Apesma's Birthday

It was a year ago today that I posted this Captain Beefheart spoken word bit and thus launched my great adventure in bloggery. At the time I really didn't get blogs. My limited experience was that most of them suck, and that the popular political ones were a little like on-line talk radio, but more geeky. I didn't see the attraction. My motivation was simple. I was a writer who wasn't doing much writing. The blog, I figured, would be a daily discipline to sharpen the skills. That was all.

Along the way, a few things happened. The first was that writing everyday changed everything. Between the blog and teaching my class on homelessness and poverty, I developed new insights into an issue I've worked for twenty years. I decided that the federally encouraged ten year plans had more to do with neutralizing than ending homelessness. I realized that homelessness and the changing nature of our cities flows from the logic of globalization. I started to see past all the layers of "compassion" bullshit to reality, and became more intentional about building alliances across class. I became a better speaker and a more forceful advocate. I embraced conflict as an organizing strategy. I made new friends. I began a personal biography project. I got a divorce. I started working on a book. Life changed dramatically.

Clearly, blogging is not for the faint of heart.

The other thing is that I gained readers. The map above offers a geographic snapshot of recent readership. The graph nestled at left shows the steady climb to more than 4,000 unique visitors a month. The late-March spike last year was the blogospheric event when I clashed with the Seattle Weekly. Since October, Apesma has rountinely exceeded those numbers. A very cool chemistry has arisen in the comments section as well, and several friends have started their own blogs.

Apesma's gone from a Technorati rank of up in the three-millions somewhere to below 250,000. I'm hoping that this year I break the top hundred-thousand blogs barrier. With well over a hundred-million of these things out there, I'd be among the blogging semi-elite. Otherwise, I hope things slow down. I don't know how many more years like 2007 I can take.

The People Have Spoken.

OK, I admit it. I'm a little obsessed with the panhandling thing. Since Kate Elston made a cartoon of my position in the Post Intelligencer a few weeks ago, I've become this straw man for the opposition to hold up and say, "Well, surely you don't agree with him!" The Stranger's SLOG, following Elston, has me calling Downtown Seattle Association's Have a Heart Give Smart program "a war on the poor," a claim that is overheated at best, as the DSA's lobbyist was delighted to point out. A young appellate lawyer with a degree from Yale who lives and works downtown and thinks he knows more about homelessness than I do (people like him know more than the rest of us about everything) blogs that my position is "absurd," and some Republican poli-sci prof from Houston has dismissed me as the "latte left."

This is annoying.

Panhandling is suffering made visible, and that's why it makes people so uncomfortable. I think most of us could stand to be a lot less comfortable, content, and complacent. Panhandlers have something to teach us about the world and about ourselves.

All of this got me wondering about what else is being said. Are there other downtown yuppies blogging about how annoying it is to be asked for change? I searched the Technorati blog engine for references to "Seattle panhandling" and discovered the answer to be "not really."

• Some guy who describes himself as "politically and socially conservative Catholic who enjoys the silly side of life" goes on for a bit, and dignifies the DSA's Peg Dreisinger's assertions with the term "research." It doesn't take much to convince some people.
• Another low point comes from some asshole Harvard Law graduate, who blogs at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute that New York panhandlers make $60 an hour and don't even open savings accounts. This sends him into a tight-assed little rage.
• Someone on MySpace is planning to be homeless for 48 hours this month, but has already decided that "every chance they get when panhandling they use to get abusive substances." It is also a well-known fact that MySpace is where the English language goes to curl up and die.
• Again on MySpace is a story from Bellevue about a woman pulling up next to someone in a 90s T-bird to ask for a few dollars for gas. Incredibly, she gives it to her. Another soft touch on MySpace, this one from Bothell, discusses karma and resisting the urge to judge. It's a nice little essay. A Capitol Hill MySpace blogger has responded to the P-I article too, and has a thoughtful position as well.
• A guy from North Dakota who moved here four months ago notices a post-Hempfest surge in panhandling. "They're like an annual locust - a plague on the city after the largest "protest-ival" is over," he says. "I'm not sure what bothers me more, the little kids in strollers at Hempfest or the leftover stoners." Being from South Dakota myself, allow me to say, "Welcome, brother."
• A quite lovely post on panhandling as an opportunity to practice compassion comes from a woman in San Fransisco. I think she kind of nails it. This from her post:
  

"i saw a woman tonight in front of walgreens on polk street. she was a slight pile of dirty clothes with a head and tiny feet in socks sticking out. she was sobbing, begging, lamenting. she had lost her shit, basically. her face looked so old and she had gray dirty hair, eyes swollen from crying and splotches. she was holding herself and rocking back and forth. i've been to that walgreens a million times and every time ignored the people begging out front. tonight i gave her about a couple of dollars in change. if a beer is going to make this night bearable for her, then i'm not going to deny her that. how many of us actually use our change anyway. every home i've ever visited has some kind of jar full of change. people stockpile it for years and then cash it in. most of us would not miss it."

Dr. Wes Unplugged

This come hither shot of Dr. Wes Browning was taken around ten years ago at the Real Change office. I think we were trying to get a speakers bureau photo. You want this guy coming to your kids' school. Right?

My favorite blog anywhere these days is what Wes calls his Runoff Blog. Between Wes' weekly Technocrati Sucks feature, in which he always finds a new, innovative way to say, well, Technocrati Sucks, his ongoing childhood memoir (Wes' parents tried to kill him when he was one year old, but only succeeded in causing brain damage that resulted in perfect recall of events through the age of four), and his always astonishing and incredibly eclectic UTube video offerings, I find myself dropping in around five times a week to see what's new. One of his latest video posts, a 1932 Max Fleischer cartoon built around an appearance by the Mills Brothers, is simply jaw dropping, as is this post of a Lindy Dance competition of kids going nuts over Sweet Georgia Brown. You can't watch either of these without feeling very, very happy.

Hey, Look at Me!

Keeping a blog has to be one of the more narcissistic acts in the writer's repertoire. So it was really just a matter of time until I went there.

Now that I have, I find myself actually wanting people to read the thing. I know that my dwindling circle of friends has better things to do, so what I really need is access to a enormous pool of losers. Naturally I turned to the Internet.

On the advice of a fellow blogger who admits to spending time analyzing his visitors' IP addresses, I registered at Technorati.com. "55 million blogs," the site promo reads, "some of them have to be good."

I like this, because it speaks to the slim odds of actually finding a blog worth reading. Say that, generously estimating, there are 50,000 blogs in the world that more than ten people want to read. That means that any blog one randomly stumbles into has a less than 1 in 1,000 chance of not sucking.

This seems about right.

I'd like to think that these comfortably low expectations make me a blog rock star waiting to happen. With a Technorati rating of 1,852,099, there's nowhere to go but up.