Vermilion Art Bar, Tuesday January 7, 6pm - 9pm

Here is the url of my next show:

https://www.facebook.com/events/791664298014864/

cya there!

To the Emerald City...

The morning commuters on the E line, timeline 6 am, are mostly middle class White and Asian mid-level managers, of course the crowd may also contain a smattering of the working class ethnics, Blacks and Hispanics such as me. Everyone has a, work id badge swinging from a lanyard or clipped to a belt, a hot coffee, a briefcase or backpack and are busily punching away on a phone or laptop.

At night, however, after about 11 pm, after everyone that has a job and a place to call home has gone there for the night a radically different crowd slowly emerges, takes over and transforms the bus, the route and the many stops along the way north. This emerging crowd are the hapless and homeless, of all colors that make up Seattle's rapidly growing derelict underclass. Like day changing in to night this fog of vice and misery overtakes the bus, the streets and sidewalks along the route as seats are consumed by wheeled travel luggage, sleeping bags, cardboard signs, thick gray woven wool blankets and baby strollers pushing crippled old dogs. Some homeless scoff at storage. They enjoy the independence and security of carting all the belongings they need to survive on a daily basis outside in the cold or hot from day to day. At each stop 50 year old men lumber BMX bikes onto the bike rack while spotted faced meth heads wearing 4 dirty coats, 3 pairs of pants with dirty underwear and no socks squeak wet tennis shoes against the rubber matted floor of the great traveling monster we commonly call the E line. There faces, arms, hands and fingernails are crusted beneath weeks of blood dirt and vile. People do more than just wait for the bus at E line bus stops they cover themselves with umbrellas or blankets and light meth bubble pipes in clandestine public view. Hookers and boyfriends gather to smoke talk and organize the belongings in their luggage, they groom and redress themselves, hang out, or just take a break from life. Late night commuters stand back. They give them the space they have earned. They understand that the Aurora bus shelters are the living rooms of the homeless, the hookers, the strung out and the lost.

These night folk look tired and desperate.They are hookers who passed retirement age decades ago, young sleepy runaways,  and scar spotted meth addicts court one another hustling to find another shard of a drug that makes one believe everything is perfect and wonderful despite the environmental situation at hand. They board the bus but they have no destination. These are very dangerous people with no fear of jail or even a beating. A man with nothing to lose fears and respects nothing. He's not a stake holder. Arrows merely bounce off his chest like a superman. The E line is a destination unto itself. It flows and slithers down Aurora for more than 10  miles searching northward, Highway 99, our own urban freeway. This night crew is boarding the bus with no destination. The number 7, the 124, the E Line, these are mobile motels. Fare enforcement officers have gone home for the evening so the coast is clear, just don't forget to bring your heavy gray woolen blanket you stole from the shelter the night before. Metro must know. I think some of the drivers even empathize with the "circle riders". Not too long ago one night as I circle rode the number 7, when we got to the end of the line the driver didn't even force us to get off a tacit acknowledgement that he knew we were just riding to nowhere.

If I were new to Seattle someone might tell me to avoid Aurora Avenue although it may be the surest bet to find a cheap motel and a low cost meal. But for those housed in the many cheap motel rooms along the way life is a desperate proposition as they hustle for money to self-medicate and pay the nightly rent of $80 or more. And without the $80 nightly entry fee, the 11 am check out time comes early especially after an all night meth binge.

The history of Aurora Avenue reads like an Amityville horror highway novel. Needless to say what started out as a logging road in the 1850's, later became a state highway, and finally a strip mall littered urban hoe stroll.

I grew up in Seattle coming to know 3 central core neighborhoods, Beacon Hill, the CD and Capitol Hill. But after 2 1/2 years of living homeless I look at my new DESC studio apartment on 96th and Aurora Ave as gift from heaven. There is a mental privacy one needs. In this semi-isolation one can think sane and clear thoughts. Being crowded together with lotsa people in shelters isn't just uncomfortable or inconvenient it is , to me at least, an incubator of insanity. I was kicked out of Seattle's central core for failing the economics test of getting a good enough job to be able to rent and survive there. I will someday make my way back to the core Seattle area by a combination of rental subsidies and higher wage opportunities. But where I am is great. It is brand new and many of my building neighbors trash the neighborhood, trash the building and trash their own apartment up to the point that when they move a HAZMAT team must be called in. When I am a block away I already know what the 24 hour supportive staff has served for dinner in the dining room. I know because even from a block away chicken bones and pasta salad is strewn up and down the sidewalk.

For some reason people love animals more than people. So we have a lot of dogs at my building. Unfortunately, those little green bags that you use to pick up the poop - no one uses those. So in addition to lotsa fresh rat food up and down the block and in the apartment courtyard (the overflow of the daily breakfast and dinner we are served, even though we have kitchens) , from the beginning of the block to the front door of the building is a mine field of accumulated dog feces. Uh .....don't ask me why our neighbors don't like us. DESC has given a whole new motivation to the dispassionate catcall: " Not in my back yard!"  If I was a property owner in my neighborhood I would be very upset that this new building with all these dysfunctional people in it, are lowering my property value, property I would like to pass on to my descendants, so in this sense we are taking food from the mouths of our neighborhood children!

So why am I so happy to be on Aurora Avenue, ( the ass crack of Seattle)? Because I watched a conservative documentary one night called " Seattle is Dying", and at the end of this documentary a radical solution is proposed. A solution which is a long way from Seattle and Aurora and even a long way from freedom and justice. They show you a helicopter shot of the old McNeil Island prison complex and the narrator proposes that all the dysfunctional, drugged out, homeless, self-medicators be housed there until they can get off drugs and learn to support themselves. Just like I usta always tell my late wife "Baby , recognize, it can always get worse"