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. Mental illness is itself a culturally ingrained yet incorrect label we place upon people with diseases and injuries of the mind and emotions yet are as physical as cancer, tuberculosis, and fractured femurs. All things mental arise from the body, and so-called mental illness is as physical as anything physical. Perhaps a more accurate term is neuropsychological diseases and injuries. Too much of a mouthful, tho, for what is a global pandemic of mental illness and emotional trauma.

Early this Saturday afternoon as I pulled out from Walgreens onto Aurora Avenue in my car upon the last day of August 2024, I noticed the folks waiting nearby for the bus. They had my attention, those fellow human beings. Glad traffic was light, too, as then was able to whip out carefully and methodically instead of the usual dash and dart. My goodness, those fellow humans appeared to be really weird looking fellow human beings. One of them sat on the bench at the bus stop there. She was an enormous White woman, simply gargantuan, and appeared to weigh, gosh, maybe 300 or 350 pounds. All she had on was a teeny tiny black swimsuit, and it was all stretched out as she reclined upon that bench taking slow, calm drags on a cigarette. Temps was mid-70s outside, Fahrenheit, and her pasty, white flesh overflowed out of her super tight, stretched out everwhichaway black swimsuit.

Right next to her, on her right side, sat a teeny tiny, old Black man with bad hair all mashed up end pulled out crazy like like wild blackberry brambles pulling down a rusty, old barbed wire fence. The fella crouched upon the bench like a scrawny little bear cub doggie boo. He wore dirty gray and blue clothes. Dwarfed by the lady he shared the bench with, he gripped a cigarette between thumb and index finger. The man jabbed that cigarette in and outa his mouth every other second as he puffing jerkily with high, agitated anxiety. As the flow of buses, cars, and trucks eased up, I darted out into lanes of traffic and rocketed north. Continue reading →