Fone Guy & Eye Patch Man

Stories from the Streets and Buses of Seattle

First noticed Fone Guy at a bus stop sitting inside the shelter on a wet, wintry day speaking passionately into his old-style flip fone while I waited for the bus. His voice was as crisp and clear as a lawyer arguing in court and as fiery as a street activist bellowing into a bullhorn. Most of the time, however, he could’ve been one of those YouTubers pontificating like Joe Rogan on the state of everything from wars to boxing matches. We were up in the north end of the City of Seattle where the neighborhoods of Greenwood, Bitter Lake, Carkeek Park/Broadview, and Crown Hill come together in one of Seattle’s somewhat chaotic, funky, octopus intersections. There I stamped around waiting for the southbound # 5 to head south down thru Greenwood and up along Phinney Ridge. Fone Guy was dressed like a laborer but without any particular jobsite uniform. His heavy coats hung open around his burly, middle-aged frame. Dawned on me he was probably homeless and the bus stop shelter was his office. In those moments, however, he was King of the Shelter and Emperor of the Flip-Fone. Continue reading

Bad Bad Bus Ride…& the Decline of America

A crazy sad madcap urban bus ride vignette 

My bus ride this morning was epic bad, the kind that makes me not wanna ride it again, LOL…well, lol but not LOL.

It’s not funny. No. Sad, yes. Madcap, maddening, tragic, stupid, bonkers Seattle. 

Was insane!

Yes, I’m with the progressive PC Woke crowd, and it’s all gone too darn far, way too far, dammit!, when chaos, anarchy, and disease take over, fear dominates, and citizens are cowed into submission, apathy, and violence.

Apparently the buses bombing straight up and down Aurora pick up the worse of the worse – about 75% if not more of the riders seem homeless. Most appear to have bad mental health, drug & alcohol problems. One old, White man with a shaggy beard kept shuffling around with his pants down around his ankles and no underwear – he tried to hold them up by hand but gave up as the bus lurched around traffic – and tried to hand folks a one-dollar bill. No one took it. Why? Cuz the money looked like he’d wiped his ass with it! He shuggled forward towards the bus driver and offered her a nasty looking dollar bill, too. He seemed confused and perhaps wanted to somehow pay someone for for his ride on the metro bus. She waved him away. Told him to go sit down and pull his pants up. He turned around looking confused with his britches still down with the money still in hand. He left a wad of bills on his bus seat along with folded pieces of notebook paper, but no one dared grab such nasty looking money or attempted to sit down on the same two-person seat. No way! And there were preteen kids on the bus with big eyes! A family of tourists! God! And the old fellow kept babbling really loud in a obnoxious way – except his babble actually RHYMED in a cute way that also grated on yer nerves. Continue reading

Man on the Morning Bus

A Seattle Bus Ride Vignette

Don’t laugh because it’s really not funny. OK?

A homeless man got on the bus talking vigorously to himself in gibberish. Plopped down across from me in aisle-facing seats. Scratched his head ferociously the whole time with his right hand as he gripped a crumpled stack of cash in the other. A hundred dollar bill stuck out between his fingers like a squished mouse.

He scratched & skritched & scrotched head so mightily I was afraid, truly afraid, he was gonna fling head lice on me with his right hand all the way from where he sat across the aisle from me. Then I thought he was gonna fling cooties into the back of a young Muslim woman’s hijab as she sat scrolling down her fone in a forward-facing seat. Was gonna holler at the bus driver if he did. Continue reading

Between Snotrockets in April

Text chat with my old friend Kurt Snotrockets after fist bumping Young Mister Snotrockets out in the Street

The following occurred in the City of Seattle on Monday the 18th of  April 2022:

Kurt: Hey, Sir William! Still blowing snot after a cold. Life is good.

Me: Dude! That’s nasty! LOL

Aye, I fistbumped a strung out young druggie with enormous snot rockets reaching down thru his red moustache & beard at the bus stop last week who was posturing around like a ruff & tuff gorilla wearing only red & black plaid pajamas with dingy Superman pants pulled up over them & a gray T-shirt and it was cold as Charles Dickens with the threat of snow flurries in the air. Then when I looked the scary guy in the eyes above his snot rockets, I glimpsed sadness & bafflement & fear in his soul. Or were his eyes mirroring mine? Continue reading

A Raincloud for Halloween

My four year old daughter determines to be a Raincloud for Halloween 1998

Morgan (now Dylan) as a Raincloud for Halloween 1998.

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HAS THE WORLD CHANGED?

A Homeless Man asks a question with his pants down, but can anyone really answer?

Gawd, now I know I’m back in my beloved but gone-to-hell Seattle. While changing buses at Northgate Way & Aurora Avenue on my way home from a long trip to North Carolina, I came upon a homeless man of about 40 years old who also happened to be Black and bearded. He stood on the edge of the curb on the west side of Aurora next to the crosswalk, cupped his hands up to both sides of his face, and bellowed out into traffic:

“HAS THE WORLD CHANGED? HAS THE WORLD CHANGED?”

“WELL, HAS IT?” was my automatic response tho only in my mind.

My second response was the temptation to shout at him to pull his damn pants up, but that was before I listened to him.

Then he rhythmically pulls down his dirty gray sweat pants and shows his naked ass to the whole wide world and then swings his cock up and out across the way like the neck and head of a goose jerking forth from a lake. It looked large and waxy in the harsh, September sunshine. Pulls his pants back up with this tip of his penis perched upon his waistband like a damn peacock peeking out. Damn, I looked away, away, AWAY!, but, OH GAWD was too late as it all happened in a flurry of seconds as the crossing lights hadn’t changed yet. Couldn’t unsee this mess. Felt transfixed, no, crucified, crucified! Felt crucified by the clarity of his call and response during the middle of our long, apocalyptic slide into Armageddon. Continue reading

MLK Jr Blues on a Cloudy Day

We see you. And we’re not messin’ around.

Today is the official federal holy day honoring the late, murdered Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior. I’m in Seattle with my Sweetie Sweetchickens. Both of us are FV & Boostered, we don’t feel well, and she feels worse than me. We’re waiting for the results of her test for COVID-19. Got tested Saturday. So with all due respect to MLK we avoided marches, rallies, and social gatherings indoors. We chose to go for a meandering ramble up in Shoreline at Richmond Beach Saltwater Park. We need wide open spaces with healing views of big sky, open water, and a breeze. Temperatures were in the low to mid 40s. Fahrenheit.

Contemplation of stillness amidst vast spaces…and those waves of energy rippling out thru air and water.

We contemplated the winter sun, the sea, and overcast skies. To our surprise one lone boat was way out there crossing the Sound. Then it dawned upon me the Salish Sea appeared so bereft of boats because of the threat of tsunamis from earlier in the morning. Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai, a submarine volcanic mountain in the South Pacific, had exploded in spectacular and deadly fashion. Tsunamis shot across the Pacific in all directions, battering other islands including Hawaii, Fiji, and New Zealand. These walls of water reached from Japan and Australia to the entire western coasts of the Americas all the way from Alaska to Chile. I wondered if any waves crashed up on Kamchatka in the Russian Far East.

In the Vast

Ahhh, yet another dreadful yet mesmerizing apocalypse. Fell into a funk as I considered the current state of voting rights in my country, the creeping and creepy push towards an American dictatorship, the clamor over civil war, multiple pandemics and not just COVID, the economy, asteroids, comets, Earth slowing down and cooling off, the paralytic crises in governments, the weather, the climate, murders and robberies…aye, twas a deep funk. So I opened wide into the mystery, the majesty, and the terror of it all.

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Wounds of War

Visible & Silent

Reading of the current horrible war in Tigray with massacres and atrocities on all sides, especially by Ethiopian Federals and Eritreans, and watching the videos of massacres reminded me of an earlier time in my life. I was a licensed massage therapist and master bodyworker with a clinical practice in the Green Lake area of Seattle. My clients included people from all walks of life. They came in for reasons as varied as relief from pain from auto accidents, sports injuries, chronic pain, general health and well being, pregnancy, depression and anxiety, and a host of other reasons. The bulk of the people seeking bodywork were White with a smattering of Black and people of South and East Asian ethnicity. I myself am White, originally from Virginia.

Once state laws changed and insurance began to cover a greater range of treatments with what was formally called Complementarty and Alternative Medicine, or CAM, we began to see a greater cross-section of humanity upon our massage tables. I began to get a number of men, mostly slender Black men who spoke minimal English, as clients. Nearly all of them had scars from bullet wounds and sharp blades. As one of my backgrounds was world history and current affairs, I realized I was working with people seeking relief from old war wounds from the Horn of Africa. Being with these men and their injuries felt humbling, tragic, and even awe. 

As time progressed and more of these African immigrants began to open up, I felt startled to discover they were from different formerly warring groups. I worked on men who identified as Ethiopian, Amharic, Eritrean, Tigrayan, and Somali. A few were impressed I was aware of the complexities of the Ethiopian and Somali Civil Wars including the Ethio-Somali Ogaden War. I don’t know if they were combatants or refugees or both other than they were all former hostiles living peacefully as immigrants in the same city in the United States.

The horror and tragedy of multigenerational wars perpetuated back and forth across time and space hit me. Had to fight down tears. These men were all silent. They had endured bloodshed and terror and agony.

William Dudley Bass
Wednesday 30 June 2021
Seattle, Washington
USA
Cascadia
Earth
Sol

 

Copyright © 2021 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.

 

 

Response to a Video Speech

The President and CEO of the company I work for released an internal video speech addressing support for Black Lives Matter, human and civil rights, the challenges of helming a unique business thru such turbulent times including the currently ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, and his inner struggles with recognizing his own White privilege. His presentation moved, inspired, and even humbled me as well as others. As his presentation is itself confidential, the words below constitutes my otherwise public response:

* * *

Eric. Thank you. Powerful presentation. I appreciate your empathy, especially when such a vital quality of our shared humanity seems absent among much of our national leadership. Let’s learn together our various lessons from these events as we find constructive ways to move forward beyond or even with our disagreements. At different times in our nation’s history many have spoken up for justice, representation, and, indeed, recognizance – to simply be seen, and, yes, sadly, resorting to violence when they don’t feel seen as human beings. The list is long: Native Americans, Latinx, women, Blacks, Asians, working class folks, immigrants, children, the elderly, the disabled, veterans, those with chronic illnesses, people from different religions and subcultures, people from across the spectrum of different sexual, gender, and relationship identities, on and on, as, gosh, the list of our diversity is so very rich. Continue reading

Father’s Day on The Mountain, June 2008

Snapshots of a family in the Great Outdoors playing in the shadows of volcanoes, Sunday the 15th of June 2008

The Mountain. This massive, majestic, and dangerous volcano loomed above us wherever we went this bright, sunny Father’s Day.

The author with 2 of his daughters: Foto Left to Foto Right: Katie (10 & a half+), me (49), & TaTa (6). Kate performed over 30 cartwheels nonstop earlier this day, her personal record. We all encouraged her, of course, coached her, too, and, to be clear, it was all hands off. Left us in awe. As did being up in the snow at Paradise in Mt. Rainier National Park wearing sandals and flip-flops.

Breakfast for Daddy! Red eyes for the camera & all! Kate & Talia surprise William for Father’s Day 2008. Foto by Kristina.

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Day Trips with Li’l Butterfly

Remembrance of Journeys Past with my Stepdaughter across the last month of 2008 and the first three months of 2009

Talia debates going to the top of Kite Hill at Magnuson Park, Seattle. Tuesday 31 March 2009.

She was my third and last child, the stepdaughter I read to while she was in her mother’s womb and caught in my hands as she was born after long hours of struggle. Kristina, TaTa’s “Chee Chee Mommastina,” called her daughter, “Little Sitting Buddha Girl,” for she would sit still and quietly observe everything around her with precision and presence. As her “DaDa William,” however, I called her my Li’l Butterfly.

Distant Olympics on a ferry ship sailing across the upper part of Puget Sound as we traversed the Salish Sea, Washington. Sunday 4 January 2009.

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Atomic Mushroom Clouds at One in the Morning

Sun of Godzilla

Staggered downstairs into the kitchen for a bite to eat, and thru the windows saw a strange, orange yellow red glow growing swiftly on the horizon. Forgot all about nom nom nomming on a post-midnight snack. Felt confused. Fear came alive as I watched the weird glow expand into a raw, giant, golden, Godzilla cloud.

Big windows looked west from the great, long hill in North Seattle called Phinney Ridge. I currently abide there within an old, dilapidated house built over a century ago. Shared it with two other single, divorced guys, too, plus two elderly brothers down below in the daylight basement. From an old, grandma kitchen we could look west over the top of Ballard across the Salish Sea into the Olympic Mountains. The United States of America maintained one of the world’s largest stockpiles of thermonuclear weapons right in the guts of Cascadia just over there across the water from Seattle.

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MAKE IT STOP

Insanity in the City of Cranes

(Early 21st Century Americana with short Audio-Video further down below)

Found art by a tagger cartoonist as construction noise roars across traffic. South Lake Union/Downtown area of City of Seattle. Discovered one Thursday morning on the 5th of September 2019.

My beloved Seattle has mutated into a nightmare. The once Emerald City, the former Jet City, is now the City of Cranes. We’re the Abyss of Homelessness for those whom the Great Global Recession never ended and for whom the well-to-do would rather eradicate from view. Left my creaky old minivan at home, walked up the long, steep hill to the top of Phinney Ridge, and caught the bus to work. The #5 dropped me off with others 3 blocks further away than where it used to do as the cancer of over construction tore thru our city of dust & mud & noise. Dammit, I must zig zag this way & that way just to get to work!

Gosh, thought I would get to work early! Not now! Streets seemed closed in all directions. Sidewalks, too. I must cross the wrong way here to get over there to go the right way. To go west to east to get to work, I zig north, then south, then north, then east, then south, then west, south again, north next, north again, then east, then zag around the darn corner to end up going east again. Why? Because every block is different in a city cluttered with octopus intersections. On one block the sidewalk is shut down on one side and on the next shut down on the other side. Just like that, back & forth block to block.

People are both amused, stressed out, befuddled, giggling, and pissed off. Uber & Lyft drivers block honking buses. Lime-green & orangey-red app bicycles litter broken curbs. Hashtags litter all languages. Tourists peek back and forth between smartfone screens and big, floppy maps. Both are already obsolete. The lights take forever to change, traffic is too heavy for me to leap out into the street all skippity dippity dooby doo, and, ya, there’s ewwie random piles of doggie poo oozie-oozing outa tossed plastic baggies to hop over, too! Work is waaay up there beyond the top of the next hill. If I can just get outa this crazy ass place! Construction is so LOUD I turn off my hearing aids merely to keep my eyes open to see my way thru the madness.

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Goofin’ with my Fam on Cam: An intersection of family & technology captured in time

Fun Family Moments with technology & the Memories they generate recaptured from May 2000 & June 2001

The Bass-Hughes/Hughes-Bass Family goofin’ around on their new LogiCam attached to their Compaq computer where they lived at Orca Landing, a small intentional community as urban cooperative household  in Seattle. L2R: William, Baby Kate, Morgan (now Dylan), Gwen, & housemate Baby Dylan (under Gwen’s chin). Tuesday 9 May 2000. Foto by Computer!

These pictures are not by any means “good” as far as quality of photography goes. They are fuzzy, blurry, and fusty. Nor is this a traditional article the general public may seize upon with joy. This is more of a family legacy post, a digital heirloom for now, nearly two decades later, and the future beyond every tomorrow. Yet these capture a certain nostalgia, a few moments back in yonder spacetime of joy and befuddlement, of tears and misery, of surprise, confusion, and laughter. Even moments of glee!

All but the last three fotos were taken by what was then an amazing new tool, a Logitech Webcam mounted atop and connected to our Compaq Presario desktop PC running OS Windows 98. At the time the Internet had shifted from bulletin boards & Gopher protocols to MS-DOS-based programing for Microsoft programs, IBM Peanut desktop computers, and Apple’s Macintosh to the growing, glowing World Wide Web with way cool browsers such as Netscape. Oh yeah, remember MS-DOS? And those fancy, old Peanuts and sublime early Macs? Gosh, remember Netscape? What an astounding expression of technology the Netscape browser was! All of these artifacts are today considered “vintage technologies.”

Morgan & Kate. Morgan now goes by Dylan. Here they are focusing on this hypnotic vintage technology! In the age between TVs and smartfones, too! Here at Orca Landing, Seattle, woo HOO! Wednesday 3 May 2000.

While we were having so much fun posing & goofing around with our new Logicam, these hi-tech companies were booming themselves right up into a massive financial bubble. The Dot-com Bubble began around 1994, the year my first daughter Morgan Hannah (now my eldest child Dylan Blair) was born, and ended in 2000. This hyperspeculative bubble finally burst, many companies died, the economy crashed, and a recession kicked in. The bursting of the bubble was a process lasting into 2002. Around the same time Compaq, once one of the top leading brands of personal computers, fell apart and was gobbled up by Hewlett-Packard.

This particular recession, which in some ways began a decade earlier in Asia, continued in parts of North America into 2003 and across Europe till around 2004-2005. This crazy tech boom of the 1990s laid the foundation, however, for stunning digital transformation of civilization over the next two decades. This remained true even into the midst of the Great Global Recession, an economic and financial catastrophe that began in late 2007. These events greatly affected our family and friends even as we carried on our daily lives. Our vintage technologies allowed us to preserve some of the good times amidst all of the gloomy news. Such memories remind us our glasses were more than half-full rather than half-empty or knocked over. So let’s raise a toast to those happy moments of yesteryear and be present to the little joys all around us even now, woo HOO! Yes!

Here we are, however, back in the day at the turn of the Common Era’s 21st Century in awe of those blurry, silly, and spontaneous “vintage tech” pictures. Digital spontaneity is one of the keys to understanding this brief time in history. The astonishing speed of computerized camera technology reached the point people felt free to be spontaneous in the moment. These were the beginnings of the digital selfie boom! People were goofy! Solemn. Smiling! Frowning. Weeping! And grinning, too.

Momma Gwen gets in on the action, too!

Small, precision-image camera technology making the Logitech cams and then the tiny iPhone and Android fone cams were initially developed back in the 1960s by the NRO, the secret National Reconnaissance Office. This unique technology was finally released into the public marketplace, seized upon by private companies, and made its way into mobile devices such as cellphones. The NRO was a clandestine Federal intelligence agency formed in 1961 but wasn’t officially declassified until 1992 after the Cold War was over. It’s early cameras are considered superior to those in the later Hubble Space Telescope.

Social media entered the global picture, and, boom! Our planet would never be the same again. At the same time, sadly enough, this the lull before the storm, before the growing, intermittent Global Long War on Terror exploded into a worldwide conflict with the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States Home Front in September of 2001.

In the meantime, while this long war still burns and smolders around the world, let us nevertheless enjoy these precious moments in time. Perhaps they will fortify us to more closely re-examine our history of violence as a species. Perhaps doing so will illuminate and motivate us to find ways to generate peace and love instead of war and hate. Meanwhile, we move forward. Life is messy! Enjoy the pictures!

“Shirley Temple Kate.” Kathryn Elizabeth stylin’ at Orca Landing in Seattle, Tuesday 26 June 2001.

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Excuse me, Sir, I’m starving

Seattle, City of Cranes, 2 April 2018.

“Excuse me, Sir,” the man called out. “I’m starving. Can you help me please?”

Frank was out in the streets again struggling to move his broken body this way and that way as he pivot-twisted and zigzagged from curb to curb only to give up from exhaustion and wander right down the middle of the road, getting run over by humans in cars and trucks be damned and indeed goddamned. Spring 2018 in Seattle, Washington. Giant construction cranes hovered overhead like those gigantic Martian battle tripods in the 2005 War of the Worlds movie. The Emerald City, once the Jet City, has now become the City of Cranes, a muddy, noisy, chaotic mess of hope, despair, greed, beauty, boondoggles, and opportunity.

I shared this with Rockcatcher, one of my managers as I came into work thru the employee entrance. He earned the nickname for catching a large, softball-size rock bouncing down the mountain directly into his face when he and a few others were climbing over in the Olympics. Snagged the rock with both hands without toppling backwards down the cliff, too. Both of us, however, had encountered Frank plunging into traffic to declare his hunger.

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Seattle Vignettes: A Prose Poem in Five Parts

  1. Dead Man on the Steps with One and a Half Legs
  2. Bag of Dimes
  3. Tattooed Hands
  4. Donuts, Needles, Jelly, and Blood
  5. P.S. Box of Donuts in the Rain

 *All of these vignettes are interpretations of real events I experienced in Washington State along my way to work from SeaTac to Seattle and back again during the Cascadian Winter of 2017 – 2018. ~ Author’s Forewarning

Dead Man on the Steps with One and a Half Legs
Rain poured in torrents
as dawn broke sunrise into silver and gray.
I hurried down South 176th Street in SeaTac towards the airport to catch my train to work.
Can’t be late again.
Won’t be late again.
I shall arrive early to work
to keep my job alive.
My commute is 3 hours long roundtrip.
Why do good people scatter their trash along the streets?
I passed all kinds of trash, mostly food related, as I approached the SeaTac Visitor Information Center,
also known as Seattle Southside Visitor Center.
A man lay curled upon the lower steps. Continue reading

Golden Leaves of November

Walking back to catch the train home after a dentist appointment brought unexpected surprises as a late blaze of Autumn glory swiftly turned into a fierce storm in mid-November of 2017

*This is an unfinished work in progress. Please enjoy what’s here as I complete it. Thanks!*

Click on each picture to expand it. All fotos by the Author.

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Swarm of Ants on a Sunny Day in June

Ants swarm upon a sidewalk in Wallingford.

I wanted to walk home from work at least once as one way to say goodbye to where I’ve lived at the time. Finally did so one sunny Saturday in late June of 2017. At the time I lived in the Tangletown-Latona neighborhoods of the Green Lake area in North Seattle. Lived there for a little over four years in an informal cooperative household.

For various reasons of timing, I didn’t make the walk to where I worked in the old Cascade neighborhood of South Lake Union. Today, however, I declined the offer of a ride home and chose to proceed on foot instead. And I did. Walked all the way home. Passed thru the long, strung-out-along-the-water neighborhoods of East Lake, skirted the edges of the U-District, and crossed under I-5 into Wallingford. Eventually passed north thru Wallingford into Tangletown-Latona.

Took me about an hour and 45 minutes. Could’ve walked it in an hour and a half or less, but I dawdled at viewpoints and took my time before spurts of speed. I felt at peace in and with nature and enjoyed my little adventures along the edges of the urban wild. Continue reading

Lost My Wife

Foto by William Dudley Bass on Saturday morning the 24th of July 2017.

Walked down the street on the way to work recently & came upon a haunting illustration at the rear of an abandoned restaurant slated for teardown. Felt intrigued by the bittersweet mix of symbols & metaphors. What’s the story behind a mystery as old as time when the first dawning of love went awry?

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Videos and Stories from the Unfinished Struggle for Workers’ Rights at REI

Six Videos, the Petition, and our Stories…and it’s not over

Note this article with its compilation of videos is not marketed or sold for profit nor is anything in this article being marketed and sold for profit. This article and the videos within may be freely shared as long as various sources and authorship are acknowledged.

“There is one word missing. One word that makes all the difference. This word is ‘organized’. That is: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, ORGANIZED citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” It speaks to the power of people mobilization; the power of true change that starts from the bottom wing…there is a growing, if naïve belief that all you need is a lot of passion, a lot of commitment, a lot of good intentions and lots of mavericks, rebels, disruptors, contrarians and challengers and, alas, change will happen. It won’t.” – Socio-cultural change activist Leandro Herrero of Spain on the necessity for activists to organize and organize quickly.

A workers’ revolt had brewed within REI since at least 2015. Matters came to a head in July 2016 as groups of workers rose up openly in nonviolent direct action. Among their issues at stake were demands for a living wage, for secure, predictable scheduling, and for democratic representation via a union. These demands burst open the heart of the matter to reveal whether the REI Co-op would be a truly cooperative business. Or a lie.

This is our story as a brief summary from my perspective. Thus this is only a small part of our big story from only one person’s point of view from a particular time and place. Indeed, the record of this peaceful uprising may even be your story. Much work remains to be done by we the working people. Our story, your story, remains unfinished. The truth, often forgotten or unacknowledged, is we who stood up before the media for our co-op and for our fellow coworkers who wouldn’t or couldn’t were scared. Yes, at times we felt terrified! We were afraid of being fired from REI and blacklisted from securing employment elsewhere. And we stood up anyway. We stood up and spoke what needed to be said and heard. Such actions took more courage than simply feeling brave. What made it possible was the support from our collective, cooperative community of REI Members, fellow coworkers, and former coworkers.

In the beginning, actions may be led by small numbers of people determined to organize and act in such a way, as the late, great anthropologist Margaret Meade liked to point out, as to change the world. They may be resisted at first by those who insist these leaders not speak for them but say, “some few individuals.” Progress cannot be stayed. Even the most peaceful revolution has setbacks and is set upon by cynics and automatic critics as well as often ignored by the apathetic and the resigned. It is acceptable to feel afraid, and let us move forward anyway even if scared. Yes, it’s OK to be afraid. Move forward anyway. Don’t let fear stop us, but do let fear keep us alert and on top of our game. Our revolt had repercussions benefiting many workers, although success wasn’t as widespread as initially believed.

One can trace this revolt back to the influences of the 2011 Wisconsin Insurrection followed by the Occupy Uprisings of 2011-2012. Out of Occupy Seattle emerged the political campaigns of economist Kshama Sawant, the Socialist Alternative candidate, for local offices in 2012-2013. She lost her race for the Washington House of Representatives, and won her election to Seattle City Council where she has served since 2014. These struggles overlapped with and were followed by the Black Lives Matter revolts beginning in 2013 and still ongoing. They in turn help inspire the successful Fight for $15 an hour minimum wage struggles of 2014-2016. This uprising was sparked by Alaska Airline employees in SeaTac, Washington, spread to Seattle, and then reverberated across the United States in the form of fast food strikes and other direct actions organized with assistance from Socialist Alternative and allies in the labor union movement such as SEIU (the Service Employees International Union) and UFCW (the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union).

More directly related to REI, however, were the 2014 demonstrations against sweatshop labor in making products for The North Face and against REI’s partnership with The North Face. The anti-sweatshop protests were small but loud, nationwide, and even erupted in other countries. A nationwide student labor union known as the United Students Against Sweatshops or USAS (http://usas.org) organized these demonstrations at REI and TNF stores.

The international horror in the wake of the April 2013 Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh was still fresh in the general public’s mind in 2014. Over 1,130 people were killed and nearly another 2,500 injured in this disaster. A foto of an unidentified man and woman buried in the rubble still embraced even in death became famous. Their nature of their actual relationship remains unknown, and the image of their tragedy affected the world. To be clear, while up to 28 Western companies including Benneton, J.C. Penney, Joe Fresh, Zara, Primark, and Walmart were involved in the Rana Plaza collapse, this list don’t seem to include any companies associated with REI or The North Face. Even so, the Rana Plaza catastrophe left a vivid impression on people about worker’s rights in general within our globalized capitalist economy.

Sweatshop labor is slave labor where predatory capitalists, the kind of capitalists that give responsible businesses and visionary, hardworking entrepreneurs a bad name, leveraged deeply indebted people into perpetual debt bondage and exploited children for their tiny hands and nimble fingers for profit. Such vulnerable people were beaten, fed little, worked with little rest or sleep, sexually violated, kept terrified, and generally traumatized. People died and were maimed in these slave factories. The problem afflicts many companies as human slavery and trafficking is a worldwide wicked problem. To be clear, these problems existed long before capitalism, and we have the power and vision here in the 21st Century to work together and resolve these conflicts.

Patagonia and Apple were among the few to take vigorous action to tackle this problem of slavery and trafficking, but unregulated capitalist imperatives to exploit resources and cheap labor for short-term profits, socio-cultural normalization, and political power makes cleaning up these messes self-defeating. The North Face, owned by VF Corporation in Greensboro, North Carolina, was one of the worst offenders. Only in 2015 did VFC and TNF start addressing sustainability and green energy issues, but still has not addressed its use of sweatshop labor.

See: https://rankabrand.org/sportswear-sports-shoes/The+North+Face.

See: http://reisweatshops.usas.org.

[Upate 2023 insert:] The two above links no longer work and are kept here for historic, archival purposes as original sources that worked back in 2017.

More workers in America and more workers in other nation-states such as Bangladesh are beginning to understand this is an international issue, indeed an international working class issue. Thus an issue that demands we workers hold the capitalist classes accountable as we further organize a new mass movement across the working and middle classes to build a progressive, planetary society. It is up to us to figure out what such action steps look like. We must find ways to rise above the endless arguments over -isms and understand expanding democracy into the workplace expands democracy for all.

What the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., used to call “economic democracy” and what the progressive Left today such as Sen. Bernie Sanders call “democratic socialism” is often misunderstood by many and erroneously conflated with communism, totalitarianism, anarchy, Nazism, Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, and so forth. Those isms are not at all the same thing as economic democracy or democratic socialism. People who believe they are need to learn a few things. Indeed, this movement expanding democracy in the workplace is also an expansion of our individual liberties, human and civil rights, and social responsibilities. Equating such with dictatorship and tyranny is fearmongering feeding hysteria, polarization, violence, and ignorance.

People may disagree on approaches and degrees of this and that, debate whatever ignites their passions, but forget the Big Picture so many of us work to put together and build out. In many ways we are limited by our language. We get lost in fighting and arguing over political and economic -ism terminology from the 17th and 18th Centuries and the horrors of the 20th Century. Together we can choose to build a better local-global system for our 21st Century. Or not. The consequences are dire. It doesn’t work to go all out in support of cherry-picked progressive agendas only to bash labor unions and worker-owned cooperative businesses.

Below is the first of six videos here and is from United Students Against Sweatshops. It is a part of REI history we must remember and Corporate Headquarters wants us to forget. REI HQ preferred instead to distract people’s attention by ramping up its efforts to market the petty bourgeois abomination known as “glamping.”

Before REI workers launched their own petition for real change after so many were fired in late 2015, there was an earlier petition demanding “REI, Drop North Face Sweatshops!” I signed it myself on Monday 2 January 2017. Yes, I am ashamed to confess I was unaware of this petition until recently (2017) and didn’t realize the true nature of the anti-North Face protests back in 2014. In 2014 I was still emerging from almost two years of being homeless or semi-homeless while ill with severe depression and a cluster of autoimmune conditions. That’s no excuse, of course, and I share to give one a sense of what was experienced. As alluded to earlier, these struggles of solidarity for justice, equality, and liberty for working class people are far from over.

Max Silva, an REI Member, initiated the anti-sweatshop Petition for USAS with Moveon.org back in 2014. It still continues to gather signatures. Move On is financed in large part by billionaire George Soros. While I am not a fan all of Soros’s actions, the claims of rabid, Far Right conspiracy speculators his manipulations of geopolitics and unaware Leftist activists fund his faction of squabbling plutocrats to rule the world are not based on facts and reality. Despite such rubbish, Move On still charges hard as an activist NGO in the pursuit of good.

Review and sign the Petition to compel REI to drop North Face products here: http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/rei-drop-north-face-sweatsho-1?source=c.em&r_by=6189219.

This accelerated worker and member discontent within the Co-op. The first phase of the 2015-2016 REI workers revolt culminated on the 11th of July 2016. A small group of retail workers from across the United States, although mostly from the West Coast, showed up in Seattle to go public en masse before the media. These workers were desperate, afraid, and courageous. I know as I was one of them. My coworkers and I were scared we would lose everything, and we didn’t have much left to lose as our wages and hours were so low and random. The possibility of getting fired and losing what little we had left terrified us. Even more scary was the prospect of being blacklisted from finding other work elsewhere if we were purged. We stood up anyway. We workers took a stand.

We did so with the support of Councilor Kshama Sawant of the Seattle City Council and the dynamic staff of her office. Among them was community and labor activist Jonathan Rosenblum who helped build grassroots networks across the country from New York City to Seattle. He helped us REI activists to distill our long lists of demands into three. We did so with the determined support of Socialist Alternative and UFCW 21. We did so with the support of many Members of the REI Co-op, and we did so with the support of larger numbers of our co-workers from all across the company who felt they had to stay discreet or anonymous but who informed us privately they were still with us. 

We REI Coworkers had many, many even conflicting demands. Dozens! In just a few meetings we distilled them into three primary ones. They were, 1) immediate implementation of the $15 an hour minimum wage instead of a three-year long phase-in, 2) predictive scheduling, and, 3) we need a union. Our first two demands were met. The third was not. There remains the lack of some form of organized, internal democratic representation of us workers as a group to management.

There are several different ways towards building a workers’ democracy. One way is thru a union. Another is thru cooperative ownership of the company as a true cooperative business with democratic deliberation and planning. Or a hybrid of the two. Cooperative worker ownership and/or unionization defends hard-won gains, sustains the network, and advocates for greater democracy. There are successful examples of worker-owned, consumer-owned hybrid cooperatives, and most of them are also unionized. Clearly this struggle isn’t new but is as old as the exploited standing up to those who exploit them. Our struggles are far from over for democratic socialist representation is THE most important battle to win.

Back in the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., came to recognize there can’t be any political democracy without having economic democracy and one can’t have capitalism without war. He came to champion what we today call democratic socialism. King was assassinated in April 1968 while in Memphis, Tennessee. He’d traveled there to support striking sanitation workers and their new union. Those terms remain highly charged today. The next five videos, however, demonstrate what’s possible when people from across the working classes come together to move what many thought were immovable mountains, especially REI, the mythic icon of the American Pacific Northwest and the Great Outdoors. Continue reading

Aurora Avenue and the Dark Side of Love

A Nest of Urban Vignettes

Machines break down and stop. People break down and somehow keep going. Machines are all about function and efficiency. People are for creativity, making messes, and love.

Chaos was silent. No blaring horns from cars around me. No one reads beyond the edges of their digital screens any more. Finally stopped wondering how people sitting in cars behind me might respond or react to my bumper stickers. Nope. They’re too busy merging with their, ahem, “mobile devices” as they herd themselves into the Internet of Things. At every stop during the last few days all across the City of Seattle I’d see heads bow down and fones rise up in the postmodern autonomic digital prayers of the unconscious. Can’t even get a HONK! Not even one faint li’l bitty ol’ frickin’ honk. Then, BOOM BOOM CHOP! I had to put my 16-year old blue car in the repair shop up north on the Greenwood side of Aurora Avenue, and I met real people out on the streets in the everyday circus of madness and bliss.

She sat hunched over in the woodchips alongside the sidewalk in the shade of Gold’s Gym under a row of leafy trees with her face kinked between folded arms and knees. Her body was so scrawny the spinous processes of her lumbar and thoracic vertebrae poked out like those strange fins on a stegosaurus’s back called scutes or dinosaur dermal plates. They arched over with her spine in such a way I could almost feel the connection to her reptilian brain, but, hey, she’s a mammal, a hominin like me. We’re hominins in America. Hominins in America! The United States was and is still a quasi-fascist, pseudo-democratic oligarchy masquerading as a constitutional capitalist killer clown republic, Barack Obama was POTUS, and the Dem-Rep Duopoly self-gridlocked. Global Climate Disruption worsened, and the Great Global Depression wasn’t over at all for millions and millions of unemployed and underemployed lost people like us. She sat. I walked. She smoked. I judged. She despaired, and so did I.

A red suitcase lay loosely shut with clothes hanging out next to her. She smoked a cigarette somewhere down there under crossed arms, I could smell its acrid, stale heat, but I couldn’t see her face. I could see the crack of her ass between her shirt and her shorts. She was a young White woman with brownish, straw blond hair and all skinny and boney and all alone. I felt huge sadness and empathy. Oh, she was so alone in this world! I felt her energy as I strode around her towards the Gym. Without even trying, I could feel into her dark pool of synaptic fog just by walking by her. She felt sad, hung over, frustrated, desperate, and zonked out depressed. I could feel the ice-cold glitter of pain screwing thru her veins as the yearning for the next fix built up hot under her long sleeves.

I was in a hurry, however, as my car was in the shop, I had errands to do, and I was walking everywhere without any wheels. I wouldn’t take the bus. Nope, no bus today. Gonna walk for exercise. I stopped myself from going over to her, however, and reminded myself I have an old, bad habit of rescuing people. I am not going to rescue anyone anymore, no more drama triangles in life, and so must hold tight to my boundaries. Yes?

Hurried off into the Gym and trained hard with the weights. Slowly regaining my health after a prolonged and strange illness. Came back out after my workout with a long walk ahead of me. There she sat, more sad and desperate then ever, without looking up. She didn’t need to look up. She was primal enough to sense what was happening around her, even if her senses were warped and fragmented by too many of the wrong kind of drugs. I felt her coil without coiling and sensed the dead pulse of mutant killer kundalini. She cranked taunt as locked gears forced apart and popped as automatically defensive as a robot sentinel left behind to guard some long-abandoned ancient fortress. I stopped. She bristled and the image of her lunging at me with a dirty syringe in hand burst into my mind as real as a wild ass grizzly bear rearing up on her hind legs. I shuddered and recalled being homeless myself not all that long ago…and scared.

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In the Swirl of a Dish

Petri Dish Man’s Urban Seattle Socialist Vignette

Hungry. Sun blazing in my eyes. Making me squint as my belly growled low like a dog guarding a slab of meat. Hadn’t eaten since yesterday. Felt ravenous after I spent too much of the morning in the hospital being poked, pierced, measured, and explored by fantastic doctors and their curious assistants. Prodded me like a damn bug followed by quick pecks on their computers. Felt as if I was a giant insect splayed out and peeled apart in an enormous Petri dish by mad scientists and clever kids. Who behaved as if any moment they would hobble over and slather weird baby food goo all over me to see what monsters might grow. Ahhh, yes, call me…Petri Dish Man! BAM! BAM! BAM! DON’T BAN THE PETRI DISH MAN! ran thru my head over and over, tho I dared not tell anyone at the time, as it felt so strange.

Brought back memories of being in the Battle of Seattle during the so-called Anti-Globalization Revolts, and memories of being in Occupy Seattle and Occupy Olympia. Yes, even brought back memories of being homeless during the Great Global Recession after rich, capitalist pundits declared it long over. Despite being such a proficiently medically inspected man, however, I felt grateful for Obamacare’s ACA here in Washington State. Thank goodness it covered what my employer’s private health insurance plan wouldn’t cover. I shake my head funny too, as it seemed plain old common sense for 21st Century America, indeed all of Planet Earth, to have an integrated single-payer universal health care system, a democratic economic system, a socialist system.

Thus satiated on clarity of vision, I ventured hungrily into The Dish, a funky Seattle café, for a belated breakfast. Call it brunch. Time was 11:30 am. It’s a lively little café in my neighborhood. I currently live in a small, quasi-cooperative household below the landlord’s family in a house uprooted from the I-5 Corridor running north and south across the States between Canada and Mexico. The house sits beneath three immense Western redcedar trees in the Tangletown-Latona part of Green Lake up in the middle of North Seattle. At least till the rent rockets up. Only my second visit to this cafe, too. Rarely eat out anymore. Now it’s a treat! The place was abuzz, too.

Two staffers had called in sick, however, leaving the business understaffed. Only two other people were out front serving including one new worker who admitted she didn’t know how to work anything quite yet. But they were game and smiled anyway. Big, welcoming smiles, too. They bustled in and out among crowded customers, and the one cook in back paced himself as he had to. The warm smells of cooked food swirled with exuberant colors intoxicated yours truly Petri Dish Man.

The ghost of a homeless guy watched everything right over the lip of his big orange coffee cup. He was so invisible it as was if I couldn’t see him but nevertheless still sense his presence. I felt the color of his large, tattered coat fade charcoal and gray. Was his bright orange cup just a reflection of the Sun upon a glass bowl of slivered fruit? No, he wasn’t there, just a coat and a cup and the ghost of a man who gave up everything precious but his dignity and curiosity.

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Why I’m not voting in the Washington State Democratic Caucus for anyone even tho I root for Bernie

Rally for Bernie in the Key Arena, Seattle, WA. Foto by Kristina Katayama. Sunday 20 March 2016.

Rally for Bernie in the Key Arena, Seattle, WA. Foto by Kristina Katayama. Sunday 20 March 2016.

This isn’t about Bernie. It is for integrity and strategy.

Bernie, of course, is Bernard Sanders, the Independent Senator from Vermont who calls himself a “democratic socialist.” He’s charging forward to secure the nomination of the Democrat Party as its Candidate for the American Presidency. The state caucus is today this Saturday the 26th of March 2016.

It’s unethical to play musical chairs with the fate of our nation and go play Democrat just for one day if you have no intention of actually joining the Democrats to stay a Democrat. It’s shortsighted and self-defeating to get so caught up in Bernie’s amazing rise that one short-circuits the long-term building of a new party for the 99%. If we don’t stay focused on the new movement for the working and middle classes we’re going to end up right where we started, broken upon the altars of Lesser Evilism.

Many of my friends among the Left are crossing over into the Democrat Party to vote for Bernie Sanders in the Washington State Caucus. These people are usually independents and/or members of smaller parties outside the Democrat-Republican Duopoly. Most of those smaller parties represented are the Socialist Alternative and the Green Party with a few Libertarians. While a member of both SAlt and the Greens, I have engaged very little with either in the last couple of years due to a prolonged, chronic illness and due to my work and family schedule. Bernin’ for Bernie, however, burns all across social media.

There’re a sizeable number of my comrades among these same small parties that plan to vote for Bernie if and ONLY if he secures the Democrat nomination to run for President, or, failing to do so, launches an independent bid. They are NOT voting for Bernie in the Democrat Caucus. I am NOT voting in the caucus for Bernie either. “What? What! Why not? WTF?!” is often the response.

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Old Man God with the Green Guitar

Discordian Harmony at the Pacific Northwest Folklife Festival

with

Zombie Jimi

Mystery Musician aka Zombie Jimi

Mystery Musician aka Zombie Jimi

 

Sunday 24 May 2015

My eyes heard him hunched over his old green guitar before my ears could see him stretching notes thru the air. Old Man God stood in the Center of Seattle crouched in the corner facing Jerusalem on the other side of the world before turning his back on Abraham’s minions to face Ancient Timbuktu instead, his skin all black as Mississippi Goddamn and his beard as snowy white as polar bear belly all while focused on changing what never changes as he grasped the old, banged-up, burring, purring, electric, green guitar in his hands the same way Neptune once burst open the sky with his trident held high all a buzzsaw humming like Betty Dodson’s Hitachi Magic Wand gripped in Goddess hands orgasming the Himalayas apart with the Love Song of a Cosmic Chainsaw. His hands trembled all steady with purpose as he caressed his green guitar with the adoration Zeus once had for electric thunderbolts and nymphs sweaty with humid rust. Old God Man shuddered back on his feet, unwound his pelvis as Mike Mulligan once cranked up trusty Mary Anne, lumbered forward at the wall as a Zen steam shovel on testosterone and played his green guitar with a certain must with a deliberate lust driven to play things as they are with a ferocious thrust not what others demanded oh yeah he played with raw beauty and ugly grace oh yeah he played with verve to shear men and women like sheep oh yeah played his old green guitar so damn hard I swear the sky blazed electric blue and in the midst of such Rapture heard a vast groaning zombie drone as reanimated angels buzzed straight up outa the ground like Jimi Hendrix lighting up Woodstock high up on stage high above the mud deep down in O Mississippi Goddamn mud it’s Nina Simone eating up the sky with her brow all furrowed like eight thirty o’clock way up upon a stage crowded with pianos on fire PIANOS ON FIRE! giving voice to the lynched the burned and to the drowned. Aye, my hearing aids filled with the android squeals of Betty Dodson Jimi Hendrix Nina Simone jackhammering open bones skin and soul to touch my love with feathers stuffed with steel.

See, I heard all these things in a voodoo of pain nothing could change not even Deuteronomous Dali Bosch. Continue reading

Dragonfly People: Coming together in Nature for Adventure and Community, 2002 – 2003

A real Dragonfly Community in Nature.

A real Dragonfly Community in Nature.*

Dragonflies are small animals and ferocious predators. They live all across the planet except Antarctica. Prehistoric ancestors of today’s dragonflies were huge insects with wingspans of almost 30 inches or 7.6 centimeters across. The Dragonfly is also a symbol of transformation, power, adaptability, and poise. A number of us communitarians came together from different urban cooperative households across Greater Seattle to explore new communal possibilities. Some of the early meetings held anywhere from 20 to nearly 50 people. A few individuals, including Syd Fredrickson, known as a major player within the intentional communities movement, helped facilitate many of our early sessions. Eventually some of us moved to form a new intentional community. Our new family came to be known as Dragonfly or the Yellow Dragonfly House. We chose this majestic, wild animal as our spirit totem with a focus on personal and group transformation.

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TRANSFORMATION: a 150 foot long dragonfly crop circle apparently created overnight in England, the U.K., in June of 2009.**

What came to be known as simply Dragonfly or the Yellow House was established in October 2003, but the process of community formation began much earlier. People from older groups such as Orca Landing and The Barn began coming together in 2001 to determine what was next for them as individuals, families, and communities. Some of them were monogamous families. Others were engaged as a polyamorous cluster. And a few were single. Several shared children between them. All were deeply spiritual and engaged in profound personal and professional growth, training, and development. Most were ethical stands for love, communication, and for community. Those who were not left Dragonfly of their own accord except for one person, initially intensely involved, who was asked to leave upon being a fraud and a manipulative con artist.

During the years of 2002 – 2003 the members of Dragonfly embarked on a series of trips to spend time together in nature and to strengthen the bonds of community. Not every member of Dragonfly Community went on every adventure. The following fotos are from six of our trips including our major outings. Some of the earlier members and candidates are not in any of these fotos. The core ones are celebrated within. These pictures survived the 2010 burning down of my and then-wife Kristina’s post-Dragonfly home. I took most of these fotos, and some were by Kristina, and others by friends who gave us copies after the fire. I edited most of those images. They captured moments in time and space representing the forging and celebration of relationships amid the great outdoors of America’s Pacific Northwest. These pictures represent a perspective of Dragonfly history as captured by cameras. This article is not about the record of meetings, finances, interrelationship dynamics, conflict resolution, coparenting children, politics, religions, and such. It does, however, illuminate such challenges and joys via the surviving pictures thru the lens of the cameras with my historical point of view as author and participant. Enjoy!

Dragonfly Backpacking & Camping Trip to Second Beach, Olympic National Park, Thursday 4 July – Sunday 7 July 2002:

L2R: Talia, William, Atreyu, Edan

L2R: Talia, William, Atreyu, & Edan.

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The One Place on Earth to Go

One of many travertine falls in Plitvice Lakes National Park, Croatia, European Union. Photo by Donar Reiskoffer in the Public Domain. 2013.

One of many travertine falls in Plitvice Lakes National Park, Croatia, European Union. Photo by Donar Reiskoffer in the Public Domain. 2013.

What is the one place down on the surface of Planet Earth’s crust should everyone go visit at least once in their life? As gorgeous as they are, it’s not those beautiful lakes that fall one into the other in the picture above.

So many people pass thru Seattle these days and night, coming and going and going and coming, from somewhere to nowhere to everywhere. It seems Seattle is now the one place to go, or it’s what I hear from so many tourists. Which surprises me. Seattle is booming, yes, one survey earlier this year counted 80 construction cranes dominating the Downtown and Belltown areas alone. Despite the magnificent scenery of the Salish Sea and the Olympic and Cascade Mountains, however, Seattle isn’t The One Place On Earth One Must Go. I love Seattle, tho.

During the Great Recession I worked in retail at the Downtown Seattle REI Store, its largest flagship, and met people from around the world. Still do. Love working here at REI. Many fellow human beings from all over Cascadia, too, came and went and come and go as they tell stories about past trips, excited or in some cases afraid of upcoming adventures. Many people come into REI to buy supplies on their way to help out others, whether it’s devastating earthquakes in Haiti and Nepal, supertyphoons in the Philippines, giant mudslides in Latin America, or the Ebola epidemic in West Africa.

At work I am usually in sustained motion. When it’s slow, I either stock products or stand briefly and people watch. Engage and talk. Ask questions and listen. Help them find appropriate products, or if we don’t have them, suggest other places. Once there was a man from Yakutsk, the capital of the Sakha Republic in Russia’s Siberia. He was of Turkish-Mongol-Siberian ancestry, was unusually tall, and was in the United States for the first time. Dressed like a cross between a tweedy college professor, a backcountry woodsman, and a steampunk engineer, he was in quiet awe of the amount of merchandise in every store, including North American grocery stores. He was especially in awe of REI’s depth and breadth in outdoor adventure travel.

Claiming to be among the numerous proud descendants of Genghis Khan’s warriors, he said I should visit Siberia. I’d love to go, I replied. Siberia! One of the wildest, most extreme regions on Earth! The vast boreal forests of the Siberian Taiga, deep and mysterious Lake Baikal, hungry brown and black bears raiding villages, gigantic rivers pulsing towards the Arctic Ocean, bitter subfreezing temperatures, exploding scary ass methane craters in Yamal, the wild, remote, volcanic Kamchatka Peninsula, meteorite-hit cities, huge mountains and isolated deserts, southern steppes and northern tundra, Eurasian ethno-cultural blending amid ancient, little-known ruins, and the longest railroads in the world. O, Siberia!

But, no, not even majestic Siberia. There’s another place even more incredible everyone must try to get to. Yes, everyone.

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Three Bands wrack Café Racer during one magnificent wet Saturday night in Seattle

“Yeah! I think this is like Your Band’s first review!” ~ Ben Callup of Your Band

Your Band distorts gravity down at Cafe Racer

Your Band distorts gravity down at Cafe Racer~

My Saturday was awesome. Awesome beyond cliches, Hell yeah it was! The 3rd of January! 2015! Busted my middle-age Happy New Year ass in the Gym. Hung out with a dear friend I haven’t seen in almost 2 years and dove down an esoteric rabbit hole with her between death & life, and spent the evening of a Full Moon Eve at Café Racer where I met up with friends from the Socialist Alternative and listened to a trio of bands jam. It was good to get my butt away from the house and out on the town a bit. Slowly enjoyed a pint of Scotch Style Pike Kilt Lifter Ruby Ale from a scruffy, jolly bartender. I’m a glass-draining, guzzling gulper by habit, so I disciplined myself to slow it waaay down to one, delicious slow-drinkin’ beer while eyeing all the qwerty-quirky colorful, kitschy, & strange ugly ass art all over dayglow walls. Outside on the sidewalks knots of people smoked cigarettes in the rain as if it was the most natural thing to do at night in the misty Seattle rain.

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Response to a Concerned Small Business Owner over 15 NOW

Earlier this month I posted a link on one of my social media sites to an essay I wrote the night before, “Yes, $15 an hour minimum wage, NOW!” Among the people who responded along a spectrum between yes and no were two from my native state of Virginia. Let’s call one of them Brigid, which, of course, is not her real name. Brigid, a progressive liberal more radical than many and as mellow as a Summer pond at twilight, expressed concern about us activists moving too fast to raise the minimum wage. She thought proponents for $15 now would be wise to slow down and take more time. After all, why rush it and mess it up for all of us?

More captivating, however, was a wrenching inquiry from a friend of mine back East. He was a small business owner who ran a small but bustling bakery and café. My friend, let’s call him Isaac, declared raising the minimum wage up to $15 an hour “would put” him “out of business in one month.” Unless, he said, he jacked up his prices. I could hear him as he pounded his fist upon the countertop as he continued. “The socialist-workers rights-stick-it-to-the-man person in me loves it, but I am the man here. This seriously would break me,” he wrote. “Why do this if prices just rise in concert with pay?”

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Raise the Minimum Wage

It’s not about the Money

Up Close and Uncompromising! The front of one of the famous Red T-Shirts worn by volunteers for Kshama Sawant's Socialist Alternative Campaign for Seattle City Council, Position 2, the 5th of November 2013. Photo by William Dudley Bass.

Up Close and Uncompromising! The front of one of the famous Red T-Shirts worn by volunteers for Kshama Sawant’s Socialist Alternative Campaign for Seattle City Council, Position 2, the 5th of November 2013. Photo by William Dudley Bass.

Those who argue against raising the minimum wage do not get it. The naysayers spin broken webs of economic facts and figures rooted not in the reality of our natural environment but inside the charts and computer algorithms of a virtual world divorced from physical reality. It’s not about the money. I want to stand up and shout, “It’s not about the money; it’s about people! Real live human beings!”

I really want to jump up and yell, “It’s not about money, you insert language most foul!” Such verbal intensity, however deliciously vulgar, would just rile up the troll militias, so I won’t cuss here. It’s challenging enough to feel compassion and empathy for my fellow human beings, including those who exhibit cruelty and heartless stupidity. No matter. We all suffer. Everyone single one of us experiences suffering. Life is Struggle.

The working classes get life is a struggle. So do artists and small business owners. So do the unemployed, the underemployed, the homeless, the foreclosed, the laid off, the poorly paid, the uneducated, the overeducated, students deep in debt, the hungry, the sick, the pissed off. Reformers understand action is better than indulging in cynicism, apathy, and do-nothingism. Revolutionaries understand reform only goes so far before it dead ends in a mirage. Struggle serves to move the working classes from enduring ever more suffering to survive to rising up to stand in their power and thrive.

During these bleak but exciting times I volunteered for Kshama Sawant’s openly Socialist campaign for Seattle City Council. I joined with other veterans of the Occupy Uprisings from the Green Party of Seattle and the Seattle branches of the Socialist Alternatives to serve to get her elected. Other Socialist Alternatives ran strong campaigns elsewhere, especially Ty Moore in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

It proved a tight race. Still counting ballots days after the Election. We rocked the city and made waves across the nation. Ripples were felt around the world. It was an astonishing experience. A small, highly disciplined organization raised well over $110,000 and marshaled over 300 volunteers, many of them part-time volunteers such as myself. What helped us stand out in addition to our red t-shirts was our uncompromising stand for a $15.00 an hour minimum wage.

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My Third Wife Changes Her Name: Gender Issues, Ex-Wives, and Surname Conflicts

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The Blended Family Wedding of Kristina Katayama (L) and William Bass (R) with vows to their children (Morgan, Kate, & Talia) and with their Community.

I married Kristina this past Saturday the 11th of July 2009. She was the great love of my life at that time. We have been together over 7 years, ever since late 2001, as I write this essay. Kristina is a vibrant and dynamic woman, bold, sexy, intelligent, professional, and passionate. She lives full out as a Postmodern Age human being. We married ourselves privately in bed back in May 2005 and became officially engaged in November 2005. We intended to celebrate with a public, legal wedding in the summer of 2006. Didn’t happen. We felt too busy with careers and children, however, and lived as if already married. In a way we already were. And in 2009 we finally did it. Up to our Wedding Day, Kristina used her father’s family name, “Katayama,” as her own. And after our wedding she insisted on changing her name. Or, to be more accurate, adding my surname to hers.

“What?” I asked incredulously. “That’s old-fashioned culturally-ingrained male domination of females. I don’t own you. I’ve fought against this kind of bigotry my whole life.”

I had more to say, too. “I LIKE the Japanese sound of ‘Katayama.’ Mine is an “Olde English” name. I like the global feel of Bass and Katayama being together as a couple. It supports Euro-Asian-American planetary integration! My name is short and monosyllabic. Yours is long and lovely with four syllables emphasizing the same vowel. And don’t you dare hyphenate! That’s a monstrosity!” Blah blah blah.

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