Well, he certainly didn’t mistook them for little bitty hats

Cootie Man Blues is the music in my head here on the bus ride to work with a fellow scrubbing and pinching lice from his neck and head. One Saturday this month, I watched an elderly, mentally ill, homeless White man wearing an unwashed, black Chinese kung fu shirt with white trim and sideways frog buttons with Catholic rosary beads dangling a Christian crucifix around his neck pick lice off the back of his shaggy neck. He placed each louse down in his lap. Carefully and exactly with callous precision. On his dirty pants. With his dirty hands. After each time he did so, the man bent over to stare down hard at them. Really hard, as if he was squinting into a microscope. Then he reached back to his shaggy neck to pinch out more cooties to put in his lap. Oh, Lord, start me up some three-chord Cootie Man Blues.

Oh boy, he must like the feeling of itchy nuts, I reckoned. Itchy nuts. Scratching with hands, big dirty RED hands with scabs, hands so big they look like giant coconut crabs. Occasionally Cootie Man dropped a louse on the floor and gently stepped on it as if he wanted to be absolutely certain he killed that bug. Oh my God, we had a cootie picking man sitting on the E-Line, on a public bus in a city getting ready for World Cup soccer games, as we blasted down Aurora Avenue from Shoreline thru North Seattle towards Downtown. Of course, God and Goddess didn’t have anything to do with any of this. The man was his own man, a Cootie Man Blues Man. 

Weirdest damn thang, tho. Reminded me of when we used to step on cockroaches back on the dairy farm to make them burst after they darted out from beneath hay bales in the cow barn. Gosh, so long ago now, back in the 1970s, 1980s, 90s. Here it is 2026. In the 21st Century of the Common Era. 

Another old fella looked like Gandalf sat near Cootie Man. Old Gandalf wore one of those gigantic, beat-up leather and felt English hats from a mix of the Dark Ages and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth.  Gandalf kept looking at Cootie Man. Finally he rolled his eyes and shook his head as if he couldn’t take any more of this tragic nonsense.

So Gandalf turned around in his seat and shouted at the dude, “There’s subsidized housing for folks like you; you just got to ask,” but Cootie Man’s mental illness remained paramount and unscathed. He just ignored Gandalf and kept pinching lice off the back of his shaggy head to put more cooties in his lap. He burbled in a crazy mix of baby talk and singsong burble-wurble. Gandalf gave up with one of those urban Seattle Oh-my-God-fuck-it-then-whatever-sheesh looks. 

The big E-Line bus jounced to a halt at the stop on Thomas Street over the Aurora Tunnel. Good! Quickly got the hell off the bus. Next had to walk about three-quarters of a mile up and down some rolling Seattle hills to get to work. Sad, really, but I did laugh a little bit.

I shared this in a text message to my brother and sister who both lived back in rural Virginia on the old family farmland. 

My sister was not impressed. She texted back with emojis only:

🤮🤮🤮

No, I didn’t vomit, I told her. Felt disgusted, curious, sad, compassionate. He sure clawed at the back of his neck and up under his hat like a dog fighting off tiny little demons. Yet he seemed perfectly as peace with the tedious task of picking off these life-sucking demons one by one, staring down hard at them in simple curiosity, and then squashing them under his shoe. Cootie Man probably had him a passel of cootie eggs glued up in his hair, too, and some of those cootie eggs were probably hatching lots of baby lice.

I don’t know why I write about shit like this. Other than it seems more real than me than well-dressed people getting all excited about the World Cup soccer/football games coming to Seattle. Suffering cuts thru ecstasy every time.

Made me contemplate Jesus, too. Would Jesus have returned as a mentally-disturbed, homeless man quietly examining his own head lice in his lap? Probably not. Would he sit next to the poor man and offer support? May be, possibly. Probably. He would hang with the lepers of our time as he did millennia ago. Earlier in the morning had come across a YouTube video documenting one of the CIA’s RV or Remote Viewing programs. The CIA RVer, a former Methodist minister, claimed he remotely viewed Jesus, and all of them, he and his fellow RVers at the CIA, have to do this although they’re not informed of who the subject is at first. What they encountered was a short, Jewish man with short, curly brown hair wearing a business suit. He was friendly and forgiving. His attire and hair was to say he’s not stuck in the distant past. Here he is today, right now. The CIA guy claimed his encounter with Jesus via remote viewing changed his life for the better even tho he, Mr. CIA Man, wasn’t a particularly religious person. So, no, I don’t think Jesus would show up today as a disturbed, deranged homeless person. Nor as some billionaire corporate CEO or populist politician either. All this flashed across my mind after I got off the bus and began walking east down Thomas Street towards the outdoor adventure giant a couple of small hills away.

All of this happened on Saturday the 13th of June 2026 on my way to work. Reminded me, too, of the late Dr. Oliver Sacks and his classic book from 1985, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat and Other Clinical Tales.

William Dudley Bass
Thursday 18 June 2026
Monday 22 June 2026
Thursday 25 June 2026
Monday 29 June 2026
Shoreline/Seattle, WA
USA
Earth
Sol

Copyright © 2026 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.