A Night View of View Ridge Playfield, and a Name

Dear Diary,

Last night, I kept at another project of mine way too late.  And then around 12:30 A.M. I suddenly needed to go do Number Two.  My options included Safeway, if I could get there enough before 1 A.M.; View Ridge Playfield; or Gas Works Park.  Since I was, as usual, in the northeast of the main campus, the easier direction by far was east, towards Safeway and then, since I got there at 12:57, View Ridge.  Fearing all the while that I'd been misinformed, last week, and the playfield's restrooms wouldn't really be open.

I needn't have feared.  (More precisely, I needn't have feared that.  I should've feared the cliffs in nearby sidewalks more.)  Yes, dear Diary, it's the return of the dreaded door shot:

I remembered that in the page in which I'd forgotten View Ridge's restrooms, I'd been paying attention to privacy.  View Ridge's men's room is in the common category of not-quite-worst:  the toilet stall has no door, but does face a wall at the far end of the room from the main door.  In this particular case, you can see that there used to be doors; I have no idea why two of them:

One aspect of the playfield had puzzled me on both previous visits, because it involves stairs.  Since the park was deserted, it seemed a good time to walk away from my cart and climb those stairs.  Now, all I've seen people do at the top of the stairs is turn around to look at the view, which doesn't work at all well at night, but here is, as promised, a night view of the playfield:

There turned out, though, to be an open door at the top, and I couldn't resist going through it.  There I gradually found what seemed a whole new park:  a ballfield, a playground, picnic tables ... ?  Finally came View Ridge Elementary School, and light dawned.  The neat stuff I found there, a mosaic near the picnic tables, is almost certainly on the school side of the border, but here's a picture anyway:

One of the few who've been reading you, dear Diary, in the slow time that I hope will end soon, asked me a question the other day.  He wanted to know what I thought of the current protests.  I replied, essentially, that they've become too big to have a single opinion of.  I can't forget, for example, that I shop daily at a store that was attacked under cover of a protest.

But that evades a central aspect of the question.  I have continued to write you, dear Diary, instead of running off to join the rallies, so I suppose it's only fair that I be asked, but my answer is unambiguous:  Black lives matter, and should not be taken at anything like the current horrendous pace by those who claim to protect and serve us.

Several of my first publications were about race relations in Chicago.  My work on a student newspaper there is almost my only published writing not available online, but if you watch this page, currently pretty much up to 1984, eventually you should find:  "A Study in Black and White", early 1989, history; a story about crime in spring 1990; and two items in September 1990, "Analyze Don't Memorize:  There Will Be a Test", chronology, and "Segregation", maps.

So here's the last thing that got my attention in View Ridge Playfield last night:

And here's a display in front of University Unitarian Church, not far away, that names some names:

I want to try to return to the conversation a name that hasn't been said nearly enough, these last weeks.  In my first publication in Seattle, I made the following extravagant claim:  "as a mentally ill homeless man, I give thanks daily that I haven't found myself in law enforcement's gunsights."

Extravagant, but mostly true to this day; and if I don't fear police as much as might a black man in my shoes, I still do fear them.  That's due to several attacks on people like me, but especially the murder of John T. Williams, 1960-2010, in my old neighbourhood.

Williams was, like me, not black, but unlike me he wasn't white either.  He grew up in a First Nations village on Vancouver Island.  He became a carver, as is often said, but rather less often have we been shown his work; here's an example from the 1980s.  We hear that he also grew up alcoholic, and he was living at 1811 Eastlake, not technically homeless, when shot; but he was also, apparently, separately, mentally ill.  He was known to the policeman who shot him.

Apparently there was some saying of indigenous names on Capitol Hill lately, so by rights he should already be known to many protesters; but it was time anyway for me to say his name.

Bye for now, dear Diary.  I'm currently planning a very long trip to take in all the remaining North Seattle parks known to me, to begin next week if the weather actually does improve, as forecast.