~ Stories from the streets & buses of Seattle, America ~
The time’s about 8 in the morning on Veteran’s Day 2023 in the Pacific Northwest, I’m the son and grandson of United States Navy men from Virginia, and was deemed too deaf to serve when I tried to enlist way back in college. Now I jounce along on the local metro bus as it barreled down Aurora Avenue South from Shoreline into Seattle on my way to work Downtown. The bus is one of those newer red-and-yellow express lane coaches, and already it bounces like some old sad hag tossed up on a trampoline by mean kids at some stupid Animal House frat party. Gosh, I’m losing it already.
My beloved, troubled country is a wreck even tho there’s many promising things going on, too. The wrecks, however, make the evening news. So, like many sick of neverending chaos and political paralysis, I am sick of conservatives and their rigid narrowmindedness. And I’m deathly sick of liberals and their rigid, ideological delusions. I’m sick of them all. Aren’t you? Are are you still yelling at your “brothers and sisters” on the other side? Where the Hell are all the normal folks in the center? The moderates? The so-called Radical Middle? Gone, baby, gone. Gone with the flood. They’ve fled, or have themselves been radicalized by extremists.
We’re long, long gone from the 1970s and 80s when my father used to joke he was a Republican who kept voting Democrat. The centerfolks are so far gone as to be beyond desperation and resignation. Instead they burn with whatever mob comes along as beacons of rage, hate, and stupidity. I know. Aye, I know, dammit, because I used to be one of them. Used to be on the Far Left on most issues and on the Right on others. For years! Liberating myself from these political-economic cults, however, has not made life any easier. Such freedom has allowed me the liberty to see everything with absolute clarity.
Homeless young White man gets on the bus in Shoreline wearing only a white T-shirt and new, too-long blue jeans. He’s tiny, lean, bushy headed, and his jeans are bunched up over dirty sneakers. He’s babbling and gesturing to invisible people. His arms and fingers jerk in jagged jumps like bolts of lightning. He’s not at all smooth in his movements. Even his head turns in rough jerk-and-stops like a robot’s with bent gears. He scares me. Definitely would not want to end up in a fight with someone who reminds me of a rabid raccoon. Temps outside are now in the 40s. Got down into the 30s overnight. It’s wet outside. Damp and misty. He’s cold. Exhibits what seem to be signs of schizophrenia, but I don’t know for certain. He sits down hard in the seat across the aisle from where I sit, so hard its almost as if he plunged down from Outer Space.
The man seems oblivious to the cold other than pulling his t-shirt up over his face for a moment or two, then he stares around seeing thru everyone on the bus as if we’re all invisible to him, but he can see all those people invisible to us. Or entities. His speech is intelligent gibberish, and he jabs his finger around the bus as those invisible creatures up in the air. I feel if he actually saw me, and if had an axe in his hands, he would immediately render open my skull out of some mix of unrestrained curiosity and evil duty to some prehistoric old god whose call he is unable to resist.
Earlier when I’d first boarded the bus a large, heavy-set Black man had sat in the same seat. The man was watching YouTube videos on his smartfone and listened to them full blast without any ear buds. Rude as shit. Didn’t give a damn about infringing on anyone else’s auditory space. Maybe this is how he felt like getting back at The Man, whatever that may represent for him. How the Hell do I know? I just sat there and sucked it up because I myself was too tired, too cold, too pissed off, and the moment I, a White man in his mid-60s, spoke up, he would label me a self-righteous racist. Didn’t wish to get caught up in microagressions. Reminded myself of the old, tired maxim not to “sweat the small stuff.” The thing is, however, this man was smiling. He was engrossed. Happy. He kept smiling and smiling at whatever he watched. He looked so happy I called him the Happy YouTube Man.
Me, well, I’m profoundly Hard-of-Hearing, nearly Deaf, so I am not in Happy’s body, not in his shoes, so maybe he had enough money for the smartfone and an ad-free YT subscription but not for a pair of earbuds. Maybe earbuds hurt his damn ears. The ear molds of my new hearing aids hurt my ears at first. Made ’em burn a little bit. For the first time ever, for I got these new hearing aids back in September, my health insurance from my dead-end retail job covered the cost. Woo Hoo! They even reimbursed me for the co-pay that was so huge I had to lay it on a credit card. So I took the reimbursement and paid off the credit card. Nope, sent my eldest daughter $105.00 of it as they had gotten laid off the previous week when the nonprofit they worked at ran out of funding. So they laid off an entire little section in their department, a section that labored to help transgendered and queer people being discriminated against for being themselves in New York City secure rental apartments and health care.
So Happy YouTube Man got off the bus and left his damn trash in the goddamn seat. Yeah, I’m stewing now, but too exhausted already and not even at work yet. It’s cold and wet outside and not much warmer on the bus. At least it’s dry on the bus. Lots of homeless people are on the bus to get out of the weather. They’re bundled up and some sleep are stare off over a pile of bags in their laps. The person in the seat in front of me sleeps curled head down between his lap and the back of the seat before him with his clothes spilling out onto the floor of the bus. The jerky White fella in the too-long blue jeans took his place across the aisle.
Skinny White fella with psychiatric issues snatches up an empty, plastic water bottle and stares at it. He snarls and makes angry sounds. For he is a human being after all, a Homo sapiens of Earth. Maybe he’s mad someone left their trash in what’s now his seat. Maybe not. Because he unscrews the cap off the water bottle and starts peeling and scraping invisible stuff off the back of the seat before him and sticking it into the empty water bottle. Gives up and drops the bottle back were he found it with the lid next to it. His left hand keeps jerking up towards the ceiling and his fingers skewer the air like, um, skewers. His arm movements, however, remind me of a man lost in broken prayers.
Skinny cold White guy shivers and giggles. He has found a new toy! He giggles over and over as he unscrews and rescrews a metal screw from a red, plastic, stop-the-bus fixture bolted to the shiny, stand-up metal bar. Then he unscrews it again. Removes the metal screw and eats it. Yep, pops it in his mouth and swallows it without skipping a beat. Darn thing was at least half an inch long. Swallows it! Starts pointing to something up in the air only he can see. He glowers in anger at whomever whatever he’s pointing at.
Yeah, I was flooded with a dozen different emotions all at once. Everything from surprise to disgust to sadness to helplessness to anger.
Later at work I shared my experiences with a few of my coworkers. Wayne Bob, a buddy I’ve known since 1980s North Carolina, said, “that fella got a loose screw! Hate to see it come out in his stools!”
Didn’t wanna see any loose screws coming out that way, but did start calling him, “Loose Screw Guy.”
Composed from Notes saved and “Sent from my iPhone.”
End of Vignette.
What do we as a civilization do with our fellow citizens who are homeless, jobless, and/or mentally ill without care? Our nation-state is deep in massive debt, a debt increasing into critical levels as multiple crises converge with compounding expenses. There are multiple national security crises including the threat of major wars as well as increasing incursions of UFOs/UAPs/NHIs, multiple environmental crises including extreme climate disruption, multiple economic crises, multiple health care crises, energy crises, the issues of accelerating technological change with the looming threat of the AI Singularity approaching, cascading social justice crises, and the crises of a highly polarized and broken government struggling to find ways forward as it’s become impossible to seriously reform an ossified but nearly holy Constitution.
There isn’t much money available to fund the services needed to address the convergence of income inequality, homelessness, affordable housing, living wage jobs, and health struggles including addiction illnesses and those psychiatric/psychological in nature. Even if there was enough funding, we’re entering into an age of demographic decline. There are not enough people trained to work in these professional services, even fewer who want to, and not enough money to pay them what they deserve. And don’t even get me started on those clueless and naive enough to say, “For the cost of one aircraft carrier we could blah blah blah.”
We find these challenges duplicated around the world. They torment all nation-states and stateless-nations in great degree. It’s become increasingly clear simply swapping out one economic-political system for another in the endless “war of the isms” isn’t going to solve the problem either. We must move beyond fighting each other over 19th Century isms and figure out something for the 21st Century because the 22nd isn’t gonna wait.
The Reagan Administration often gets the blame for closing down the numerous psychiatric hospitals and long-term mental health institutions and for dumping those patients out on the streets. Deinstitutionalization fueled the first major wave of homelessness since the Great Depression. The situation and history of these evens is far more complicated than President Reagan’s actions at the time. For one thing, the public and the nation was appalled back then at the horrific abuse going on inside those institutions. The corruption, the physical and psychological torture, the rapes and sexual degradation, the abuse of juveniles, the poor food and health care, the poorly trained and overstressed staff, and more. It was as if Americans suddenly awoke to a gulag of abuse hiding in plain sight. The horrors also extended to so-called nursing homes for the elderly and for invalids.
Reforms were demanded, and, sadly, maddeningly, there weren’t enough funding available. These institutions were thus shuttered, but most families had neither the financial means, the time, the skill sets, the training, the patience, or even the room to take care of those turned loose by the closure of the invisible gulag. Most of these people ended up on the streets, prey to whomever and whatever, abandoned by nearly everyone, and self-medicated into addiction and oblivion. These chickens have already come home to roost, and it’s a tragic, violent, sad, and frightening disaster. Cthulhu has emerged from the Abyss and stands in the oceans above the edge of continents, for we in our mindlessness have called forth something primal and ruinous within us, but we are unable to see what’s truly there. We may think we know what’s going on, but even now we fail to take these crises seriously.
Loose Screw Guy was busy digging around his seat for other screws and bolts to eat. My stop came up, so I got off to walk the last three-quarters of a mile to work.
William Dudley Bass
Saturday 11 November 2023
Friday 17 November 2023
Shoreline/Seattle, State of Washington
The United States of America
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Copyright © 2023 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.