Yay! -- Wait. Huh?

Great news out of Florida. According to an AP story, a federal judge has struck down Orlando's law against feeding the homeless in downtown parks on the grounds that it violates the rights of homeless activists. Yay!

But, wait a minute. The rights of homeless activists? Why weren't the rights of the homeless people to receive the food mentioned in the story? Were they not considered at all? I'm hoping the AP reporter just left that part out. Still, what would that say about the AP reporter then?

One way or the other I can't give this news a full five cheers. It has to be four cheers and one jeer.

Greg Nickels Is A Fool

The events of the eviction of Nickelsville from alleged city land yesterday felt a little like a Beethoven sonata to me: attack, release, attack, release. Except with a background drone. My description of it for YouTube users is intended to get the idea across to non-Seattleites:

Sept. 26, 2008. Nickelsville, a tent city with ambitions to become a shantytown for the homeless in Seattle. After three and a half days of existence, Greg Nickels, our mayor who hates the homeless, whom Nickelsville is named for, as a dishonor, orders Seattle police to evict the occupants and demolish the camp. The police don't want to do it. They tell the people privately that they know that the mayor is a liar and that there is not enough shelter to house them. They will have no choice but to find yet another place to camp. But orders are orders. In every scene the sound of news and police helicopters overhead nearly drowns out the human voices, but hopefully the sense of the hour is conveyed.

Eviction at Nickelsville

Email to HPN

The Homeless People's Network is an email list for homeless and formerly homeless people to talk about whatever, and share information. A lot of the posts direct attention to items in the news about homelessness. Yesterday there were two opinion pieces noted. One was this Seattle Times Editorial, the other was this Las Vegas blog. Both were outrageous and I immediately wrote this in reply, only to find that my email reply function wasn't working. I think I worked around it and the email should be posted to HPN soon. In the meantime, it's here:

I'm having trouble doing email replies in this account, so I'll just respond to the gist of the two posts yesterday regarding Seattle's "pink tent city".

There's some bullshit in both that needs calling out. Both refer to Seattle as one of the most liberal cities in the country with respect to the homeless. This is crap. Until a year and a half ago you could make a case for that claim. In spite of the fact that we've never had more than about half the shelter beds we have needed, we could claim to be liberal because food was easy to obtain and homeless people sleeping outdoors were not often harassed if they stayed away from downtown and away from residences.

But in the spring of 2007 our current mayor, Greg Nickels, SECRETLY initiated a draconian policy of sweeps of outdoor homeless encampments. Even though our One Night Counts have determined that there have been as many as 2600 homeless people in the city in addition to the number that can fit into about 2700 existing beds (these don't count car campers and people who scored couches that night; if you count them there are fewer than half the shelter beds as there are homeless people), even though the mayor has not been willing or able to challenge those figures, he has ordered "cleanups" of homeless encampments. These "cleanups" consist of ripping up tents, sleeping bags, mats, even blankets, and trashing them. People were left with no survival gear, vulnerable to the elements, and no new shelter.

Real Change, the street paper I work with, had to use the Freedom of Information Act to find out what was happening. After we uncovered the policy, which had been hidden even from the city council, the mayor's office "revised" the policy to "take into account public concerns." The revised policy has the appearance of meeting objections, but the fine print contains major loopholes. We have already seen the loopholes exploited since the revised policy went into effect early this year. We have also seen safeguards advertised in the revised policy turn out to be lies.

The revised policy brought with it new shelter, that was touted as the place people swept could go. How many new beds did they provide for the more than 2600 at risk? TWENTY! Not even one percent of the need.

In the meantime, we already have had at least one confirmed case of a man who has died as a direct result of the sweeps. He was driven from a safe spot under a bridge and died from exposure soon after. The fact that they are continuing the policy in the face of that death, a death that was predictable and certainly not the last, is proof that Nickels is a criminal who must be stopped. This policy amounts to attempted genocide, and it has succeeded once so far.

The Seattle Times says Nickels is no Hoover. Given what he has been doing, he is worse than Hoover. He is engaged in nothing short of criminal, unconstitutional, harassment of the homeless population. He has attempted to carry out government policy changes without public view or legislative oversight, a violation of democratic principles of open government. There's nothing liberal about Greg Nickels on this issue, and if Seattle as a whole lets him get away with carrying out these crimes, then Seattle will have lost the right to call itself liberal, too.

As for the pink tents. They're temporary. The plan is to use them only until permanent structures can be built. As for whether they came from a breast cancer charity, I don't know, but I know that Real Change got them earlier from the Girl Scouts of America, and we turned around and gave them to the Nickelsville people. Maybe the Girl Scouts got them from a breast cancer charity, but it's not like a breast cancer charity handed them directly over to Nickelsville.

-- Wes Browning, Real Change News, Seattle

Noise at City Hall

Women in Black usually do silent vigils when homeless people die outside or by violence. Today they made noise by banging pots and pans around City Hall, with help from WHEEL and the Church of Mary Magdalene and others. I was there, living out my dream of some day participating in a Chinese funeral procession.

The purpose of the rally was to speak out about the extreme need for the planned Summer Emergency Shelter for Women. With only $9,500 of city funding it could be open by the beginning of next week.

After marching around City Hall 4 or 5 times with the sun beating straight down, all collected in front of the building, and I got the camera out.

Noise at City Hall

Peeve: "Poor Have Too Much"

When I talk to middle-class people, sometimes I hear complaints like, "It isn't fair that poor unemployed people don't pay income taxes." Or, "Gee, it must be sweet to never have to pay a mortgage, rent, or house payments. I wish I had it so easy."

They really get worked up when they find out that some poor and homeless individuals have had good fortune. When a homeless guy wins the lottery, I have heard housed people bitch, "It isn't right, that they win big while I have to work for a living," even as they're putting a dollar of their own down for a shot at the same good luck.

It would totally suck that poor people have the occasional good fortune if their lives were a bed of clover aside from it.

A case of misplaced poverty envy occurs every year when the Seattle Seafair Torchlight Parade goes past Anitra's room, and we open the blinds and watch it from the comfort of bed. The other parade observers outside on the street often make comments to the effect that we have it too good. Ha! One evening a year, maybe!

So many poor people live in Pioneer Square because decades ago Seattle made the decision to sweep all of its poor into this neighborhood and forget about them. That it was discovered to have historic charm and turned upscale around me is not my fault. That they route the parade past our bed is not our fault.

Once the parade started people turned and watched the parade instead of us, and I took some videos.

This first video is ironic, in that the sirens heard at the beginning are just a reminder of the sirens we hear every 20 minutes on average all year round, 24-7. So we're supposed to regard all those sirens at once as a treat?

Hot Cycles



Anitra says a bad word. I respond by bad-mouthing clowns and poking fun at the lederhosen-ed. Before anyone gets their panties in a bunch, I clown in print and I'm part German myself. So ease up.

Color Commentary



The ability to live in a neighborhood where dragons may often be sighted is also a benefit of living in the Iron Triangle.

Torchlight Dragon

What a Dump!

Video Find of the Day

Homeless people camping at "the old city dump" in Sacramento are at risk of being swept. They're bringing filth in... to a dump. THEY are too dirty, to live in a dump.

It's the city of Sacramento that stinks.

Planned Homeless Camp Sweep Postponed

Homeless in Seattle & Noa Noa

Last night I slept again in a tent on City Hall Plaza in protest of the inhumane sweeps of homeless encampments on public land. The lives of homeless people are endangered by the destruction of their survival gear, done in the name of "public safety" and "hygiene." This morning that protest was followed by a civil disobedience. Fifteen of the protestors obstructed a downtown street in Seattle, a street that just happens to lie precisely between the offices of the mayor and the county executive.

First, there was a memorial service conducted by Women In Black of Seattle. They read the names of 283 people who died on the streets in King County from 2000 to date.

Homeless remembrance Service, Seattle



In the Polynesian traditions a law (taboo) can be broken only if rituals are carefully followed. It's called Noa Noa in some places. Sometimes translated as Freeing, or Release, or, Declaration of Freeing. The rituals demand a statement of purpose, and the invocation of the god governing the taboo, petitioning for release from it. That's exactly what you see in the next video, plus initial arrests.

Stand Against the Sweeps



The rest of the arrests, including a scene in which Anitra, my woman, appearing in the role of a hooded gang banger, is processed for arrest outside of an SPD bus, while I explain to someone that her being arrested and me filming is all part of the plan. "Division of labor" as I call it. Her arrest was well planned by the Real Change Organizing Project, and was joined by participants from SHARE/WHEEL, Women in Black, and members of the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness, and others.

The Usual Suspects

Sign of the Times

One of our vendors brought this in to the Real Change office this morning like it was a picture of his new baby. He showed it off proudly to everyone who would look. "Have you seen my eviction notice?"

"Shelter #6" refers to a covered picnic shelter at Woodland Park, near the zoo, not a homeless shelter. His property isn't actually in the shelter, it's hidden nearby. The notice says he has to move it or lose it by tomorrow afternoon.

As he put it, he's been evicted from the street to the street.

Note that contrary to the warm fuzzy goodness of the words "Customer Service Bureau" neither the notice nor anyone on the other end of that line promises or can promise any place for the evictee to go. (Really, we're customers now? We're not citizens anymore? Or is the idea that homeless people aren't citizens?) The homeless shelters in this city are full, as was underlined by the news that the count conducted Thursday night found 15% more homeless than last year.

Michael Howell, Part I

It suddenly occurred to me that a major anniversary of Michael Howell's passing had itself passed without my noticing, and there is unfinished business.

The Michael Howell of whom I speak is the formerly homeless one who made a career in Seattle of sitting in public doing pen and pencil drawings of wizened old homeless white men, tinting them with watercolors, and selling them not to the subjects but to mostly female concerned idealists. He also, in late 1991, began what he called the Seattle Homeless Art Gallery, which later called itself the StreetLife Art Gallery.

When Michael died over ten years ago I was still very active in StreetLife, had been writing for Real Change, and everyone assumed that I would be the one to write the obituary. I'd known him since the mid-80s, and at one point I was for all practical purposes his principal assistant in running the gallery. But I said then that if by obituary they meant eulogy, forget it. I would not write a eulogy. It turned out it was a eulogy the editorial committee wanted, so fellow editor Michele Marchand wrote it.

I think ten years is long enough to wait. This now is the obituary the editorial committee would have gotten if they'd kept insisting. It's a little long, so they would have cut it. I'm going to run it here in installments -- because I can!

I first met Michael at Ralph's Deli at 4th & Lenora, around 1985, give or take a year. Dates in the 80s are a little hazy because of the divorce, the extreme grief (which resulted when I couldn't see my daughter anymore because she was taken thousands of miles away from me), the two bouts of homelessness, one long, one short, and the intense delayed stress syndrome associated with PTSD that was so bad that between 1984 and 1987 I couldn't look at the front page of a newspaper.

Ralph's Deli was a decent all-night grocery store and deli then. They didn't discriminate against the homeless like they do now. They let Michael and his buddies hang there all night long, only asking what all stores ask, that they occasionally pay for a fresh cup of coffee to justify their occupancy. Michael was there with a chessboard every night and wanted to play anyone who looked at all interested.

I was a cab driver. I came in every night to buy coffee and a sandwich. The sandwich would usually be my only meal in a twelve hour shift. I'd use the purchase to justify the use of the men's room. Sometimes I'd sit down and take a break, sometimes not.

One night I stopped to gaze at a chess game Michael was playing with a friend. The brief attention I gave induced Michael to introduce himself and spend the next several days twisting my arm to play a game with him.

While he was prevailing on me to play chess, I got to know him as an artist. Whenever he had no one to play the sketch book would open and he try to sketch the most wrinkled white man in the room.

The choice of white men as art subjects was not racist. Michael was racist -- I'll be getting to that -- but his choice of art subjects was NOT a manifestation of his racism. Michael was fascinated with wrinkles and the shadows they cast on faces. With white people the shadows are more pronounced because of the contrast to the white skin. Early on he would draw wrinkled old women, too, but there aren't as many wrinkled old white women around as white men because the women use makeup to hide the wrinkles. Eventually when he caught on to the fact that women were more likely to buy his art he convinced himself that it was old men they wanted to see. He thought old women would disturb them because they might identify. But they could just feel sorry for the old men.

Finally I caved in and played a game of chess with Michael. I lost. I played another and lost. And another. Over the next few weeks I lost 30 games in a row to Michael, winning none, tying none.

Michael was an insufferable gloating prick when he won. He was also hypocritical about the game. He bragged that he would never be a "book" player, but he never played any opening as White but P-K4, and he whined if you didn't follow with P-K4, saying you were "ruining" the game. On top of that he whined whenever he had to play Black so much that just to shut him up I agreed to play Black all the time. [Pictured: The start of a "good" game, as seen by Michael.]

So heading into the 31st game I was getting pissed at his petty whining and gloating and general unsportsmanlike behavior. I did something nasty: I went to the Seattle Public Library and found a big thick opening book that analyzed lines of his favorite opening to 20 and 30 moves. I found an obscure trap in the 12th move that was described as "unsound, but very difficult for an unprepared player to counter over the board." I memorized it and sprang it on him the next time we played.

As soon as he realized he was about to lose a rook to a knight (as the trap promised) he panicked. He started whining that I'd spoiled the game by playing a "weird" move. He tried to get me to take it back. When I wouldn't he started to get that it was a deliberate trap, and began to get hostile about it.

He had a friend who usually hung with him who was a tournament player. Michael got his friend to help him solve the problem posed by the trap. So I was playing two people now.

Michael might have pulled off a tie in spite of the trap by just exploiting his superior experience in the endgame, but he couldn't stand the thought of giving up his unbroken streak of wins against me to a tie so he took a rash risk that cost him the game, and I finally won one.

When losing a game it's customary for a chess player to tip his King over, acknowledging defeat. Michael Howell acknowledge his one and only loss to me by yelling, "SHIT, GOD DAMN IT, FUCK!" and hurling his King half-way across the grocery.

So I never played him another game. It pissed him off that I would stop playing after a win and not let him "settle the score." That the score was 30 games to 1 in his favor meant nothing to him. I guess he had to win the last game or he was a loser in his mind. I didn't care. I didn't want to be bothered playing such a sore loser again.

Nickels Must Go

Over on Apesma's Lament, Tim Harris -- speaking entirely for himself, ha! -- calls upon Greg Nickels and the city to stop the secret homeless sweeps that have been going on. (See also Swept Clean, but Still Dirty, in the Oct. 31 Real Change.) I already complained about the policy in this week's Adventures in Irony, but reading about it further in Tim's blog got my ire up again, and I wrote this comment, which I'm reproducing here just for the record.

"The fact that this is being done without the knowledge of CEH doesn't relieve them of one iota of culpability. They created the atmosphere.

Greg Nickels belongs in jail for doing this at all. The fact that he has been doing this secretly means he's that much more of a crook. He compounds a crime against humanity with a crime against the open government we are entitled to. He has proved that his contempt for the rights of homeless people extends to an equal contempt for the rights of all the residents of Seattle to know what their government is doing in their names.

Nickels must be recalled."

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.

A Heaping Helping of Abuse

Yesterday I attended a Single Adults Committee meeting. The Single Adults Committee, or SAC, is a population subcommittee of a subcommittee of the Committee to End Homelessness in King County, or CEHKC, which began working on King County's Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness in 2004, and therefore if that title meant what it promised, homelessness in King County will be non-existent in 2014.

In fact, there has never been any intention to end homelessness in ten years. That is not the plan. That is just the name of the plan. The plan is something else. I'll get to that later. Right now I want to bitch about something that happened yesterday.

As I say, I attended the committee. I'm an actual official member of the committee. I received an actual invitation to be an actual member of the committee. The committee has between 22 and 25 members. About 20 of them are service providers or social and health services functionaries for the city or the county, including the county hospital, Harborview. The remaining 2 to 5 members who show up each month are us Consumers.

That's what they call those of us who are or have been homeless as single adults. We are called Consumers, as in "consumer of services targeting homelessness."

Let me explain how offensive that is. The token 2 to 5 people selected to appear to represent the single adult homeless community while having their numbers deliberately kept low so they can't have any real power are DEFINED SOLELY IN TERMS OF THEIR RELATIONSHIPS TO THE REAL POWER IN THE ROOM.

Well, fuck us. Fuck us to hell.

They make nice about it, they really do. They pay a couple of us a stipend of $20 every third visit. If it's one of the meetings where only one other Consumer shows up I get the $20. If two other Consumers show up I usually get bumped because they only alloted stipends for two Consumers on the committee, which means that 2 or 3 of us are bonus tokens. I appreciate the thought behind that, seriously.

But I'm still digressing. Yesterday one of the service providers connected with DESC (the people who house me in addition to running the Downtown Emergency Service Center shelter) was talking about how hard it can be to keep chronically homeless people in transitional and permanent housing because they fail due to issues. She was mainly speaking in connection with women I think. Someone said what issues, please list some, and she listed some and one of the issues was "the boyfriend."

Now, I was already in a snippy mood, because only just minutes earlier the same woman had talked about the need for programs where women can live in group situations permanently, and I was remembering how just four years ago we had Noel House providing just that, and promising just that, and the promise was broken. Because the people in charge decided they knew better than the residents what was best for them.

So I thought I might not have heard right, because my mind had been clouded with a snippy fog. So I asked. She said that yes, she said boyfriends. She said that, you have to understand, she was using the term "boyfriends" lightly.

It's probably not a good idea to use the clause "you have to understand" when talking to a mathematician. I am trained to push back hard when I am told what I have to understand. I don't have to understand. You have to explain yourself. I'll understand when you've done your job.

But I ignored that, because I have also been trained in civility. I said that I could see an opportunity here for having more success keeping people in housing. You could arrange the living experience in a way that accommodated the boyfriends.

She said that wouldn't be a good idea. The boyfriends are often abusers and violent and often they are drug suppliers. And I started to ask what accommodations do you make when you don't know that domestic violence or drug supply is an issue, when I was told that it is always considered a bad idea to maintain a relationship when someone is trying to get off drugs.

So here's the deal. I was mistaken about the whole program. I thought the goal was to get people in housing, and that the question was, how do we do that effectively. Instead I find out that the goal is to get them off drugs at all costs, even if they don't want off them.

I find out that the goal of the Ten Year Plan has been taken over by the Missionaries, and that the homeless are the Indians. This woman and her 20 cohorts around the table are the Missionaries who decided that tribal culture was corrupting Native children, who had to be isolated and raised apart from their parents.

They're also the Missionaries who told us that Noel House had to be made temporary for the good of its Consumers. It doesn't matter that now the Missionaries are saying that group living is a good thing, the point is, they're the ones defining the good.

She's not saying that the woman who goes back to her "boyfriend" whatever he is, doesn't want to go back to him. No, she wants to but the Missionary has decided for her that she shouldn't.

Over a hundred years after Native American children were stolen from their own people Missionaries are trying to pry drugs and alcohol from them and not doing penance for being the ones that drove them to those alternatives in the first place.

Missionaries,

You break up the only social ties that people have, call their chosen relationships sick and abusive, and you replace them with a sick, abusive, insulting, demeaning, "Consumer" relationship. Go ahead do it, that's what you've been doing. Why not? You're the vanguard, you're the elite YOU KNOW WHAT'S BEST FOR EVERYBODY.

OK, admittedly, you don't know what the new symptoms will be. The chief symptoms of meddling in the Native American's culture were widespread alcoholism and their own subsequent particularly high rate of homelessness. You don't know what the new symptoms will be of the new artificial Consumer relationships you are creating among all the current homeless people you are ripping apart to house. But you KNOW , because you are so fucking superior, that the new symptoms will be something you can cure when they materialize and you get around to them. In the meantime, you can live with yourselves, because you're so fantastic.

My Bad

[Shown: The 20th Century. My fault.]

The other night Anitra dragged me to a small public meeting dealing with the Homeless Place of Remembrance Project being planned here in Seattle. The project would create a place in an existing park downtown (Victor Steinbreuck Park, next to the Pike Place Farmer's Market) dedicated to those who have died while living on the streets.

I hate going to public meetings. I hate being in the public. This meeting was so small it was like a high school shop class for a trade nobody wants anymore. Like, when I was in high school you could sign up for electronics shop, but it wasn't cool electronics with transistors and printed circuits, it was all obsolete resistors and vacuum tubes. The only reason to take it, apart from the rare interest in technological history, was to satisfy a shop requirement.

Once trapped in a situation like that, I feel the best strategy is to sit in the back row prepared to heckle and/or shoot spitwads or rubber bands at the neck of any speaker who dares turn his back to me.

So I talked Anitra into settling down with me in adjoining seats in the back row. I got out our handy dandy cheap-ass video camera, just in case something graphic happened. I loaded up on free chips provided, and munched my way though the meeting, praying for a clear shot, of one kind or another.

The first part of the meeting was a slide show all about people who have died and their survivors' grief and joy at having places to feel connected with their lost ones. What a total buzz kill. By the time that was over I was ready to confess all my crimes.

Then there was a speechy bit about the background and history of the project. Since I share a bed with Anitra "I'll Empower Anybody Anywhere" Freeman, I already knew all about the background and history of the project. She had even submitted her own proposal and made me critique it. "You're an artist, Wes. Use your artist eyes and tell me what you think." "No." "Please!" "No." "I'll do the dish-es!" "It's very very memorialistic." "You're not being serious." "Neither were you." And so on. By the time the speechy business was over, I was ready to confess to the 20th Century.

Next we had Questions and Answers about the background and history. At this point a woman in the back row to my far right, who had clearly come to heckle because she was not only in the back row but near the exit, asked how the Parks Department could allow something like this when they have a policy prohibiting memorials in city parks.

A couple of officials from the Parks Department were there to explain that in fact they had taken that policy into account and were not going to let the Homeless Place of Remembrance be an actual memorial. And yes, they said, this would be tricky, and involve "walking a razor's edge" of fine policy distinctions, but they felt goosed and up for it. This answer did not satisfy the heckling woman. "Yes," I thought, "yes, I will have my fun yet. I will not leave early."

Thanks to the heckling woman's refusal to take an answer as a given, the discussion of how any decent parks department could ethically walk a razor's edge passed out of the baroque phase and through the rococco. Finally, just as the razors in my head were melting, she let up, and we moved on to the part of the meeting set aside for brainstorming.

Perhaps I should have mentioned it before now but in fact there is currently no design for a Homeless Place of Remembrance at Victor Steinbreuck Park. There have been designs, but they were to show what designs might look like. There have not been final designs. First the public would be asked to offer ideas. Then a designer would be found and handed the ideas. Then the designer would do a design with or without the ideas handed. Then, I don't know, we build it. Or not.

So we had this brainstorming session. What feelings should the place evoke? What elements of design should it have? What should we expect of the designer/artist that we choose to do the actual designing? Answers from the audience were put on giant post-it notes and stuck up on the wall.

When it came to elements of design, a gentleman sitting in front of Anitra said he didn't want any benches there because that would attract drug dealers and other criminal types.

Now, I've never seen a working drug dealer sitting down. But I am willing to entertain a hypothetical just like the next guy, so I took that idea of drug dealers lounging on park benches kicking back, and I gave that idea a back rub, and shared a beer with it. Then I thought, we can't leave the giant post-it note like this, with the words No Benches written on it.

So I raised my hand and said, "I like benches. I WANT benches there. Lots of benches." I said that if there were enough benches then not only would there be benches for the bad people, there'd be benches for me. But if there were no benches for the bad people, then there would be no benches for anybody, and that's just cutting off your nose to spite your face, or words to that effect.

When I said all this the gentleman sitting in front of Anitra turned around and gave me the meanest full-on scowl I have been handed since my 8th grade arithmetic teacher took a wet one in the neck and guessed I'd sent it.


Thank you, thank you, Anitra, for making me go to that meeting. It was great.