Dear Diary,
This is kind of a frustrating abandoned page. But let's get to it, shall we?
Why?
I'm sure, dear Diary, you've long since read the good article by Vivian McCall, who's now interim editor-in-chief of The Stranger, in which the article appeared, about the fully evolved, and now rapidly devolving, security measures adopted by the giant grocery chains after several years of complaining that they were losing trillions of dollars every minute to theft. (No, I admit, that could be an exaggeration, because they never quantified the damage. They just made it clear that they considered it worse than, say, an upsurge in ritual murder.)
Anyway, though, in fall 2021, their experiments on the way to what McCall described really came home to me, because I made the mistake of buying, at the Ballard Fred Meyer, a pair of socks that insisted it had been stolen, and screamed bloody murder about this all night. For years after that, I annoyed any number of Fred Meyer employees by demanding that they remove security tags before I left the building.
Something about effectively stealing from me the things I'd paid for [1], while at the same time putting the notorious "eco-blocks" illegally into the streets, congealed in me into something nasty.
And then I had a simply brilliant idea.
What?
I don't fully remember.
But the core issue involving homeless people who buy run-down old Recreational Vehicles to live in - seems to me the core issue is a Seattle law that says vehicles wider than 80 inches can only be parked in places zoned industrial.
My brilliant idea somehow applied actual ecological concepts, such as niches and succession, to the conflict between RV dwellers and businesses, not all industrial in character, but located in places zoned industrial, which in North Seattle mostly means southern Ballard. Hence "Ecology in Southern Ballard".
Why not?
Because I couldn't get legal help.
The now finally partner, yay! who organised the GoFundMe that got me housed earlier in 2021, was of course the first lawyer I thought of. I wanted to know when the 80 inch Seattle law had been passed, so I could find out why it had been passed. But online records didn't go back far enough, and I'm not sure what excuse I had for not going to the King County Law Library, but anyway, I asked her, she said she'd look it up, and there it ended. So I must have forgotten my brilliant idea pretty quickly, what with downtown parks and library hours to focus on, not to have asked her again.
I also have a feeling that the opacity of Seattle zoning, which strongly discouraged me from using "urban villages" to structure my hikes this year, may have made an appearance then too. Giving me trouble identifying just which zones allowed RVs.
On an entirely different front, November 2021 isn't that far from January 2022, when I came down with omicron COVID.
Finally, I'm quite sure that, not being a driver, I had too little sympathy for the RV dwellers, whose main problem, parking, is viscerally important to most Americans, but not to me.
What now?
I'm not sure.
I'm unlikely to recover the brilliant idea, but its outlines are fairly obvious. And my esteemed city council representative is currently trying hard to revive all the key components of the issue - RV parking, eco-blocks, and trouble for the homeless.
More importantly, either I have to get to the King County Law Library, or I have to find a lawyer who'll do it for me.
Again, dear Diary, we'll see.
[1] Sort of happened again this year. I bought two pairs of shoes there only to find that the left shoe of each pair was unwearable thanks to a security tag. They fixed the problem, and I'm currently wearing out the first of those pairs hiking for you, dear Diary.
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