Real Change News | ©Dr. Wes: When you gotta go

April 15, 2009
Vol: 16 No: 18

Dr. Wes

©Dr. Wes: When you gotta go

by: Dr. Wes Browning

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In my opinion, the most important qualification that a writer should have is the inability to do anything else. Incompetence in all subjects and activities improves writing in many important ways. It makes the writer wonder how things are done, and so encourages him to ask, giving him stuff (answers) to write down, whereas the competent won’t ask anyone how to do what they do. How often have you heard someone say, “I can do it, but I don’t know how to explain how.” The writer can write that down.

Incompetence keeps me from finding gainful employment, which motivates me to write as an alternative to that.

“But ©Dr. Wes,” you might say, “you are a Doctor in something; surely that is a sign of competence.” Actually, having a Ph.D. is primarily an indication that it took you way too long to finish school.

Besides, every generalization has its exceptions. It turns out that knowing how to patch 97-dimensional differentiable manifolds or how to blow them up and tie them into knots to make 98-dimensional balloon animals (you use 98-dimensional lips, respectively hands) is as good as not knowing anything, most of the time.

Such knowledge is especially useless if it is out of fashion or no longer current. So it is: 97-dimensions are passé, like knowing how to prepare a batch FORTRAN program on IBM cards.

Another example is knowing where all the public toilets in 1964 Seattle were. When I was 15 years old, I was a world class expert on public toilets in downtown Seattle. I also knew which buildings had public throughways, so I could navigate much of the city indoors out of the rain and I never had to relieve myself in an alley. This was important because I was addicted to Coke® and peed like the happy new dog at the dog park all day long.

The trouble here, where the incompetence rests, is that 1964 is not 2009. My knowledge of Seattle’s public pissoirs is dreadfully out of date. But because it’s no longer useful knowledge, I can leverage it into writing.

In fact by my count I have already succeeded in wasting over 360 words just getting to this, my point, that I would like everyone who reads this to help me and Real Change find the publicly accessible bathrooms, toilets, WCs, etc., in today’s Seattle.

By publicly accessible, I mean toilets you don’t have to buy anything to use. If you have to buy a cup of joe to get the key to the can, you are probably going to want to drink it (the joe), to get everything you paid for. But clearly that would be counterproductive. Also, the people who would most likely use the information obtained, besides this and other writers of Real Change, would include many people who would not be able to budget a dollar-fifty or two every time they needed to “see a man about his dog,” “feed the goldfish” or “donate to the Downtown Seattle Association.”

We will not publicize the specific answers we get without permission from the individual proprietors, but we may use the information in “aggregate form,” as the banks and dot-coms like to say. We will, however, let our vendors know where they can find free porcelain outlets, so they don’t have to hold it in until they can make it to the Real Change office to use the one we have here.

Since Real Change began in 1994 we have had a ten-fold increase in the number of vendors, and we have to work out of the same space. Imagine you’re a family of four living in a house, and imagine fighting with your two teenage daughters to get some toilet time. Now imagine, there’s 40 of you in the same house, like 36 more daughters just dropped in out of nowhere. That’s Real Change during the morning rush.

Please help. Our vendors will thank you, from the bottoms of their — well, they’ll thank you.

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