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.
Uh-Oh. He rocked back into position. Hands back up to his mouth. One of those few who don’t need any bullhorns to amplify their natural voices. He thundered forth like a gritty preacher from the pulpit of the street:
“HAS THE WORLD CHANGED? HAS THE WORLD CHANGED?”
“WELL, HAS IT?” roared back inside my mind.
Street Preacher Man exposes himself again out in the street. Folks just keep walking and scurrying back and forth as he bellows and bends over and thrusts himself up in unending sequence. He does it over and over and over again with the same automatic rhythm as if he’s some windup mechanical Deadhand clanking thru the gears guarding the Perimeter of the Here & Now from the Grand Finale of the Apocalypse.
The crossing lights switched to walk after what seemed an eternity of tragedy and a group of us hurried across Aurora to the next RapidRide E Line bus barreling north. My hearing aids picked up the absurdist cuckoo clock racket of a loud mechanical bird tweeting for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.
What was Street Preacher Man’s story? What twists and turns along the ups and downs of life led him to moon and flash the whole wide world while challenging our collective bullshit? We gaze in shock, horror, and try not to giggle as we unload with our opinions but do little else but hurry home? Got on the bus. Ugh. Those big, green-red’n’yellow E Line buses, the pride of the Emerald City, are once again full of mentally disturbed and emotionally volatile people, addicts, alcoholics, students, workers, shoppers, and even families of tourists who attempt to shield their children from half-naked humans caked in filth and scabs and loud toughs ranting to one one and everyone with violent profanity.
“HAS THE WORLD CHANGED? HAS THE WORLD CHANGED?”
“WELL, HAS IT?” Has it? Well?
Any wonder our otherwise progressive city and state is completely wrong on its war on cars? Even if all private transportation was abolished, we still need fossil fuels for a plethora of a bazillion thangs from plastics to rubber to fabrics to industrial and agricultural chemicals to lubricants and many other items. And, yes, absolutely, we need to move away from our addiction to fossil fuels. Do we need to tear out precious metals from the insides of our planet’s crust to make giant, heavy batteries tho? And unleash even more toxic waste into Earth’s biosphere?
Ahh, dilemmas, dilemmas. Global climate change. Economic and financial malaise. Pollution. Wars and crises threatening world wars. Nuclear weapons. Chemical and biological weapon. AI and combat robots and the singularity. Racism, sexism, and endless cultural wars. Pandemics and epidemics. UFOs/ETs and planetary security issues. Homelessness. Wealth inequality. Severe political polarization. Religious extremism and ideological rigidity. Food and nutritional security. Clean water. Clean air. Overpopulation. Energy, energy, energy. The lists of our overlapping and converging wicked problems is long and overwhelms.
My beautiful city has its own maddening list. Seattle has been overdeveloped and hollowed out by real estate developers, riven by protests and riots, buried under alternating floods and wildfire smoke, overrun with homeless encampments, jammed up with political dysfunction and inept police reform, and eaten alive by the Covid Pandemic and the Opioid Epidemic. Mental illness and emotional distress are even more widespread than COVID-19 and feels as if the challenges of neuropsychological health are out of control and beyond our financial limits to fix. At least we are in our America and not Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, or Khamenei’s Iran. Right?
One could hear the man loud and clear over the roar of traffic and the chatter of pedestrians.
“HAS THE WORLD CHANGED? HAS THE WORLD CHANGED?”
“WELL, HAS IT?” clanged inside the caverns of my mind.
Kristina, one of my ex-wives, texted a group of us to showcase the incredible news of Yvonne Chouinard of Patagonia giving away the wealth of his company to better serve those in need. I responded Patagonia also treats the workers in its overseas factories better than the majority of other similar companies. Fondly recalled I still have some old climbing gear stamped <C> purchased in my early climbing days before Chouinard split into Black Diamond and Patagonia. Chouinard turned Patagonia over to a trust to leverage the profits to fight global climate disruption. The old mountaineer and entrepreneur was held up as an altruistic angel, the epitome of compassionate capitalism in an age of encroaching corporatism and neofascism. Imagine if Bezos, Musk, and Schultz did the same instead of crushing their workers struggling for greater democracy in the workplace?
Then again one of the weaknesses of our current economic system is our neofeudal social dependence on the patronage of individual billionaire ultracapitalists. Isn’t it? We elevate plutocrats as supermen in a madcap Ayn Randish romantic fascist sort of way and don’t even realize it as so many of us are lost in the envy of their wealth.
“HAS THE WORLD CHANGED? HAS THE WORLD CHANGED?”
“WELL, HAS IT?”
Trayvon Martin was shot dead over ten years ago on the 26th of February 2012 less than a month after his 17th birthday. Remember him? Do you remember Trayvon Martin? And the eruption of the First Black Lives Matter Revolt as the Occupy Movement wound down? Even today, even after the so-called War on Cops and the Second Black Lives Matter Revolt and the insurrections of White supremacist Christian nationalist militias, and the Standing Rock and Coal Train, Water, and Oil Pipeline battles and the rise of Q Anon and the Trumplers and more mass shootings, has anything really changed? Is the world better off? Can a man stop pulling down his pants now?
“HAS THE WORLD CHANGED? HAS THE WORLD CHANGED?”
“WELL, HAS IT?”
You tell me. Yes, tell us. Better yet, show us. Or is all we truly have left to look at is someone’s unwashed ass and waxy cock rocking in disdain on the side of the street?
William Dudley Bass
Wednesday 14 September 2022
Monday 17 October 2022
Shoreline/Seattle, Washington
USA
Cascadia
Earth
Copyright © 2022 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.