Tag Archives: Homelessness

Is it a Full Moon or what?

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Street Mayhem in Seattle/Madness in the City 

Gaza flags waving
Motorcycles racing 
Prostitutes waving
Cruiser cars with explosive mufflers cruising…
It’s 80° outside on Aurora Avenue!

It’s Saturday in the city! In the Emerald City of Seattle! Seattle, the City of Cranes! The old Jet City! Once the City of Dirt! And in Shoreline, too, one of Seattle’s satellite cities, this one on its northeastern border. Used to be wilderness here stewarded by Indigenous Native American tribes. We pulled out of our garage in our hot new red car, a 2025 Subaru Crosstrek Wilderness painted “Pearl Lithium Red with Gold accents and Black cladding.” Pearl lithium red. Who thinks up such names for these colors? My wife is driving as I’m still recovering from health challenges. When I first met my wife in person, after she picked me up from the airport in Richmond, Virginia, she zoomed down the freeways like a gleeful madwoman. “I drive like I’m in Jamaica, mon!” She shouted and laughed. Indeed, she is originally from the island nation of Jamaica. Continue reading →

Fentanyl Sunshine Bible Man

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Another Seattle urban vignette…with pictures

Didn’t shoot any fotos this particular day, but shot this of new development along Thomas Street from another sunny day from the 27th of February 2025 was much like today’s happy blue skies. A passenger jet heads south towards SeaTac.

Saturday the First of March was a glorious, sunny day towards the end of a strange, whiplashed Winter. Even texted my wife, Faithlyn, I was “Off the bus & walking to work. It’s gorgeous outside!”

“Enjoy!” She replied.

Strode east down and up Thomas Street thru the South Lake Union neighborhoods. Used to be called the Cascade area until wealthy developers changed everything up again before the Great Recession and the Covid Pandemic further disrupted and perturbed this part of Seattle. The distance from where I hop off the notorious E-Line down from Shoreline on 7th just off Aurora/99 to where I work at the Downtown Seattle REI store is about 3/4s or 4/5s of a mile long.

Passed Kati Vegan Thai restaurant and approached the local Cascades Pea Patch gardens and city park. A obviously homeless White man sat on a park bench in the sunshine. He’s twisted off to the side like a pretzel. Sigh. It occurs when an drug addict bent over in the “fentanyl fold” sits down. His buttocks were exposed. They glowed a bright clown red more from cold and chafing than from any sunburn. Seems so many “folded people” can’t keep their pants up. That’s why they often walk with their legs bowed out like a crab scuttling sideways to keep their britches partway up over their thighs. He’s loving the sunshine, tho. He’s sprawled crooked across the park bench sunning himself like a sea lion atop a rocky beach. Continue reading →

Fentanyl Bus

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Wednesday 19 February 2025
Cold clamminess gripped the city like freezing, wet sand from a riverbank in winter. The bus finally came for me to catch a ride home. Was the notorious E-Line, “E” for Express bus. Supposed to be a speedy beady bus, yes, but, alas, twas slow as mud. So many stops. So many agitated Humans in altered states jostling in the doorways like insects jerking in the mandibles of a wolf spider. The night felt scary dark beneath cloudy skies dropping cold rain. Typical hypothermic weather in Seattle. Give me clear, dry, crisp, subfreezing weather instead, but no, twas hypothermia time in the City of Cranes. Had gotten off work shortly after 21:00, walked about 0.8th of a mile or nearly 1.3 kilometers down and up hills to the bus stop over the Aurora Tunnel, and waited and waited. The beautiful Emerald City that sprawled in the narrow corridors between the Salish Sea and the Cascade Mountains felt grimy and gritty with metal forests of towering cranes. Felt like a syfy mining colony on some faraway alien planet. Seen too many movies, yeah. And now the bus. We Humans filed aboard anonymously. None of us paid a penny. It’s not enforced. So many homeless folks and drunken, drugged up addicts seek refuge on the bus, too. Who can blame them. I’d rather pay local taxes towards “free” mass public transit anyway. It’s after 22:00 on this Wednesday night in the Common Era.

Found a seat by a window in the center of the bus. Behind me a man, clearly homeless, was hunched over and unable to sit up straight. Drug paraphernalia was laid out on the seat next to him. Blackened, crumpled aluminum foil. A cigarette lighter. Dirty, little glass pipes, more like glass straws. A few other nameless items. Fentanyl. Damn. Hate the nasty stuff. Hate what it does to people. Hate fellow Humans who prey on the vulnerable and the sick to profit from mental illness and addiction and misery. Such greedy vampires hide way up the criminal food chain. Maybe they’re the ones who should be getting the death penalty. Yes? No? Is Human life any more sacred than any other living thing whether a great blue whale, an egg plant, or a bacteriophage? Only because we’ve psychologically isolated ourselves from our biosphere for so long we’ve forgotten we were ever part of Nature. When we most believe Earth is our world is when we most become the Aliens within this planet.

Felt the anger rise in me. I was about to turn around and tell him not to light it up. Like, hey! Put that damn fire out! Reached inside the small backpack in my lap and grabbed onto my metal water bottle as if it was a club. Kept my hand inside my daypack on the bottle, feeling the cool, dented metal, and didn’t pull it out, yet. The man lights a fire behind me in his seat. He holds the aluminum foil, shaped into a crude funnel, in one hand as he flicks the lighter beneath it. Flames blaze up quickly. A few inches high. He inhales fentanyl smoke directly above the flames, looks around, and waved the rest aside to disperse the smell. Thank goodness the top windows were cracked where we sat. For I have a keen sense of smell, but could barely smell anything. I relaxed my hand upon the bottle, and pulled my hand out of my pack. Before I knew it, the man slumped over asleep, lost in the euphoria of his fentanyl haze. This particular drug’s a synthetic opioid, not an amphetamine like meth that jacks users up into violent, scab-picking, rage zombies. This man wasn’t a violent threat to me. But his drugs were, and his toxic chemical mess certainly was. To himself and everyone else. Continue reading →

Mental Illness in the Streets & Superpowers

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A Seattle urban vignette in seconds

Heavy traffic along the Seattle/Shoreline border. Construction, motor vehicles, regular pedestrians, and, sadly, fellow humans who appeared homeless and mentally ill. Early this Saturday afternoon as I pulled out from Walgreens onto Aurora Avenue heading north, to my right noticed a strange looking human being sitting on the bench at the bus stop there. She was an enormous White woman, simply gargantuan. All she had on was a teeny tiny black swimsuit, and it was all stretched out around her torso as she reclined upon that bench while she took slow, calm drags on a cigarette. Had been hot. Today’s temperatures were in the mid-70s outside. Her pasty white flesh overflowed out of that super tight, stretched out everwhichaway black swimsuit. Right next to her, on her right side, crouched a teeny tiny old Black man with bad hair all mashed up and pulled out jaggedly in all directions. He squatted next to her upon the bench like a scrawny little bear cub doggie boo. He wore dirty gray and blue clothes, and jabbed a cigarette in and out of his mouth every other second as he puffed jerkily with high, agitated anxiety. As traffic opened up, I darted out into the lane and rocketed north.

A whole month later, on the morning of Monday the 30th of September, I witnessed in seconds as I drove along Aurora Avenue again more people endangering themselves and others. At the same bus stop as before, a youngish Black man bounced around hunched over and swinging his arms wildly. He seemed to be screaming and singing at the same time. Couldn’t tell what the hell he was doing. Except he never stood up and at times he raced and skittered quickly about like a giant spider. There were three piles of clothes and bags and random possessions around the bus stop, and he tore thru each one in turn. As he did so he snatched and flung items up in the air and out into the street. He’d zip out into the street, stop and shout, all while hunched over, then spider back to the bus stop. Two women tried to stand there to wait for the bus, but they couldn’t take any more of his blammy nuttery and in less than a minute ran away. Maybe he was hunched over due to Fentanyl, but he moved as if cranked on speed and meth. Three other guys stood nearby ignoring him as they stood over a mound of clothes and luggage debris.  Continue reading →

Troubled People on the Interurban Trail

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Broken minds are everywhere, invisible

Today is the 80th anniversary of D-Day. Would have been an extremely different and horrifying world if Nazi Germany and its Axis Empires had won the Second World War – and they very nearly did. Thoughts of our history with changing attitudes toward duty and sacrificed blazed around inside my mind. Went to hike the Shoreline section of the regional Interurban Trail system. Brisk walk with a daypack up to Trader Joe’s and back home to my apartment complex. Part of regaining my health so I could backpack in the mountains once again, thruhiking the Timberline Trail around Mt. Hood in Oregon at the end of July weighs on my mind, so first had to walk swiftly on the flats without passing out. Off I go. Soon passed a homeless White man in pink clothes wearing white, puffy booties as he sat in the sun enjoying the late spring weather. He focused on using his hands to crank or turn parts on what looked like a small wood and leather puzzle box about the size of a softball. 

Later passed a well-dressed, young Black man, looked like a college student with a beige V-necked sweater on, as he stomped from the Shoreline Trader Joe’s over to the trail while hollering about God. His daypack burst with clothes and books. The man’s voice is really loud, his arms and legs jerk with agitation, and he lets the whole world know he is “angry!” When he looked over and saw me trotting along with my one trekking pole, he shouted, “By the Almighty God, by His Holy name, I’m gonna kill you for having that stick!” Continue reading →

Loose Screw Guy

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~ 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. Continue reading →

Fone Guy & Eye Patch Man

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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 →

Street Scenes from the Neighborhood

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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. Continue reading →

Bad Bad Bus Ride…& the Decline of America

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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

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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

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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 →

HAS THE WORLD CHANGED?

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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 →

MAKE IT STOP

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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.

Continue reading →

Excuse me, Sir, I’m starving

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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.

Continue reading →

Seattle Vignettes: A Prose Poem in Five Parts

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  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 →

She Cries in the Cold, Cold Rain (The Poem)

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She cries in the cold, cold rain
hunched over two worn, tattered duffel bags
and a pile of dirty blankets and clothing.
Every thing she owned is soaked in pain.
Her nest is chaos.
I stand there, already late for work,
overwhelmed,
sad, angry, and ashamed.
Afraid I may be fired for being late after I miss the train.
Again.
I feel helpless.
I rage against our economic, political, and religious systems.
I feel stupid.
And I am late to catch the train to work.
Again.

The woman camps upon concrete floors at the bottom
of a partially open stairwell across from an elevator
next to a bus stop
across from the
SeaTac Airport Link Light-Rail Train Station.
One wall is solid;
the other heavy, rubberized wire mesh.
Water ripples across the floor.
Wind blows in raindrops.
Every drop explodes
as flogs once lashed the backs of wayward sailors
and slaves.
And sometimes still do.

She glances up and stares around in wild desperation,
as crazy as a fox hemmed in by hounds
gone mad with hunger lust
and fear.
And she is hungry,
this fox,
and scrawny as a walking stick
dying in the silver gloom of December in Seattle. Continue reading →

Aurora Avenue and the Dark Side of Love

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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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