Three Vignettes from Shoreline, a small satellite city on the NW border of Seattle

There’s a mentally unstable young bearded White fella dancing, leaping, and spinning around in the intersection of N. 155th and Aurora 99 near our apartment complex in the south-central Shoreline neighborhood of Westminster. He’s acting like a dumb ass goofball. The man dramatically waves around a cardboard sign as he squats and jumps as he begs for money. He acts silly because maybe he thinks his showing off out in the streets looks cute, but all he’s really doing is pissing off every driver around as he frolics right out there in the middle of the road as if he’s up on stage. At least he got some pants on, a pair of blue tropical-print board shorts. And they’re pulled up, too. Some folks out on the streets don’t even have their britches up.

Had noticed him earlier as I drove uphill to the pharmacy at Walgreens. Passed him crouching at the corner of McDonalds munching fiercely on whatever food he got a hold of. He chewed in a hurry as he peered all around with feral intensity. Reminded me of a wild beast backed into a corner and about to pounce up into your face. 

Drove into the parking lot at Walgreens and stopped. Parked. Garbage was strewn around the store on the Shoreline side of the Seattle boundary. Most of it was the kind usually associated with the trash left behind by homeless people and too many lazy ass bus riders who don’t give a shit about much of anything anymore. Not just metro riders either. Saw plenty of people pull up in cars, park, open their doors, and toss handfuls of garbage out across the pavement. A primal urge rose up, a desire to slam my car into theirs and dart over and smash them in their stupid fucking heads with … something … a caste-iron granny skillet, and, of course, the feelings pass and I shrug and let it all go like my parents, my teachers, my therapists, and the authorities have showed us over the decades. Yes? Pick your battles. Not worth going to prison over. No right to play god. We aren’t in their shoes. Practice acceptance, compassion, empathy, forgiveness, and agape. Yeah, I get it. Still wanna kick their careless, apathetic, dumb, stupid asses, tho.

There was a young White lady in Walgreens with longish blonde hair, dressed like a hooker in a tight pink stretchy outfit. She’s dirty and bruised. Maybe she’d been evicted from those two sleazy motels the cops shut down the other day on North Aurora for human trafficking, sex slavery, drug dealing, rapes, illegal prostitution, violence, shootings, and even a murder. Minors barely into their teens were being forced into prostitution. There pimps operated them out of the Seattle Inn and the Emerald Motel. Some pimps were teenagers themselves. All those hookers, however, had and have to go somewhere. Saw this woman moments earlier while waiting for the traffic lights to turn green on Aurora. She’d lugged an enormous tote bag full of her belongings across the street. Ah, gosh, I feel sad, curious, frustrated, and resigned. Wouldn’t it be so much better to legalize, regulate, and tax prostitution? Seems having licensed, adult professional sex workers would be a good idea, yes? What would the consequences, however, for all the illegal ones and their criminal pimps, especially the minors?

Here she was again, the woman in stretchy pink who crossed the street with all her belongings, now in Walgreens, bent over the check-out counter speaking agitatedly. She desperately tried to get the cashier to convert a wad of bills into … smaller bills? Didn’t make any … sense. I couldn’t hear them well. Difficult to understand. Hard of hearing anyway, I am. But the cashier, of an East Asian ethnicity, a woman who struggled to speak English clearly, could not understand the young White woman either. She quickly got frustrated, saw a line of other customers forming behind the dirty, bruised lady, and tried to wave the assumed-hooker away out the door. The hooker lady grew more desperate and tearful. All this transpired in seconds as I walked slowly down the aisle past the counter. Walked slowly because my low back and knees hurt like hell from chronic injuries. OMG what are we to do? What are we to do? I texted my wife about this. My wife and I are both messed up as it is, lol but not LOL, as we have our own problems piling up, but at least we aren’t like those fellow humans. Our fellow humans.

Makes our squabbles over messes in the closets seem utterly frivolous by comparison.

“It’s so sad,” Faithlyn texted back. “Yeah, what can we do?”

Me again: “Idk. But the 93 yro I met at country market made my day!”

Yes, thank God for 93 year old great-grannies! After leaving Walgreen’s with the sad hooker-looking homeless lady and the traffic-weaving, street-dancing beggar lord behind, I drove on up to the sprawling, magnificent, and wonderfully so-Pacific Northwest grocery store we locals still call the Central Market even tho it’s been rebranded as the Shoreline Town & Country. Parked. Was instantly captivated by a shiny, new, blue three-wheeling car. Stepped over and joined another man talking to the owner, a man as big as a bear but without all the hair. Listened a bit, asked a few questions, and learned the machine is basically a motorized tricycle you drive sorta like a motorcycle within the chassis resembling one from a German Smart car except not as strong. The machine sported handle bars instead of a steering wheel.

“Electric?”

“Yup,” Bear said with a nod.

“Does it require a special driver’s license to operate?” I asked.

“Yes, it does,” Bear replied.

“What’s it like out in traffic?” the other guy asked.

“Ohhhh, it does pretty well,” Bear said and puckered up his face in thought. “Just stay off the interstate. Doesn’t do well around big tractor-trailers. A little too slow to scoot out of the way, and, yeah, too much wind.” 

An older car puttered right up alongside of us, nearly clipping my behind, and scooted up into the handicap parking spot next to us. The other curious man said good bye and good luck as he hurried off towards the store entrance. A small but spry elderly woman hopped out of the car and scurried over to catch the rest of the action. Saw the trike-car and quickly grew excited. She scrambled over and hopped up into this unique looking car, speaking nonstop in a way I, being a Hard-of-Hearing man, found hard to understand. She politely yelled in a way only elderly grannies can, “Take my picture!” HA! And it’s not even her three-wheeler! 

“Do you want me to take your picture?” Bear asked her.

She replied in a quick, stream of consciousness something about “yes” and “cellphones.”

She claimed the local paper recently did an article on her. I didn’t understand her name, didn’t wish to be too pushy, and simply stood back and enjoyed the moment. She behaved almost as an excited child would, announced she was 93 years old, and full of energy. Wanted to ask her what worked for her and what didn’t as far as healthy aging and longevity goes, but felt such an inquiry wasn’t appropriate at this point. After all, both of us wanted to go grocery shopping and the man with the trike-car, while patient, also seemed he needed to leave. So I stepped away and took a few pictures with my smartfone while the woman sitting in his car sought to give him hers so he could snap a few. 

Didn’t take any fotos of the aggressive dancing fellow or the person struggling at the Walgreens counter or of all the trash scattered around. The magic in the parking lot of the Shoreline T&C made my day, uplifted my spirits, and reminded me to be both grateful and humble. Still doesn’t address the confounding entanglement of homelessness, income inequality, mental illness, the opioid epidemic, violence, shootings, prostitution, mass incarceration, institutional racism and sexism, missing Indigenous women, affordable housing, living wages, corporate influence on politics, the pharmaceutical industry’s influence on the mainstream media, alcoholism, pollution, police reform, threats of dictatorship and social upheaval, climate change disruption, rising health care costs, our power and energy grids, cybersecurity, and human trafficking, just to call forth from an overwhelmingly long list of local-global wicked problems.

Still doesn’t help the beggar man dancing in the street for money, tho, or help the bruised woman desperately arguing with a cashier about breaking down change, or clean up the endless trash that appears everywhere all over again the day after it gets cleaned up. More and more asteroids and comets are being discovered, however, with a number as possible threats to Earth as well as a gigantic prehistoric crater so enormous it hid in plain site across Australia. At least the two main American political parties in power are strongly bipartisan in their determined inquiries into UFO/UAP whistleblower and witness testimonies regarding the retrieval of machinery and biologics from NHIs or Non-Human Intelligences. The same two parties seem to be on the edge of civil war in regards to nearly everything else. Even so, the elderly human being who clambered up into a new electric vehicle inspired a small number of us in the parking lot of a grocery story that day in early August of 2023 while the world still existed.

Danny Westneat, a writer for the Seattle Times newspaper, ends an article in yesterday’s Sunday edition on the desperate plight of a homeless wheelchair man left out in the streets in his own waste for several hours, over six, I think, and the struggles of others trying to help him. It’s a tragic, infuriating, and heartbreaking story. Westneat ends his article with an apology to the homeless person on behalf of the greater Seattle community and notes Seattle is over “seven years into a declared homeless emergency.” The columnist declares Wheelchair Man’s “…story is proof we’re still not acting like it,” as if there’s no homeless emergency.

On top of those issues we have a crime wave in progress and need more police everywhere, but who the hell wants more cops when so many of them appear to be racist, sexist, abusive, and corrupt? That’s too bad because there’re a lot of good cops out there, too, but they do not control the narrative.

There was a time in my life I was full of solutions for so many problems. So were many other humans, too. Now I don’t know what to do. Seems to me the biggest and most difficult underlying problem is our inability to listen to one another and work together regardless of our differences. Seems easy, yes? Except when our many differences make us extreme, then what? How do moderates work with haters and other extremists? What do we do as a species when “our” social compact on what constitutes the bedrock of truth and reality buttressed by facts breaks down in a whirlwind of lies and fake news and paranoia with the demonization of anyone who differs from you? No words left.

 

William Dudley Bass
Tuesday 8 August 2023
Saturday 12 August 2023
Monday 14 August 2023
Shoreline/Seattle, Washington
USA
Cascadia
Earth
Sol

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.