Anitra's Valentine

You've read about her in my column; you've read her reviews; now, see her Valentine video! I know, it's lame, but I only discovered iMovie a couple of hours ago, and I don't know what all the squarish thingies do.

My Muse

I've always been a creative problem solver. This is a picture of me, at an age of roughly between 2 & 1/2 to 3, creatively solving the "How do I secure my next block?" problem.

I like creativity. I like seduction. I like the strange. I like the strange seduction of creativity, and the seductive creativity strangeness can induce. Speaking of seductive strangeness, my Muse Cindy Holly (not her eternal name) is the Muse of Other and the Muse of Few Words. When I first started my Real Change Column under the title Adventures in Poetry I was only allowed 350 words each. It was feared that my strange thoughts and modes of expression, if multiplied beyond that limit, might run amok and negatively impact unsuspecting innocent readers. Lawsuits could ensue.

Now, as Adventures in Irony, I manage to get away with 666 words per column. Still not much. So I am grateful to have Cindy peering over my shoulder all the time, suggesting words to cut. "Don't write words," she says. So I say, "What should I do then?" So she says, "Write." So I say, "Oh."

Sidney Cuteness Vicious

Here's beloved Real Change owner Sidney Vicious lying on newspapers in the back office and feebly predating on the moving pieces.

WARNING: In the future I intend to display other instances of Massive Sidney Cuteness in this space.

Let's See If This Works!

OK. So there's a dog. And then above it, toward my elbow, there's mountains. The mountains are on the dog's back. He doesn't like that. Below the dog is a snake's head. Above the mountains is one of the worms. Another worm is in the palm. There may be worm droppings, ha. The dog and snake will meet on the side opposite from where they are now, 'cause the dog and snake don't like high places.

So, Wes, What Is The Fey?

I thought I'd never ask. It is an interesting question which only I can answer, since only I know what I mean by The Fey.

First, The Fey is a class label. In that, it is like The Working Class, or The American Sports Hero, or The Rock & Roll Album. Whether something is an instance of a class label is often subject of argument. Often, the whole reason to introduce a class label is to incite argument. Argument excuses speech and long-windedness and detailed storied justifications. All of which are good things, some of us think.

What defining characteristics do instances of The Fey have?

There are several.

First, an instance of the Fey must be an event that either has happened, or maybe hasn't.

Every instance of The Fey, whether or not it has actually happened, must elicit surprise. It shouldn't elicit so much surprise as would cause heart failure or an unwillingness to stay for the end of the movie. The best sort of surprise is the sort that prompts remarks like but not limited to, "That was odd," or, "Huh," or, "Who would have thought that would happen."

There must, nevertheless, be a sense of inevitability to each instance of The Fey when it is closely examined. If the event in question hasn't happened, it must, upon reflection, be recognized as sorely wanting to happen, or asking for a happening in a most insistent or annoying way. If it has happened, it must be possible to realize that it was a Thing Waiting to Happen.

I can illustrate. Years ago, David Letterman put on a velcro suit, jogged toward a small trampoline, and jumped on it and bounced onto a velcro wall, where he stuck. My first reaction, when I saw this was to think, "That was odd." My second reaction, after reflecting upon it, was "How could it not have happened? I mean, there's velcro. There's trampolines. There's Letterman. So it had to be."

I hope that adequately explains what The Fey is to me, Dr. Wes Browning. Some other time I may explain why I am obsessed with it.

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.