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!

We Happy Poor

Well, here we are again. It's income tax time and, to make matters worse, the stock market is sagging under the combined weight of dozens of beached dot-coms and the seasonal tax-time supply glut. It's time for all the rich people to come out and cry and whimper about how miserable their lives are.

And, what a coincidence, Bush's tax cut proposal is on the agenda in Washington, DC.

Meanwhile, thanks to my degenerate choice of a poverty-inducing lifestyle, I am able to live a lazy life of luxury off the taxes of the hard-working rich. Not only do I not have to pay income tax, but I don't have to pay servants, I don't have to pay for gasoline for my cars and yachts (I don't have any), I don't have to pay interest on my credit card debt (no credit card), and I don't need an expensive accountant. Neener, neener.

One thing fascinates me about all this. If I have it so good, why aren't the rich falling all over each other trying to join me in my idyllic life of ease?

Could it be they see drawbacks to my happy-go-lucky lifestyle? Even though I am not in a thirty percent tax bracket? But if there are drawbacks so severe that even the rich, who can have anything they want, would not be poor like me, then, perhaps those drawbacks rate some kind of compensation, no?

FOR EXAMPLE. Lately we have all had to see, on TV, over and over again, a bunch of basketball show-offs dribble and pass a basketball around for a minute, only to finish with a Swish ™ in the corner of the picture tube.

If I was rich I bet I could afford some gadget to filter that minute of aggravation out. But I am poor. Drawback! I have to watch this stupid display thirty times per hour, all the while developing an irresistible urge to wear basketball shorts.

Finally I break down. I buy basketball shorts. Hundreds of them. I spend all my beer money for a month on basketball shorts. I have nothing else to wear, I can't go to a concert at Benaroya Hall, they won't let me in, I'm always wearing basketball shorts. My cultural life deteriorates.

I go to public meetings of the City Council, but no one takes me seriously, because I am wearing basketball shorts. My political life crumbles. I am reduced to merely voting reactively, i.e., I become (eewww) a reactionary voter, because I had to sell my cut-off Levis to buy basketball shorts.

Then, just when I think my life could not sink any lower, my woman leaves me for a man who wears spandex.

Somewhere, maybe across the continent, maybe not even in this country, is a vice president of Random Crap Merchandise in charge of commercials for basketball shorts, who, thanks to all my purchases got a twenty percent raise boosting him into the tax bracket where they make you give them two-thirds of all the money you make, and then they paddle you if you make more. Lets call him Doug.

Doug's life is so horrible. In return for making me addicted to basketball shorts, all he gets is oodles of money and the envy of the world. He can't ever enjoy the simpler things in life that I had before he made his fortune off my consumption.

As Doug himself would say, "Companies like mine, that fulfill no real pre-existing consumer need, and only draw speculative venture capital for a while and then vanish in a puff of smoke, don't grow on trees. It takes real sweat and imagination and a gift for bilking investors to create the kind of wealth that I have. It takes clever exploitation of cheap overseas labor, leaving US labor sucking lemons. And it requires a deep understanding of the psychology of the buying public, that only well paid con-artist consultants can provide."

"And then the people, through their representatives, want to take a percentage of it back. Damn."

"Oh well, at least I still have a life. Not like that basketball-shorts-wearing loser Wes Browning."

My Very Successful Prognostication

I'll confess, I'm not a terribly physical kind of guy. I'm not into rough competitive sports like baseball or rugby or marbles. I don't object to sports altogether, but I prefer the solitary sports, sports in which it's just me competing against myself.

My favorite of those is Olympic Style Nervous Pacing. Incidentally, my best score ever against myself in a pacing competition was 9.6 (it would have been a 10 if it weren't for the Russian judge.) Not to brag, but I did so well I cost myself a medal. Myself was deeply chagrined and never competed again. Really. No, not really, I just wanted to say "chagrined".

So naturally, whenever I am in an earthquake, which seems lately to be whenever I am lying in bed naked in a vulnerable position, or at least once per decade, my feeling about it is not unlike the feeling of a student who, having tried out for the varsity band, was instead picked to be a center for the football team. My feeling is that there has been a horrible mistake, I don't do contact sports. I don't even watch them!

Not that earthquakes can't be entertaining to me. Hey, I can be amused as easily as the next guy. It's just that they don't amuse me for very long. It's like sticking your finger in an electric light socket, isn't it? The fun part is pretty much over when you've realized that you have done it and you haven't suffered massive cardiac arrest yet. So, well, that was an earthquake, wasn't it? Hey, I'm not dead! What fun!

Those of my friends who are sports enthusiasts tell me that part of the value of taking part in sports lies in testing their limits, learning what they can accomplish when they throw themselves into something.

I can see that now. I mean, it isn't often that I become so distracted that I forget where I put my pants. Ordinarily I am on top of those sorts of things; "life's little details." So I guess you could say that the earthquake allowed me to discover new depths of self-distraction, great new vistas of blind panic...

Speaking of senseless violence, how 'bout that Fat Tuesday? There's another contact sport I can live without.

The first few nights of the Mardi Gras violence had no impact at all on me, even though I live in the Pioneer District, because I ignored it. (Some things deserve to be ignored, I believe. Like the practice of confounding the District and the Square. I simply don't let myself hear such idiocy. It's the Pioneer District, damn it. Or the Pioneer Square District, at the worst.)

But Tuesday night, as I was riding the bus home at about 11:30 pm with Anitra "not an actual Italian Duck" Freeman, we were unable to not notice the crowds, as they were slowing the bus so much that we were better off walking. So we continued to our Pioneer District apartment building on foot, and I had to notice the way the police were deployed. Not interspersed with the crowds, but on the periphery, in fact, just next to our building.

So I told Anitra (I'm not making this up), "First, I am going to watch Letterman. Then, I am going to do my Real Change duty, and go out there and see what is going on in those crowds. Then I am going to come back, and together we we will be tear-gassed by these police at about 2 am, when they can't think of any better way to control the crowds, which will be dispersing at about that time, under our very windows."

Did I guess wrong? No, I did not. I did exactly what I said. I watched Letterman. Then I wandered out into the Fat Tuesday crowd. I saw the beginning of the brawl that was filmed so well from the police helicopter. At that point I returned to my apartment, and waited to be tear-gassed. We were tear-gassed right on schedule, at about 2 am.

OK, there is a sport I love. I love predicting what Seattle will do next. It's poetry in motion.

Flash Weston?

Today I want to use words to talk about names. What’s in a name? Willy Shakespeare (sp?) answered with something to the effect that a rose by any other name would smell as swell. A lot of people think that’s the ultimate answer.

Balderdash! In the first place, the question was, “What’s in a name?” -- not “What’s a rose?” In another place, Willy himself knew perfectly well there was more to it than that. He went right on ahead in the same play to make a case for the opposition. He clearly indicated that he was inclined to believe that, while sweet smelliness sticks permanently to roses however named, if a Romeo Montague were to change his name to, say, Watson Whittaker, he’d get beat up by his cousins whether he married that girl or not. Names do so matter.

It has been demonstrated scientifically that even when collected into conferences and given little individual cards to pin on their shirts, and an indelible marker, scientists can’t completely explain why names, such as “Montague,” are different from words, such as “rose.” But I believe the answer may involve the reptilian brain, the difference between the sacred and the profane, and Dicks Nixon, Clark, Cheney, etc.

Whatever the difference, it is now known that there is one. If your first pet dog was Blacky and you go around calling all dogs Blacky, people will call you Dingy. And rightly so.

Once we understand that names and words are different, we begin to understand why people might like to change names on occasion. For example Amazon.com might want to change it’s name to Prosperity.com or Cornucopia.com or Nodotcom.com, on the theory that people might forget that unfortunate NASDAQ turn of events.

What the hell is a Verizon? When you ask that kind of question you betray ignorance of the difference I am picking at. Verizon is just the new improved name of GTE, a name that escapes all the ugly associations that the old name has, like the association that everybody had learned to think “corporate weasels” when they heard “GTE”. But you don’t think “corporate weasels” when you hear “Verizon.” Not yet. Instead you think “What the hell is a Verizon?”

Similarly the name US West served the function of a name, not a word. It helped the rest of us to identify that specific thing that screwed up our phone billing all the time. If the internet connection went down exactly in the middle of our composing of our 500 page treatise on the relationship of the fluctuations in the perfume market to the practice of personal bathing in Europe, we could relieve our tension by uttering a curse upon the house of US West, a particular corporation, a legal body, near-person, and receptacle of a name.

US West heard those curses. That’s why they are no longer US West, but the as yet not-so-cursed Qwest.

Here we arrive at a crucial distinction between names and words. Names can be cursed. Names accumulate curses. Names attach to persons and to entities perceived as persons, and they collect the feelings we have for those entities.

How cursed can a name become? Ask Seattle Housing Authority. But don’t call them that when you ask them. Call them PorchLight. Or don’t ask them. Ask anybody else. Typical reaction to hearing the name “Seattle Housing Authority” -- “Boo.” Typical reaction to hearing the name “PorchLight” -- “Huh?”

It’s part of the American Way. The accursed change their names and they expect everyone to forget the old names. And we do, because we want to reserve the same right for ourselves. We want to be able to declare bankruptcy if necessary, change the name, get all new credit cards, move to the next great “growth center” (it’s Houston, the last I heard) and start a new career, or as we put it, “make a new life for ourselves.”

It’s only possible if everyone agrees to let it be possible. So it has to be part of the social contract.

What I’m getting at is, some day I could put Copyright Doctor Wes Browning away and start calling myself something like Flash Weston or the Writer Formerly Known as Wes, and this being America I could probably pull it off, even without incorporating. And rightly so.

Increasing Awareness Through Fairness

Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if everybody was treated the same way homeless people are. When I first heard about faith-based initiatives that’s what it sounded like to me -- we were going to arrange to do all government business through churches the way the missions do the soup kitchens.

That could be pretty enlightening for the general public. That’s something I could support.

For example, suppose whenever anybody wanted a fishing license, they had to go to a local church and sit through a half hour sermon to the effect that if they weren't such sinners they would be the CEOs of corporations and have figured out how to have fish flown in to them. That might be enlightening.

What if they ran Medicare like they run the mission down the street? Say you’re on Social Security, you’re old, you have cancer, and you need pain-killer. The government sends you to a mission, you have to show up at the door no later than 4:30, the sermon starts at 4:35, NO LATE-COMERS, we don't care how much pain you're in, this is Christ's time, you'll get your pain-killer when it's your turn, and while you're waiting you'll find a hymnal at your seat. You don't have to sing to the Lord, but if you had let Jesus in your heart years ago you never would have landed here. Look at the pain you're in, it's proof you hate God in your heart. Oh, yes, and if you expect to come back for more FREE pain-killer you'd better spend an hour sweeping the vestibule, whether it needs it or not.

What if everybody's grandparents got treated that way when they needed help? That might be enlightening.

Why stop at spreading the soup kitchen experience around? Let’s think of some more ways that everybody else can share in the homeless experience!

Here in Seattle, homeless people who have tents aren’t allowed to set them up anywhere, because such living arrangements are unsafe, according to the government. They aren’t even allowed to to sleep in tents on private land with the owner’s permission. Can we think of a way to share that experience with everyone?

Well, I couldn’t think of anything, but Fairfax County, Virginia, found a way.

People in the government of Fairfax County, Virginia, near Washington, D.C., have apparently decided that they don’t have enough homeless people. Too many people are living in the houses of Fairfax County. They have decided it’s time to put a stop to all that.

They are trying to get a law passed to prohibit anyone from sleeping anywhere except in a bedroom. As of this writing, it appears that the Virginia Legislature would allow such an ordinance to be put into effect, according to an article in the Washington Post.

You see, poor people have been driving down property values (gee, what a shame, that housing should cost less) in Fairfax by letting too many people live with them in their apartments and houses. When your neighbors put enough friends and relatives in every living room and every kitchen and hallway and they all have Hondas and Sonys, you know, pretty soon you’re having to park all the way out in New Jersey and listening to sixteen kinds of salsa at once all hours of the day and night, if you know what I mean.

That’s right, someone just might think that the purpose of the law might have something to do with ethnic interests involving immigrant populations. But its sponsors deny that they are targetting minorities. They say they are preserving parking spaces and peace and quiet.

Why can’t we do something like that here in Seattle? Let’s have a law that prohibits people from sleeping on their own living room couches. We’ll tell them it’s for their own good. That might be enlightening.

Seattle's Not From Here

The Last Demonstration Zone

© Dr. Wes Browning

Welcome to the Last Demonstration Zone,

Step right up, take your megaphone, set permanently on mute.

The American Protest Theme Park greets you,

bring your quaint belief in what’s true, they take it for cute.

Remember, don’t mention Mickey Mouse.

You’ll get thrown out of the house, you’ll pay a fine.

Anyone in America can speak out.

Take a number, don’t shout, wait in line.

Welcome to the Last Free Speech hole in the ground.

You may now speak freely to whoever’s around, nobody cares here.

Step behind the rope, dope, nobody cares here.

Is anyone besides me aware that all inauguration ceremonies are propaganda? And that propaganda is government speech? And that therefore if Pennsylvania Ave. is a designated Demonstration Free Zone, then there can’t be an inauguration there either? Is it just me who thinks Demonstration Zones are the worst things that have happened to this country since war rations? What next? Talking Zones? Thinking Zones?

They can’t even hide behind state’s rights on this. We’re talking about the District of Columbia, where all the law is Congressional law. That bit about “Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech” has full force in D. C.

Meanwhile our own mayor Schell wants to define Tent City as a political act, apparently because in the past he’s had some success forcing political acts to go away. In connection with the trials of Tent City a word has cropped up often: transient.

transient adj. 1. not lasting, enduring, or permanent; transitory 2. lasting only a short time; existing briefly; temporary -- n. a person or thing that is transient.

Mayor Schell would clearly like to see to it that Tent City is transient. But more importantly, there is the notion that the people who make up Tent City are not deserving of Seattle’s concern, because they are transient, they are only here in Seattle for a while, they are no natives.

I have heard the following statistic quoted: half of all Seattle’s homeless are not from here.

I’ve got news for you all: as of the last twenty years at least, anyone who is from Seattle isn’t a normal Seattleite.

I don’t have to go back to the pioneer days to establish the fact, but I will, just because I can’t resist mentioning that Chief Noah Seattle was born on Kitsap. Or that Denny came from Indiana, or that Doc Maynard came all the way from Vermont.

Do I have to tell anyone that John W. Nordstrom was born in Sweden? That William Boeing grew up in Detroit and didn’t move to this city until he was thirty?

I don’t have to go back that far. I can look at... I don’t know, let’s see now... the Mayor! Paul Schell, born in Fort Dodge, Iowa? So Schell once really did get out of Dodge?

City Council-person Margaret Pageler was born in CHINA for crying out loud. Jim Compton came here by way of Portland Oregon. Jan Drago and Heidi Wills are from another planet.

The Stranger was born in Chicago. More than nine-tenth’s of the Burke Museum was born in British Columbia or the Great Plains. The Pike Place Market got its start in Morocco. The Space Needle was shipped here in a box from the set of the Jetsons.

Surveys have been done that have shown that considerably more than fifty percent of us aren’t from here.

Does that make the majority of Seattle transient? Sounds fair to me.