”

Said the Grasshopper to the Ant.

“It takes a teacher able to show! Not tell! To show!

But don’t take my word for it! Ant!”

Said the Grasshopper, closing a stupid book.

Y’know? Education isn’t all talk... (Think about it. Sorry for the lousy rhyme.)

* Important: No social workers were harmed during the conception or execution of this column. Any resemblances between described social workers and actual social workers, living or dead, are purely coincidental and unintended.