The Union Breaks Father's Day Promise

The Union Hotel, the subsidized apartment building I live in, is managed by people who can't figure out how to treat their tenants with respect.

The latest insult happened today. We were told days ago that there would be a Father's Day Brunch at noon in the community room today. There were notices placed in the halls to that effect, and at the front desk.

The notices said that there would be no 7 AM breakfast today.

As I have said before, I don't want their breakfasts anyway, so I have insisted on not being woken up at 7 in the morning with reminders of the breakfast on the intercom. So as a result of my complaints, lists of tenants who wanted breakfasts were created, and only the people on the lists were called for them.

There's no reason for the intercom reminders anyway if the management could just make the meals happen at the scheduled time.

Today, Anitra and I went down to the community room to join the Father's Day Brunch at its scheduled time, 12 noon.

We saw nothing happening and asked the desk person what was up.

What was up was that the meal had already happened at 10:45 AM. She had gotten a call from management just this morning telling her to notify everybody on the breakfast call list of the change of times.

Just because some bonehead imagined that the brunch would happen in lieu of the breakfast, they told her to handle it as she would have handled the regular Sunday morning breakfast, even though it was an entirely different event. A noon Father's Day brunch is not a breakfast.

First, they broke the promise about when it would happen. Then they violated their own protocols, which called for announcements of onetime events between 8 AM and 10 PM.

I've told the story about how the intercom protocols came about in my column for Real Change. I titled it for Adventures in Bloggery as Be Silent, Consume, Die. All I wanted was not to be called on the intercom at times when I would want to be sleeping. I agreed to allow that they would call me during the day for special events like this. THEY insisted on that. So I have taken them at their word on it, and come to expect it.

Their word means crap.

They can't ever put themselves in our shoes. They have less respect for the people who live here then they have for ugliest fish in the lobby aquarium.

This comes right on the heels of similar broken promises involving a nutritional class (PTSD, posted just June 5).

It compounds the anger I expressed in Rage And Counter-Rage, just last May.

The inability of these people to figure out what they need to do to keep my experience here from amounting to one insult after another did not begin with the current manager. See Social Services Gripe for a complaint about the last one.

But the current management can't seem to get anything right.

PS: Only a fraction of the residents are on the call list (I'm blanking on the number -- I remember it as being 7 out of 52 -- but I know its fewer than a third.) So in excess of 30 residents were misled about the time the meal would happen, and Anitra and I weren't the only ones in the lobby at noon finding out we were screwed.

PTSD

It's been about 23 years since being diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Since then I have learned a lot about it. I'm no expert on how it effects everybody, but I know how it effects me very well, and I am an expert on managing my own case.

Various components of the disorder, or syndrome, that I have lately needed to take into account: panic attacks, delayed stress problems, depression due to grief, and chronic functional problems.

Panic attacks are managed by education. You learn what they are, and then you can go through them with less fear. The less afraid you are when a panic attack starts the less severe it will be.

Delayed stress problems include but aren't limited to flashbacks. I deal with them by not burying my memories. People who advise "put the past behind you" give crappy advice. You have to explore the past and face it to free yourself from it. I can avoid some situations that trigger flashbacks, but need to keep such avoidance to a minimum, recognizing the collateral costs.

Depression due to grief is not talked about much but it's a major issue for people like me who experienced long term repeated trauma. There is an awareness of loss that can't be ignored. It's mostly a sense of lost feeling. For so many years I didn't dare feel what was around me, because I was over-sensitized. It left much of my life flat, colorless, and tasteless to me. This takes grief management.

The chronic functional problems are something else. Long-term repeated trauma causes neurological and chemical changes that are not completely understood (Wikipedia has a summary here), but cause definite behavioral changes that have to be taken into account.

Typical are disturbances in fear reactions. The public stereotype of a PTSD sufferer is of someone who is too fearful. But the disorder often goes the other way. Many times I have not had a fear reaction that I should have, and put myself or others in danger. This is why I haven't driven a car since 1987.

Another problem I have that I suspect is a chronic functional disorder, is harder to describe. It's a kind of brittleness. I need to ease into things. I can't be blind-sided. To see how it works I have to give examples.

Last year a friend of Anitra and I showed up at the Real Change office on a Saturday when I was working the desk, just minutes before closing time, and invited us to join her as her guest that night at a special community meal in her building. I had planned to go home after closing and cook a dinner. The plan was detailed. I knew what I was going to cook. But Anitra wanted to go to the community meal and I agreed.

I know from experience that if I had one or two days to prepare myself for the community meal I could have gone through with it. Or, I could have gone through with it if the meal event was less stressful than it turned out. But what happened was, we got to her building and found ourselves waiting in line for entrance into the dining area, and Anitra left me to go look for our friend. It was crowded, the other people in line were loud incessant talkers, and I had a severe panic attack on the spot. When Anitra came back I begged off, ran home and collapsed in bed in tears, hating myself for being a freak.

I simply shouldn't have agreed to the sudden change of plans. I knew better, but I thought I could get away with it just this once, and went along to avoid being a pain.

Yesterday there was another incident here at my building, the Union. Over a month ago I had signed up for a nutritional class. According to the sign-up sheet it was scheduled yesterday, a Wednesday, at 2 PM. It happens that's also the day of the week we have a community dinner at the Union, at 5 PM, but in the past when we've had nutritional classes there was food at the end of the class, so I didn't think I would mind missing the dinner. That was just what I planned to do; I would use the meal-time to do my usual afternoon errands, including my stop at the office to feed the cat.

A couple of weeks ago the plan was solidified when a sign reminding us all of the class was posted, and it specifically promised pizza. The staff added that it would not be just any pizza, it would be pizza we ourselves made during the class. Now there wasn't any doubt that I would get something to eat at the class, and wouldn't mind missing the dinner.

This is the Union, though. It's run by the Downtown Emergency Service Center. So yesterday morning I went to the front desk to make sure everything was going as planned.

I was told that the times hadn't changed. The class would be at 2 PM. the dinner would be at 5 PM. Then I noticed a sign for the dinner saying that pizza would be served. I said, "That's odd. Why would you have pizza for dinner, knowing that the people who attended the class would have already had pizza?"

The answer was, "Oh, the people who go to the class will make the pizza that's served at the dinner. There won't be pizza at the class itself, you'll get it at 5 PM."

Well, screw me and my stupid plans.

In the weeks leading up to the class I had come to look forward to it. I didn't so much care about what I might learn about nutrition, I was looking forward to the shared communal experience. Now I found out that the complete experience, including the shared eating, would drag out over 3 and a half hours, and I had other things I had planned to do during that time.

Here's where the PTSD kicks in: I had prepared for the whole thing, the making of the pizza and the eating of it. In my brittleness, I couldn't deal with dividing the experience in half. I couldn't go to the class and enjoy making the pizza, knowing that I was being screwed out of partaking in it, if I wouldn't be at the dinner. I couldn't go to the dinner and enjoy the pizza, knowing that I was screwed out of the joy of helping make it, if I hadn't been to the class. I couldn't do both the class and the dinner and enjoy them, knowing the whole time that I was abandoning my usual afternoon routine, and knowing that I had been misled for two weeks about the class.

So I decided to bag both of them. Right after making that decision, Adam, our Editorial Manager, asked if I could come in to see some public disclosure documents he got hold of. I promised to arrive by 4 PM.

As I was leaving the Union around 3 to do errands on the way to that 4 PM meeting, I expected to see the class either in progress or wrapping up. It wasn't. I found out that the class hadn't happened yet. It was going to happen at 4 PM.

If I had known that the class was going to be at 4 PM I could have done my afternoon routine early and got back in time for both the class and the dinner.

I was livid. Twice in one day, I found out in two different ways that I had been misled. I pointed this out to our building manager. I told him I signed up for this event a month ago and the Union and the class provider had a month to get me the right information, and the best they can do is tell me one hour before it's going to happen?

I was more livid by his reaction. "You can still go to the class," he said.

"No, I can't. I keep my promises. I have an appointment at 4."

"Oh well."

That was it. "Oh well." No apology for jerking me around feeding me BS for a month. No apology for taking my time for granted, and assuming that I have no life but the life that is patronizingly doled out to me by him and DESC through their events.

And I'm sure neither the building manager nor DESC will ever acknowledge that they are clueless about the special needs of their residents with PTSD.

The following closing rant is therefore directed to DESC:

Hello. Get this straight. I don't have borderline personality disorder. I make friends well. I'm not psychotic. I have excellent reality judgment. I'm not even especially neurotic.

I have PTSD. Look it up. It means I've been abused too much. You don't accommodate it by "drawing me out" into the community. I'm past that stage. I can find community myself, assholes. That's not my problem. Stop confusing me with the other mental patients who live here. It's your job to know the differences.

You accommodate the disorder by just not heaping more abuse on me. Don't feed me bullshit, apologize to me if and when you do, and keep the noise down in the next room, and I'll be just fine.

Rage And Counter-Rage

Yesterday we had a community meeting at the Union Hotel, the subsidized apartment building where I live. The meeting was facilitated by the building manager and the social director. Anitra and I and one other tenant brought up an ongoing complaint, and about half the meeting consisted of the five of us discussing the complaint while others present just listened in. The complaint was this: when any one tenant in the building repeatedly disturbs the peace of his neighbors (we couldn't name names, and we were talking about more than one loud disruptive tenant) the management doesn't do anything to relieve the disturbed.

To clarify that, lets say Jack lives in 101 and Jill lives in 102 (there are actually no apartments 101 or 102 in my building.) Say Jack screams and rages and stomps his floor, 24-7. Say Jill is a child abuse survivor (like me) who has PTSD and not only can't sleep through Jack's rages but also has flashbacks because of them. Say Jill complains every single day about Jack's behavior.

The result of all those complaints will be no relief for JIll. None whatsoever.

After enough complaints, under some circumstances, the management will approach Jack and try to help HIM with the difficulties HE is having managing his behavior.

But no relief for Jill.

Jack has to be accommodated, of course, because his disruptive behavior is due to mental illness. That's why any intervention with Jack is presented as "helping" Jack deal with HIS problems. I understand that.

What I don't understand is how the needs of Jill get tossed aside and she never, ever, gets relief, even though her needs are also the needs of a person presenting mental health problems.

One of the things I said during the meeting was that it really galls me that, all the time that the building manager and social director talked about what they could try to do in these situations, each and every time the word "help" was used it was in the context of helping the Jacks. Never would they speak of "what can we do to help the Jills?"

A point I didn't raise at the meeting, but a sore point for me, and one they're going to hear about sooner than later, is that these people aren't even mental health professionals.

Ironically, we were told earlier in the meeting about nurses who have begun visiting the building that could provide some medical assistance to tenants. It occurs to me that the building management wouldn't dream of trying to act as medical nurses to anyone in the building presenting a significant physical complaint. But upon their own assessment of a serious mental health problem of a tenant they will presume to act as if they were psychiatric nurses.

So, we have a situation in the building where one of the Jacks is a paranoid schizophrenic who has delusions concerning other tenants persecuting him, and who therefore harangues other tenants in the halls and in the community room and in the lobby. And the management steps in when people complain of being harangued, and they try to "help" this Jack.

But instead of getting better, he gets worse. Could it be that the "help" he's getting is just feeding his disease?

I think so. I think the man's acting-out from paranoid delusions serves the purpose of calling attention to himself. The "help" is the attention he gets. They're just encouraging him by demonstrating over and over again that if he acts out he'll get rewarded with exactly what he wants, to be the center of attention at all times. They also reinforce his belief in his delusions, because he knows that the management is intervening with him in response to the other tenants complaints.

The Jacks need a place to live too, and I wouldn't propose evicting them. But the methods now being used to address these kind of problems are totally unacceptable. DESC has to find a way to address the needs of people who have PTSD who have been placed next door to disruptive people.

They're the ones who are suffering the most. For all we know the paranoid schizophrenic is as happy and blissful as he's ever been in his life with all the attention he's getting, but the people who live next door to him are undoubtedly not happy from having their lives destroyed by constantly being subjected to screaming harangues, and they are grievously unhappy to realize that the DESC management can't even bring themselves to talk about helping them.

Which makes them (us, I'm one of them) feel like were just part of the fixtures around here. We aren't even shown the compassion that animals would be given under the same circumstances.

Self-Abuse

[The subsidized apartment building I live in is called The Union Hotel. It's run by DESC, Seattle's Downtown Emergency Service Center. All the residents have been homeless. I write a column for the monthly building newsletter. The column is called Out of My Mind. I'm posting them here, because I can. Usually I wait until the newsletter is out, but I had too much fun with this one to hold it back. Thanks to Tim Harris for directing my attention to my paradigmatic subversiveness.-- wes]

When I agreed to write these little columns, essays, rants, or whatever you want to call them, I had to agree to one rule. It was not, "Keep it clean"; it was not, "Don't write too much." It was, "You can make fun of the staff and management all you want, but don't make fun of the tenants."

I have respected that rule. But I admit it pains me. I SO love to make fun. All these people off limits, so sad.

Then I realized that I was wrong. The rule doesn't say I can't make fun of ANY tenant. It says I can't make fun of ANY OTHER tenants. I can make fun of me all I want. It then occurred to me, additionally, that many of the other tenants would greatly enjoy that. So here goes.

Wes Browning is a sinful self-deprecator: he deprecates himself a minimum of 3 times a day. His record: 16 self-deprecations in one afternoon, in one public toilet.

When he's not self-deprecating, Wes is an idolater, sloth, drunk, left wingnut, and hack writer. Those aren't insults, those are his bragging points.

Wes Browning is a cynical bastard, and so was his Momma: his Momma was SO cynical she thought Diogenes the Cynic was a fraud. Ha!

Wes Browning is a pseudo-intellectual geek who wouldn't know Diogenes the Cynic from Britney Spears if he saw them both side-by-side in uniform. If he can't figure it out by googling it he can't know it.

Speaking of his Momma, when she was pregnant with Wes she thought she just had a bad case of gas. After he was born the doctors asked who the father was. She put down "Nalley's, Extra Hot, Thick and Chunky."

Wes Browning is a maladjusted, senile delinquent, with delusions of genius. He's a 58 year-old self-identified Goth who laughs too much and wears Hawaiian shirts all the time. Someone needs to tell him you cannot be Goth and wear Hawaiian shirts all the time. Or be 58. Or laugh.

Wes Browning is a subversive. He subverts paradigms, because he has callous disregard for all that is decent and paradigmatic. He just looked up paradigmatic on the internet and couldn't find it, so he doesn't know what it means, but he has a callous disregard for it anyway.

Return of OoMM

[The subsidized apartment building I live in is called The Union Hotel. It's run by DESC, Seattle's Downtown Emergency Service Center. All the residents have been homeless. I write a column for the monthly building newsletter. The column is called Out of My Mind. I'm posting them here, because I can. This one is a month old; I was too sick to think of posting it here at the time. The hiatus was due to the 9 month hiatus of the Union Hotel Newsletter. -- wes]

It's been nine months since we've done one of these newsletters. I'll have to get nine months worth of complaints out before I can get back to normal.

First, I have the flu. I'm convinced that one of the reasons I get the flu twice a year instead of the normal once is I ride buses.

Have you ever thought about why it is so dangerous for you to ride in a car, sitting down, unbuckled, that the government is justified in ticketing your driver for it, but when it comes to bus riding it's OK to have people not only not buckled in, but standing? How does this situation come about? Could it be that when it comes to buses in King County, it's the government that's really driving?

So follow the connections, please. The government operates the bus system. Your excuse that "I didn't use my seat belt because it was inconvenient" translates nicely to the governments excuse, "We didn't put more buses on the road because we needed to spend that money on more cops to give people tickets for not buckling up."

So if you ride the buses every day, and you're not so obviously handicapped that the driver makes some other victim give you their seat, you are going to be standing in the aisles along with all the other human cattle, and someone behind you is going to sneeze on your neck, and there's your flu.

OK, that was one complaint. The next one is like unto the first.

When the city announced that there was going to be a Fire Department facility at 4th and Washington, was it just my imagination or did they not say anything at all to lead us to expect big bay doors and an emergency response team? I heard "offices, a communication hub, conference rooms."

The same city that tries to shut down night clubs in this area on the grounds that they're too loud for us poor residents, goes and plants an emergency response facility one block to our Northeast, when we already have Fire Station #1 a block to our Southwest? What next, at all compass directions?

Why don't they just install 52 separate fire engine sirens in our 52 individual rooms, set to go off randomly 52 times a day? Obviously they think this is all for our own good.

New Year Resolutions

Resolved:

1. Before the end of 2008, the only alcoholic beverages I will be drinking will be hooch I make myself, no matter how horrid. If nothing else, I will save the Earth thereby, by only using recycled bottles.

2. The next time I am told I have an "attitude" I will not apologize. I will remind my accuser that the only people who don't have attitudes are those lacking frontal lobes. Then, I will tell them to stick their own, attitudes and frontal lobes and all, where the sun don't shine, and twist.

3. If one more of the morons the Downtown Emergency Service Center hires to work the front desk of my DESC-run subsidized apartment building calls me at 7 AM Sunday morning to tell me it's time for the fucking hot breakfast they always have every fucking Sunday morning, the breakfast that's always listed in the fucking Union Hotel calendar so anyone who can read or who has a medium-term memory can know about it, on my overly loud intercom which has no off-switch or volume control, I will sue them, DESC, and anybody else who crosses my path before I regain control. Bill Hobson's head will be in danger from me. He should go hide in Tumwater.

4. I will not eat Vaseline in 2008. (It's smart to make a few resolutions you're sure you can keep.)

5. I will vote for a presidential candidate who would not wage war on a country that has not attacked mine. I will vote for a presidential candidate who can form a sentence. I will vote for a
presidential candidate who doesn't decide how to run the country based on what "God" tells him to do when he puts on his jammies and prays real hard.

6. I will not frighten people on buses unduly.

7. Anitra says she wants to eat more vegetables. Since I'm the main cook in this family, therefore she wants me to prepare and eat more vegetables. Therefore, I will endeavor to buy, prepare and give her to eat, more vegetables.

8. I will surprise myself, by, I don't know, doing something I haven't thought of ever doing, yet. I will accomplish this by allowing myself to behave unexpectedly. (This should be easy, as I have had some practice.)

9. I will publish something on paper.

10. I will risk my neck again riding around on my scooter, the one which, when I last rode it, slammed me down on the pavement so hard I broke both arms. Good times, well worth it.

Social Services Gripe

I live at the Union Hotel, which is not really a hotel, but a subsidized apartment building. I've been posting columns here for the Union Hotel newsletter, but even though this post will be partly about the Union, it won't be in the newsletter, because I'm not in the mood to be nice.

I'm really getting tired of the way these places are run. The management here has told me they want me to participate in the social activities. When they say "the" social activities, they mean by that the ones they arrange. So if I choose to have friends in the building and to enjoy their company, that doesn't constitute participating in "the" social activities. To do that I have to participate in activities initiated by and run by the management.

I get out. I'm involved in Real Change. I take part in political activities of my own choosing. But I've been told that this building has an active social program, which they want the residents to take part in, and, sadly, I don't take part in it as much as is expected of me. I was told they're wasting their program on me.

I've been told by some in the management that maybe I'm in the wrong building. I should be relocated to a building that's more appropriate to my needs. (Not that that's possible. The system doesn't allow for those kind of adjustments.)

They're the ones in the wrong building. In fact, they're in the wrong line of business. Nobody in ANY subsidized apartment building that gets any kind of public funding has any right imposing their narrow ideas of what constitutes socialization on me or anybody else.

These people can't get it straight. Their power over me is too great for them to insert themselves into my social affairs. People who have the power to evict you should not try to pretend to be den mothers.

When I moved in here I was told the social activities would be opportunities I could decline. I chose to apply here for one paramount social reason. The woman I would be married to if I could already lived here. She couldn't be relocated, so I located in her building.

The Union doesn't have have any business interfering with that kind of socialization.

Social workers can't be social engineers. They aren't really experts on human relationships. These people need a shot of humility.

The issue is bigger than the Union. This sort of arrogance is rampant throughout all social service agencies. If I moved to another building, I'd still find it.

In Twenty Years, Cardboard Boxes

[The subsidized apartment building I live in is called The Union Hotel. It's run by DESC, Seattle's Downtown Emergency Service Center. All the residents have been homeless. I write a column for the monthly building newsletter. The column is called Out of My Mind. I'm posting them here, because I can. -- wes]

Every month I go to the Single Adults Subcommittee for the Ten Year Planning Committee to End Homelessness in King County. I don't usually get much out of it. But last week, thanks to Bill Hobson, director of DESC, our landlord here at the Union Hotel, I saw the future and I found out that I have dodged a bullet.

What Bill said (I like to call the boss of my landlord, "Bill") was that another building that DESC runs, the 1811 Eastlake Building, doesn't consist solely of regular apartments, like the Union does. Instead, about a third of the units are what he called "carrels", and what I would call "cubicles", or "partitioned spaces", or "refrigerator boxes".

Bill called them carrels. Bill went on and on about the carrels at 1811 Eastlake, until I began to wonder if Bill didn't need to find some new hobbies. But then he sort of changed the subject to something more serious, and said that the King County Ten Year Planning People weren't going to get the money they needed to create all the new housing they wanted to create. He said they had to start thinking about other alternatives than expensive studio apartments. They need to look into housing people in carrels. They need to consider group living.

[Above: Design for future DESC apartment complex.]

So that's it. In the future, if you're homeless and you get into housing, it isn't going to be a 250 square foot locking room with a kitchenette and a private bathroom, with or without the private bath.

Instead, you're going to get a choice between the long-house, the teepee, the shanty, the pup-tent, or the bunk bed in a six-story bunk-house.

Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, I can go to the Jungle on Beacon Hill and live in a shanty or a pup-tent. Yes, you can, but you can't do it with the cooperation and assistance of the county. We're talking about being able to live like a homeless person, LEGALLY.

That's a huge improvement for homeless people, and it would be about time. But, you know, I don't do group living well. I am so thankful that I got mine, while the getting was possible.

The DSA Is Wrong Wrong Wrong

[The subsidized apartment building I live in is called The Union Hotel. It's run by DESC, Seattle's Downtown Emergency Service Center. All the residents have been homeless. I write a column for the monthly building newsletter. The column is called Out of My Mind. I'm posting them here, because I can. -- wes]

About five months ago the Downtown Seattle Association, AKA the Business Association, AKA the DSA, started a pamphlet campaign to discourage people from giving money to panhandlers downtown. The pamphlets were given out by the guys in the yellow jackets that everybody thinks work for the city but actually work for the DSA, a club by and for businesses, many of which aren't even headquartered in Seattle, and whose main interest in Seattle is profit.

Their pamphlets talked a lot about how panhandling is really bad for the panhandler, leaving out all the real reasons that the Business Association doesn't want panhandling here. They don't want it because panhandlers are visibly poor.

You may think you're cool with the DSA, but you're not. Most of us here at the Union look poor. We wear clothes we bought at thrift stores. Don't think these suits don't notice. Corporate types are TRAINED to notice things like that. You've heard the expression "charge what the market will bear." We're in the market, and the business people know we're too poor to bear much. So they want us all out of "their" city and "their" market to make room for richer customers. They're only just starting with the panhandlers. YOU'RE NEXT.

But, what do you know, the DSA is saying now, in their own uninformed opinion, that during the five months since they started passing out those pamphlets, aggressive panhandling is up 40%!

Of course, they're saying, "It's not our fault!" They're saying, it's not because of the pamphlets, it's because the Tacoma panhandlers are all moving here.

The truth is, they're wrong on every count. They're wrong about how to deal with panhandlers. They're wrong about whether to deal with panhandlers. They're wrong to try to guide public policy on panhandlers, they don't have the knowledge or the wisdom. They're wrong about the 40% increase, because they don't know how to gauge things like that. They saw an increase because since the campaign started they've been looking for panhandling more. They don't know which panhandlers are newly arrived from Tacoma because they never talk to panhandlers because they think of them as members of a mindless herd, instead of as individuals with individual problems and individual needs.

If panhandlers are more aggressive now it's because they've been attacked and they're on the ropes. If the DSA knew or cared about human beings, they could have seen that coming. They don't, so they didn't.

YOU don't eat right.

[The subsidized apartment building I live in is called The Union Hotel. It's run by DESC, Seattle's Downtown Emergency Service Center. All the residents have been homeless. I write a column for the monthly building newsletter. The column is called Out of My Mind. I'm posting them here, because I can. -- wes]

I finally have the osteoarthritis I've long expected. This is mildly annoying. But it's not a total disaster thanks to glucosamine.

This brings to mind one of my pet theories. I have a theory that you don't eat right. Actually the theory is none of us do, but I like to say YOU don't eat right, because I want to maintain my creds as a certified public annoyance.

The theory goes like this. Humans evolved over millions of years to eat what they could back before the last Ice Age forced them to invent throwing big rocks in order to eat the giant hairy elephants, because everything else went south.

So what were apes with barely any hair, dull teeth, no claws, and flimsy sticks able to catch? Well for one thing they had prehistoric broccoli. Prehistoric broccoli tasted worse than now and it was tougher. There was no broccoli "head," it was all stem. So your Mama chewed it all day before giving you any to eat. This is when the expression, "no dessert until you eat your broccoli" really meant something.

In those times "dessert," of course, meant protein. As rice and beans had not been invented yet, and as cows, pigs, etc. were too big, fast, pointy or bitey to catch, protein generally meant eat your bugs and grubs. Even lame humans can catch bugs and grubs. Bugs and grubs are a great source of protein.

And here's the beauty of it, and why I'm bringing it up now. Bugs and grubs are also a fantastic natural source of glucosamine. So the theory goes, we are all coming down with arthritis in our not so old age because we aren't eating what we evolved over millions of years to eat. Instead of eating our glucosamine laden bugs and grubs we're eating cows.

And we aren't even eating the parts of the cows that might help. We are having butchers cut the cartilage off our cows so that chemists can process it and resell it to us as chondroitin and mix it at high cost into our glucosamine pills.

Excuse me. YOU are having the butchers do that. I just eat at McDonald's. Do they even have butchers anymore?

Not So Bad Ancestors

[The subsidized apartment building I live in is called The Union Hotel. It's run by DESC, Seattle's Downtown Emergency Service Center. All the residents have been homeless. I write a column for the monthly building newsletter. The column is called Out of My Mind. I'm posting them here, because I can. This is the first one after a 3 month hiatus, due to Shelby our manager having a baby girl. -- wes]

My last name is Browning and I've been aware for a long time that the "Brown" part of it came from the Normans -- a fact that, when I first learned it, gave me no pleasure at all. It was as if I learned my ancestors were slave-owners, or the Taliban. What does history have to say about the Normans? Well, they spoke French, badly. They all were named Brun or Bill, Rollo or Roland. In the mid 11th century their Duke Billy got it into his head he was the King of England, so he decided to conquer it, sort of like Hitler woke up one morning and decided to be King of Poland. As a result all of us who speak English now speak French badly, as when we say beef instead of boeuf.

Aside from that, the Normans are mainly famous for their crummy rule of England. The Sheriff of Nottingham was a crummy Norman. Robin Hood's band of Merry Men were not, whatever Robin Hood was. So basically, all my life I have thought of my Norman ancestors as the guys you boo at in the movies.

Then Saturday I read in the Seattle Times that the Island of Sark, in the English Channel, still retains mostly Norman law and custom and that one of these laws is the law of "Clameur de haro." I looked it up and sure enough, it's a real law established by none other than Rollo "the Viking" Jarl of Ortney (855-931), Founder of the Normans, and it means "Cry of distress," and the law goes like this:

Say someone's messing with you. In front of them and a witness, you first get down on one knee, like you're really humble. Then you say "Haro! Haro! Haro! À l'aide, mon Prince, on me fait tort," which means "Hey! Hey! Hey! Help me, Prince, I'm being messed with." Then you say the Lord's Prayer in bad French.

The result is they have to stop their messing with you until the courts straighten it out! Is that cool or what?

The lesson I take from all this is that no matter how crummy you think your ancestors, or your loud drunken neighbors, or clog dancers, are, you could still find out something cool about them before you're sixty.

Becky Rocks

It's the Becky from DESC we saw on Valentine's Day (posted Feb 16), being one of the Cherry Blossoms at Night for the Morrison's talent show. The Morrison's community room has just slightly better acoustics than the U of W underground parking garage, sorry. But everyone enjoyed the show.

Mother Escapes

Here's Anitra at the Morrison, another building run by the DESC. They were holding an art show and talent show, open to residents of all DESC buildings. Anitra is performing one of her most popular poems.

Anitra: Dances With Redness

Subtitle this one Adventures in Flash.

A couple more scenes from the Union Hotel's Valentine's Day Dance Party. Becky from the Downtown Emergency Service Center was there taking promotional pictures. Since she got my picture, I figured I could retaliate. Then Anitra dances for the camera while a rectangular redness hovers around her, covering up a guy who strayed into the shot by accident.

Union Hotel Dance Party

Here are The Hound Dog (our DJ) and other residents Jeanne and Anitra dancing at my building's Valentine's Day party. I don't do this kind of dancing. When I dance there must be much more space between myself and the rest of the party, for the safety of All, and for the safety of All's toes.

Just Do It

[The subsidized apartment building I live in is called The Union Hotel. It's run by DESC, Seattle's Downtown Emergency Service Center. All the residents have been homeless. I write a column for the monthly building newsletter. The column is called Out of My Mind. I'm posting them here, properly dated, because I can. -- wes]

I love solstices, I love solstice times, and I love solstice related facts!

Here’s a fun solstice fact. Your Union Calendar says winter solstice happens this year on Dec. 22! That’s misleading!

You would think the Union Hotel Calendar would tell you when the winter solstice is going to happen at the Union Hotel. But our calendar is geared to Greenwich Mean Time. The winter solstice in fact happens about 20 minutes past midnight, just barely into December 22, IN LONDON. But Seattle clocks are eight hours behind London’s, so here it happens at 4PM plus about twenty, THE PREVIOUS DAY! Isn’t that interesting?

OK, so maybe that doesn’t shake everybody’s tree. I’ll try to make it up to you by telling a fun solstice-related story of prolonged bureaucratic stupidity. I’m speaking of course of the Swedish switch from the Julian to the Gregorian Calendar.

As you know, the winter solstice always happens about the same time every year. This is no accident. Astronomers and mathematicians put in endless sixteen hour days for 16 centuries, just so you and I could have a modern Gregorian Calendar that keeps solstices from wandering, instead of a crummy old-fashioned Julian calendar that lets solstices drift backwards by three days every 400 years.

The Gregorian calendar was the Metric System of its day. Cool countries switched to it. Spain switched to it right away in 1582. Transylvania switched in 1590. Norway switched in 1700. Sweden HAD to be as cool as Norway. But it would not be.

Like the United States, which has been switching to Metric since the seventies, Sweden decided that switching all at once would hurt too much, so they decided to do it piecemeal.

Doing it piecemeal meant skipping leap days every four years for decades, so that for half a century Sweden would be in synch with no one. Not with the cool countries, like Norway, that had the guts to switch all at once, and not with the uncool countries, that hadn’t switched at all.

But it gets worse. After they put this plan into motion they promptly forgot about it, and didn’t follow through on it. So Sweden not only was out of synch with the rest of the world for years, but at the end of it they still had to get in synch the hard way, all at once, just like everyone else.

Justice!

The Dirt on the Underground

[The subsidized apartment building I live in is called The Union Hotel. It's run by DESC, Seattle's Downtown Emergency Service Center. All the residents have been homeless. I write a column for the monthly building newsletter. The column is called Out of My Mind. I'm posting them here, properly dated, because I can. -- wes]

Forty years ago I heard there was a writer guy who wanted high school kids to help excavate something called the Seattle Underground – except that in those days nobody capitalized it.

The writer was Bill Speidel, a Times columnist and Seattle history buff. He wrote about Doc Maynard, famous Seattle founder and drunk. Some people blame Maynard for the weird streets in the Pioneer Square area, which supposedly got that way because he was drunk when he planned them. Actually his plan was neat and simple. It was his sober neighbors north of Yesler who created the mess. Doc Maynard was a drunk, but he had lucid moments.

Anyway, I volunteered to help. A bunch of us volunteers all reported to Speidel’s Pioneer Square office one day and crammed inside for a chat with the author.

Ever notice how offices in Pioneer Square all have bare brick walls inside? That was Speidel’s idea -- to create a look of history. In the 1890s the walls were covered with wood or with plaster and wallpaper. He didn’t care. He was after the LOOK of history.

In those days Pioneer Square was a pit. A lot of it was boarded up. Nobody lived here but homeless people. There were no art galleries, no fancy restaurants. There was no nightlife. By dressing the area up to LOOK historic and showing it off, and by making the Underground famous, Speidel saved the district from the wrecking ball. And he was the first to make a mint off tourists from it.

After our chat we all went down into the Underground as it was then: dark tunnel after dark tunnel of dusty dry dirt. We shoveled dirt into wheelbarrows for hours. We got no hard hats and no dust masks. Our lungs must have filled with the stuff.

I told my Father about all this after the second day. He hit the ceiling. “This guy’s getting you to do this and you get no protection AND he doesn’t pay you? He should have to pay minimum wage! At least, if he’s not going to pay you, he should take care that you don’t get sick or injured! I suppose he didn’t insure himself for liability either, did he?”

My Dad, like Maynard, was kind of a drunk and he could be a real pain, but now and then he had his lucid moments.

Believe It

[The subsidized apartment building I live in is called The Union Hotel. It's run by DESC, Seattle's Downtown Emergency Service Center. All the residents have been homeless. I write a column for the monthly building newsletter. The column is called Out of My Mind. I'm posting them here, properly dated, because I can. -- wes]

There’s some pictures on floor L I think about a lot. Paul Dorpat, who does the “Then and Now” feature at the end of Pacific Northwest Magazine, gave us the photographs on the walls down there, including the shots of the women at the Union Hotel Laundry posing for pictures around the time of the Spanish Flu of 1918. You’ve probably seen them hundreds of times. They’re posing with happy smiling faces in this one; they’ve all got their masks on in that one, so we can’t tell if they’re still smiling, but I like to think they are.

One of the things I think about is that the Spanish Flu wasn’t from Spain. They called it that because Spain was one of the few countries of the Western World that wasn’t involved in WWI at the time, and they didn’t have wartime censorship. So it was reported heavily in the Spanish press and hardly at all in other places, because the governments at war didn’t want each other to know how sick their people were. Actually it probably started in the United States.

The masks the people in the pictures were wearing were made of gauze and meant to keep infectious microbes from passing through the air from person to person or from a person’s face to their hands. I don’t know if the masks were required in Seattle but I’ve read that some California cities required people to wear them in public. Stanford University has a website that reports this pathetic jingle was posted as a reminder: Obey the laws /And wear the gauze / Protect your jaws / From Septic Paws.

At the time scientists thought the Spanish Flu was a swine flu. Most scientists now think that the Spanish Flu was a bird flu that became a human flu, just like what everyone is worried about now. Many scientists now also think the gauze masks our ancestors wore during the Spanish Flu didn’t do a bit of good, in fact may have made matters worse.

So to put all of this together, the Spanish Swine Flu was really the Kansas bird flu, the laws requiring gauze masks for everyone’s safety were actually for everyone’s harm and inconvenience, and while I’m looking at these pictures and thinking this, every five minutes I’m blasted by sirens that are supposed to be saving lives.

Sure they are.

Field Tripping

[The subsidized apartment building I live in is called The Union Hotel. It's run by DESC, Seattle's Downtown Emergency Service Center. All the residents have been homeless. I write a column for the monthly building newsletter. The column is called Out of My Mind. I'm posting them here, properly dated, because I can. -- wes]

Today I want to use this space to put in a plug for more Union Hotel field trips.

So far I’ve been on field trips to the Russian submarine, the Seattle Aquarium, the Volunteer Park conservatory (twice), the Seattle Art Museum, the Arboretum, and a couple of parks. My favorite place that I haven’t been to was the Volunteer Park cemetery, which Sara Marckx didn’t take us to, because she ran out of time. That was really awesome (I didn’t get to see Bruce Lee’s burial plot!)

I’ve also been to some places where I could spend small amounts of money. The best one of those was the Deseret Thrift store out on Aurora. I got a rice cooker for $5 there. I would like to go back as I’m sure I could find something else I might have a sudden need for once I saw it.

When I try to think of things that I might need if I only knew they existed, I think mainly of toys. Here is a short list of things I can think of needing: Wind-up Hopping Lederhosen, A Bacon Air Freshener, Evil Clown Nesting Dolls, Nihilist Chewing Gum (“Slogan: We Don’t Believe in Flavor”), Devil Duckies, Wall Hanging Tiki Mask, Pope Innocent III Action Figure, Carl Jung Action Figure & Sigmund Freud Action Figure (I could make them dispute each other), Marie Antoinette Action Figure, Deluxe Nerd Glasses, and of course the Classic Rubber Chicken. I’m not making any of these up; they’re all in the catalog of the world famous Archie McPhee & Co. store in Ballard. Even if I could only afford one or two items I would like to go see them all.

I was going to mention some other great places to go, like the Lusty Lady (for the art, THE ART), or the Blue Moon Tavern (for THE POETRY READING, THE HISTORIC AMBIENCE), but I’m running out of space so I want instead to suggest a field trip to some place that wouldn’t cost money. At 28901 NE Carnation Farm Road in Carnation there’s a statue of Segis Pieterje Prospect, World’s Champion Milk Cow and “Foster Mother of the Human Race.” I can’t believe I’ve lived in the Seattle area for most of my life and I’ve never seen the Segis Pieterje Prospect statue. Charlene?

Groping for Answers

[The subsidized apartment building I live in is called The Union Hotel. It's run by DESC, Seattle's Downtown Emergency Service Center. All the residents have been homeless. I write a column for the monthly building newsletter. The column is called Out of My Mind. I'm posting them here, properly dated, because I can. -- wes]

I am fascinated by the Universe and Space and Time. I call myself a space-time cadet. I am alert to news about the space-time continuum and its disturbances.

For example scientists have recently learned that there is more deuterium in our galaxy than expected. Deuterium is that freakishly heavy hydrogen used to make H-bombs. Finding too much deuterium in space is like coming home and finding six large pizzas when you hadn’t ordered one. You never called a pizza place, you never saw a deliveryman, and nobody else has a key to your room. Or do they?

Or take this afternoon. Adam, who works at Real Change, said, “Thanks, Wes.” I said, “What are you thanking me for? I didn’t do anything.” And Adam said, “Oh.” Then, as if that wasn’t enough of a disturbance in space-time, I said to Adam, “What are you planning to do, move to New Zealand and never return? So that you have to wrap up all your personal affairs by thanking everybody you know whether they deserve it or not?” Then just ten minutes later I found out the front office had a fifty-pound donated box of New Zealand apples! Coincidence? Or rift in the space-time continuum?

Last month I was living my life in all the normal ways I always live it – I did nothing at all different from usual! I went to all the same meetings, watched all the same TV, read only the newspapers I always read and none of the newspapers I never read. I watered Spartacus, the house plant pet I keep at my window, exactly as often and as much as I always water him, not watering more, not less, not more often, not less often. His long tendrilish stems as always groped gently upward, thrusting tenderly but firmly into my books, exploring their secret closed pages.

Until, one Friday, I came in and found his long tendrilish stems sagging! Sagging to the floor! “Poor Spartacus,” I thought, “what has become of you? What strange disturbance of space-time has done this to you?”

The following week I had the answer: The painters had raised my window an inch from the outside to better paint, moving Spartacus by accident.

Thank you painters. Thank you Union Hotel for keeping me informed, eventually.