Noise Rage

Happy July Fourth, Noise Day.

I was reminded of this the other day when I watched a vendor of ours wear earplugs while vending.

I didn't talk to him about it. Vendor training isn't one of my official duties, and besides, as one of Real Change's worst all-time vendors, I personally support every vendor's right to sell badly.

Meanwhile, speaking of earplugs and rights, I had to think about all the times I have been homeless and worn earplugs out on the streets.

One day a year we may want to celebrate the right to make as much noise as we like, but the rest of the year most of us try to get away from noise when we can. Guess who can't?

Anybody who doesn't have a house to retreat to, that's who can't! And after a while it drives them crazy! You see, I do too have an excuse! The noise! The noise! Get it out of my head!

We all want to escape the noise pollution around us. For example, I'd like the right to be able to walk down 3rd Avenue around Pine Street without having to listen to Merle Haggart, if I don't want to. Hello, MacDonald's: I can wear a Walkman if I want to hear that sort of stuff. I shouldn't be subjected to it on the street. Play it inside, that's your business. Play it outside, that's my business.

But I digress. The MacDonald's situation is bad because it is deliberate noise pollution and the city ignores it. But for the homeless, unintentional noise pollution is much worse, just because there is so much of it and it all adds up.

If you are homeless with a couple of dollars to spend and you are moving from cafe to cafe looking for a place to rest and maybe hear one of your own thoughts, good luck at getting any pleasure. Muzak rules Seattle.

When most people complain about Muzak, the focus is on the quality. But to the homeless, it doesn't matter if it's Muzak or if it's KBCS, it's still sound, and if it is ubiquitous it is as inescapable and therefore as maddening either way.

It comes down to biology. I can close my eyes. I can't close my ears.

Well, maybe I can, a little. Federally approved over-the-counter ear plugs give just under 30 decibels of relief. And I can try to drown out their music with my own with the aid of earphones. What I can't stop I may be able to control, partly. But "partly" isn't enough when the problem goes on 24-7.

Don't even get me started on sirens. If you do, you'll be sorry.

If I got started on sirens, I would probably scream HEY EVERYBODY, SIRENS ARE TOO LOUD! CAN YOU STILL HEAR ANYTHING ANYONE IS SAYING? TURN THE DAMN SIRENS DOWN!

Oh, but you can't turn them down, you would say, because they have to alert both motorists and pedestrians.

BUT I would scream THEY ALREADY ARE MORE THAN LOUD ENOUGH TO ALERT PEDESTRIANS. THEY ARE IN FACT LOUD ENOUGH TO INJURE THE EARS OF PEDESTRIANS. THAT IS LOUD ENOUGH, OK?

Oh, yes, we have to alert motorists too. Why is that so difficult? That's so difficult because cars are deliberately built to be soundproof, by and for irresponsible idiots.

And instead of passing laws against irresponsible idiots buying and riding around in cars designed to be soundproof by irresponsible idiots, our government PREFERS TO JUST LET EMERGENCY VEHICLES RAISE THE VOLUME OF THEIR SIRENS INDEFINITELY, TO HELL WITH PEDESTRIANS.

THAT'S WHAT I WOULD SAY. So you don't want to get me started on sirens.

Reason, Soap, And Air Vents

As we are all getting used to multiculturalism it is becoming more and more common wisdom that what we used to call common sense were just senses common within our separate cultures, and, now that we are all stuck together here, we don't have any common sense anymore. Not common enough, that is.

A few people have surrendered to despair, concluding that the lack of common sense implies the impossibility of sense altogether. These, however, are people who were not paying very close attention from the very beginning, even when we were monocultural.

There has always been something besides common sense, that was a kind of sense anyway. It was sometimes called uncommon sense, other times called Reason, and it was hard to live by. Because so long as you live by common sense, you've got company. That's what common means. It means it may not be right, but we're all in it together.

But your Reason, your uncommon sense, defies culture and consequently turns its back on shared ideas. Reason sets you adrift on a raft of one. I'm not saying that's a good thing.

Take Johnson's Baby Shampoo, for instance. I don't know how they did it, but Johnson & Johnson figured out how to make a soap you can wash your eyeballs with without screaming in agony. Not only that, you can wash your hair with it. Plus, you can wash your body with it. I've tried it and it works great. Plus, you can use it for laundry detergent. It works amazingly well on woolens, but it cleans cottons and synthetics fine, too. Plus, it can be diluted with water and used to wash your car, inside and out. And did I mention you can wash your eyeballs with it?

"So where are you going with this, Dr. Wes?" You might well ask. But listen to the soft but persistent voice of Reason inside your heads, instead. It's saying, "Why do I waste so much time shopping for half a dozen different kinds of soap, when I could just drive to Costco and snag a truckload of Johnson's Baby Shampoo and have all the soap I ever needed again for the rest of my life, without ever having to check the container to see which kind I grabbed?"

Why? Because your friends would laugh at you, that's why. Or maybe you don't own a truck. How should I know? But I know of someone who had the courage to live by Reason, who really did use only one kind of soap.

That would be Albert Einstein, living (well, formerly living) example that living by Reason won't kill you. Or anyway, you can do it and last into your sixties. OK, it wasn't shampoo, but it's the principle of the thing I'm getting at. Einstein preferred living according to Reason to keeping company, when faced with the choice. You could call him a loner for it, but you can't say he was absolutely wrong.

Speaking of being adrift on a raft, what I really wanted to talk about was warm air vent squatters.

A warm air vent squatter is a person who spends his nights sleeping or resting on a warm air vent. If you don't know what a warm air vent is, go to the sidewalk on the 3rd Ave. side of the Bon Marche, close to the middle of the block. That's a little one. There are bigger more interesting warm air vents associated to bigger institutions, and the best ones aren't downtown, and they aren't sheltered by an awning.

The beauty of the warm air vent is, you've got all your heating and cooling needs there (the cooling is provided by wind and rain), without the hazards often associated with heat sources.

What I'm trying to get at here is that your typical warm air vent squatter is a person to be admired. This is a person with the courage of an Einstein, the courage to live a life of Reason even if people laugh at them. Don't get me wrong. I have never been a warm air vent squatter, and I have laughed at them, but I admire them.

So if you see a man lying on a metal grate being rained on one side and toasted on the other, go ahead and laugh. But think about it again when you pay your heating bill for that month, and try to bring yourself to give a little nod to Reason.

Yo Mama Is A SUV

When I was six I knew that I would never lack a home. I could stay at my parents until I finished college. After that, I could always sleep in my spaceship, if necessary.

As I grew older, I came to realize that I was being silly. It didn't have to be a spaceship. It only had to be an all-terrain ground vehicle with a self-contained ecology. The ecology would include me of course. It would have a fully automated hydroponics system that would not only grow my food for me, but prepare it and serve it to me. If it weren't also a spaceship, that would be OK. It could be a time machine, for instance.

I pictured the thing being only half as long as the average camper.

My design didn't even call for a convenient door, because there would generally be no reason to leave the contraption. I imagined that I would have a television screen with which to communicate to the outside world. I could manipulate external objects with robot arms. Somehow all the books I might want to read would fit in the on-board computer.

My seat would recline to a bed. When I needed exercise I could pull a lever (all the best inventions were controlled by levers and large impressive dials in those days) and suitable exercising devices would appear at my hands and feet.

Eventually, I began to sense a crucial flaw in the design: there was no passenger seat. I came to realize that there must not only be a passenger seat, but there must be no levers between it and me. So I was finally led to appreciate the idea of a camper with a separate space for a bed.

Campers, and their latest incarnations, the SUVs, are not just alternative homes that can ease the suffering of the houseless, they are also archetypes. The security they represent is the security of the womb. I am sure that this is why so many American guys feel they have to have an SUV. They miss their mothers, in a physical way.

Clearly though, the homeless have especially good reasons to appreciate the camper. Lets say you live in Lynnwood, in a house, and the backwards government of Lynnwood criminalizes people who live in houses. Well, then, you're stuck. But now, suppose you live in Lynnwood in a camper, and the backwards government of Lynnwood criminalizes people who live in campers. Then you can drive to Bothell and wait for them to be backwards. Bothell is prettier anyway.

Lynnwood's stated problem with the camper-endowed and other such homeless, is that they often relieve themselves in bushes. This doesn't prevent everybody in Lynnwood from owning campers and/or SUVs and polluting the air I breathe by driving them unnecessarily to and from work. Taking a daily crap in the air is still OK for Lynnwood, Everett, and Mark Sidran. Just keep it off the rhododendron roots.

Then there are people like Dave, whose real name is also fake. Dave is an old friend of mine who once made the mistake of morally opposing a war while people with guns were transporting him to it. They put him in the brig. After that his life sort of went downhill.

What makes Dave interesting, besides being a man of convictions, is that he is a whiz at creating shelter in deep forest, but his livelihood (recycling the cast-off toys of the middle and upper classes) depends on living in the city. So he would be a perfect candidate for a camper, except he can't drive.

But Dave shares the dream we all have for that mobile womb. He just has had scale his dream back to more of a rickshaw-like vehicle. He would build a home on wheels which he could physically pull from parking space to parking space as needed.

Such dreams are so powerful that they consume men like Dave, so that they spend years fretting over blue prints of the perfect home away from mother, and never demand more from society than that their dreams should be possible.

Those Colorful Natives

Lets talk about the alternatively homed!

What I have in mind here is a romp through the world of the alternatively homed, sort of like the way that guy with the deep voice on Nature romps through 20 species on hour showing you all the exciting ways they all have adapted to their little niches. Or big niches, as the case may be. Or think of this as a sketch for a National Geographic special, "Lost Tribes of the Suburban-ghetti", or something like that.

Adaptation is the key concept here. Why is it, I'm wondering, that we admire so much the way that indigenous people like the Inuit, the Australian Aborigines, the Hopi, the Dayaks, the Bush People of Africa, the Maori, the Swedes, all used to build their huts, igloos, lean-tos or whatever, praising it as proof of Man's adaptability in the face of harsh Nature, but when someone does it down the street they're seen as outlaws?

Am I the only guy in this city who's seen the "Gods Must Be Crazy?"

What does the attraction of Survivor mean if the same people who make it number one in the ratings also spit on the real thing when they see it? Maybe it's the same thrill that white Americans got watching Red Dawn. They spent years preaching freedom while snuffing it out everywhere in the world it appeared. Then they used the magic of cinema to identify themselves as the "real" freedom fighters. Look at me, I can be a guerrilla warrior too, for seven dollars, four at matinee.

Or, hey, I can be Kevin Costner and live in a teepee. For the price of the video I can learn to spell it tipi and impress my PC friends.

Meanwhile there are a hundred men, women and children right here in this city who are surviving in tents because they have to. They aren't doing it to identify with the oppressed, they are the oppressed. How about celebrating their successes at survival now, instead of waiting for the National Geographic special, or the Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts version? How about it?

But I digress. I was going to talk about other alternative homenesses. Not just communal tenting.

The road nomad. This is usually someone with at least four wheels, horses being out of fashion and motorcycles providing little shelter. As I learned personally years ago, even a car that doesn't run can provide decent shelter if it is fortuitously parked.

My Home Was a '69 Rambler

Opus 7, Verse 2

My home was a '69 Rambler

In a warm garage it was parked

My home was a '69 Rambler

As I already have remarked.

[Oh Rambler, Oh Rambler, Bring back my Rambler to me, etc.]

If the garage is right, who needs the car? I am thinking now of an actual person, a legally blind old man whose name wasn't Angus but should have been, who would have been home in the Highlands with Lassie, a serviceable knife, and someone else's flock.

Angus found himself an aging benefactor, some old woman, who rented him an unused one-car garage for ten dollars a month "for storage". Angus then stored himself. He paid his rent by clearing the neighborhood of aluminum cans every day. The earnings provided him enough extra money that he could spend his spare time in dignity drinking coffee at a 24-hour establishment as an honored customer, where he buried himself in books hour after hour, until his benefactor died.

Thanks to my ranting I've run out of space. But I'll get back to this. More "Lives of the Alternatively Homed," later.

Electric Juju Miracle Man

"He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher," Walt Whitman said. Walter, like Emily Dickinson, had a knack for saying things in a way designed to raise eyebrows on a dead man.

What teacher? I was lucky in school in that I was never assigned poetry by either Emily or Walt. So when I see that word "teacher", I don't think of some high school English teacher. Instead, I think of Walter himself in his own natural teachy-ness, being as Zen as he ever could be. (As in If you meet the Buddha on the Road, kill him.)

If it weren't for a sprinkling of quotes like that, you could definitely get the idea that Walt Whitman was deeper into himself than Donald Trump. In fact Walt was a whiz at selling himself.

"Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity, /When I give I give myself." After reading that, don't you feel guilty for not giving Walter more of your time?

He sang the body electric. Now you have to put that into its historical context. Back in Walt's day electricity wasn't the thing more common in households than bleach. In Walt's day, electricity was almost synonymous with juju.

Walt said, "Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle." Translation -- "I got juju."

Walt said, "The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual." Translation -- "The juju stops here."

Walt wrote, "This is no book; who touches this touches a man." Translation -- "I got juju to spare, some of it's spilled into these poems."

My own favorite Whitman sample: "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes)." Translation -- "I am mass juju, I cast juju shadow."

Speaking of selling and persuasion, experts agree that there are six basic factors that influence humans to comply with requests or give in to sales pitches. These are reciprocation, consistency, social validation, liking, authority, and scarcity. I could illustrate the use of these six factors with any successful advertising campaign, but this column isn't about Madison Avenue. So instead I will show you how to use these factors to sell NIMBYs on Tent City.

To the friendly, caring, people of Seattle:

You have probably heard many appeals on behalf of Tent City [social validation], but have you heard of the great benefits that Tent City has to offer to your community?

Yes, there is only one Tent City in Seattle [scarcity], and it can be yours! The homeless people who make up Seattle's Tent City are the cream of the crop [scarcity], the hardest working 2 percent.

Listen to what Dave, a good-looking well-groomed white [liking] policeman [authority] has to say about Tent City's homeless people. "I encounter homeless people everywhere. But nowhere have I found more cheerful [liking] and energetic homeless people than at Tent City. And they are so clean!" [liking]

Cynthia R., a happy, smiling, independently wealthy [social validation, liking, authority] housewife, is typical of many who have been fortunate to live next door to Tent City. She says, "Those homeless men were great! The way they scared off prowlers, my! We had almost no crime in our neighborhood the weeks they were here. And they were so sober, what a good example to our children. If only we could repay them!" [reciprocation]

Seattle has so far provided Tent City with 17 sites in one year. [consistency] That shows just how popular Tent City has been. [social validation] Now isn't it time you invited Tent City to live next door to you?

Give yourself mass juju!

Hope Is The Thing With A Roof

Imagine what it would have been like if Emily Dickinson had ever been homeless. I think we can say this much for sure: it would have been a drag on her career. Ha, ha, just kidding. No, seriously, her whole image would have been blown! She was so far from being homeless, she was the Anti-Homeless* Poet. Any ideas she might have had on the subject would have been purely theoretical.

Emily Dickinson said, "There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away." Likewise, there is no frigate like a pair of old dirty gym socks to haul our breath to China to be sold into slavery. Another exceptional frigate is the homeless frigate. Where does the homeless frigate take us? Could we get there some other way? What's with the hardtack and salted limes? Shuffleboard, anyone?

Maybe since the book frigate takes us on a world cruise, the homeless frigate does the opposite, it takes us to a house in the middle of Amherst.

Come to think of it, Emily was pretty theoretical on most subjects, wasn't she? Emily Dickinson called hope the thing with feathers. If Emily had your hope, what kind of thing would it be? My hope is the thing with pizza stains down its front. Maybe your hope has chocolate all over its face.

According to Emily, a word starts to live when you say it. That means Emily D. was an early exponent of meme theory. She must have known that the only way to kill words outright is to delete them from all memory files. It's like killing blackberries. The only practical way to kill them in your own back yard is to crowd them out with something worse. Go ahead, try it. Kill the word "is". Good luck.

"A wounded deer leaps the highest." How would Emily have known? What was she, some kind of sadist, wandering through the forest poking various animals in the butt? Maybe the wolverine jumps higher, huh? Always the theorist.

Then again, maybe she was torturing more than just animals. She also said, "I like a look of agony, /Because I know it's true; /Men do not sham convulsion, /Nor simulate a throe." Could this be insight born of experiment?

"Where thou art, that is home." All afternoon my roof leaked. It had a hole in it as big as the sky. No, wait, that was the sky. Doh.

Poverty is the Gust

by Copyright Dr. Wes Browning

Sing to the tune of the Gilligan's Island Theme

Poverty is the blowing Gust

That flattens us to the dirt

And drags us down an ugly ditch,

While ripping up our shirt;

It leaves us there, but lookit how

We build ourselves a yurt,

We're a little worn and slightly torn

We add up all the hurt.

Speaking of hurt, I notice from the news reports that the Liberty Bell was seriously injured by a homeless man the other day.

Let me get this straight. A piece of crap bell that was given to us by the English in 1752 and never worked is so important to us that if anyone should dent it they get locked up?

Frank Eidmann, director of special projects for the Independence National Historic Park had this to say: "Anyone who attacks a national symbol is disturbed. What he was disturbed about, we don't know."

Gosh, I don't know, Frank, let me think could it be because he is homeless, Frank, could that be the problem??!!

The man could get five years for, among other things, "damaging an archaeological resource" (I'm not making this up.)

The Liberty Bell is not an archaeological resource. It's a piece of junk, which was used by the Abolitionists to symbolize this country's failure to live up to its promise of freedom for all. That is how it got its name, that is the only reason it has been preserved.

All this man did was remind us of that fact.

* In the sense of physics, not sentiment. So if she every encountered a homeless version of herself the two would have annihilated each other & obliterated Massachusetts.

Bread and Putter

While we at Real Change are celebrating the first birthday of the current avatar of Tent City, we are also trying hard to understand why some people don't appreciate it as much as we do, so that we can be on the cutting edge of persuasion, as we change their minds, and so make the street papers in other cities jealous, and steal their women.

I mean, getting to the persuading part, the bottom line is, there aren't enough shelter beds, and affordable housing hasn't happened. Living together in tents is just the safest alternative to sleeping in doorways. Ya'll don't want people sleeping in doorways, right?

I know this is hard for some of you, so let me run that at you again. Raise your hands, everyone who wants the homeless who don't get into shelters to sleep in their own front doorway. Hmmm, I thought so. Next, hands from those of you who want them sleeping in your neighbor's doorway. Better. Now lets see hands for people who wants them to sleep isolated from each other in public parks. OK, not bad. Now how many hands do we have for them sleeping in tents somewhere together?

Hello? You in the back! It's the last alternative! You have to raise your hand sometime, because these people are going to sleep somewhere! You don't get to just sit on your hands like the problem will go away. People need to sleep!

Speaking of human needs, just before I sat down to write this masterpiece I noticed I was puttering. A lot of you will say I am still puttering even now as I type, especially those of you who know what the word means.

to putter, v, to busy or occupy oneself in a leisurely, casual, or ineffective manner.

Yes, I was puttering. And I noticed! And it occurred to me that I rarely notice when I have been puttering, I normally just putter about obliviously, but that in reality I must spend two-thirds of my waking life puttering, and have always done so, even when I was gainfully employed. Although of course we generally called it something else then.

We called it paper clip stuffing, or arranging our files, or fulfilling personal directives, or sorting priorities.

Suddenly I had an epiphany! I became aware, as I had never been aware before, of the extent to which puttering is a human need. I now realize that puttering is a need right up there with food and shelter and safety and moist towelettes. No, seriously, I realized that the need "to putter", in your Maslow hierarchy of needs, must precede all the noble sounding ones, like the need "to art" or the need "to science", or the need "to make lame jokes", or even the need "to mention moist towelettes repeatedly." Moist towelettes.

It explains so much. It explains for instance, why I am so fond of things that explain things. It explains why most men can't grow a beard, they trim it to death. It explains couch surfing. It explains cubicle art.

You know what I'm talking about. Cubicle art is the greatest contemporary American folk art form. Not Cubist Art. Cubicle art. You have a cubicle at work. You decorate it with stuff. That's it. All you get is the one cubicle. It's similar to hanging fuzzy dice in your car, only now it's a cubicle, not a car.

Or it could be a car, too. People still express their puttering need through their cars, even though cubicles have become the more popular medium. And what's the most popular medium of all?

The home, of course.

I have a dream. I dream of the day when every man, woman and child of this great nation of ours has at least a cubicle, or the equivalent, to putter in. I dream of the day when that puttering will be recognized, not only as leisurely casual and ineffective, but as the very stuff of life.

I dream of a day when people will be valued not for the size of their homes, or whether they have one or not, but for the puttering that they can do, when given the chance.

Moist towelettes!