Silence ending

Dear Diary,

It's a long time since I've written anything in you, and I've actually taken to putting an ending date of 2023 into my references to you on my resumes.  But as it turns out, I have things to say, and separately, want to go hiking again.  So here goes.

About a month after I last wrote in you, I felt I was finally concentrating enough on job-hunting.  So I filed for unemployment compensation, as it turned out, not long before my eligibility would've run out.  But at the same time, I also applied to North Seattle College's accounting program.  This has occasioned much confusion on the state's Department of Employment Security's part, and very little confusion on NSC's part, but anyway, it has also staved off renewed homelessness, by virtue of an incredibly patient landlord, some unemployment money, and the magic of financial aid.

But this also means I have basically no time to do anything worth telling you about, dear Diary, during each quarter; and I'm trying to complete a degree in six quarters.  So I certainly won't be back at anything like the pace of 2020 or 2021, nor even, really, of 2022 or 2023, before I hope to graduate, in December 2025.  In particular, the months of library hours research and writing, October and April, are off the table until then, although I fear the things that worried me about library hours in October 2023 are going to be even worse by October 2026.

However, between quarters, it's a different story.  My first quarter ended two weeks ago, and although I haven't been hiking much yet, and not for you at all, that's about to change.  I have three pages planned for this break, which continues three more weeks.  One will be about your main topic, park restrooms and water fountains in North Seattle; I hope finally to just do the "baseline" summer hike I've talked about for years, a boring account of what's working, with which to compare winters and other interruptions. [1]  One will be about a library.  And one will be about something completely different.  So, dear Diary, wait another week or so, and you'll have a few new pages, and I'll have to revise my resumes.

As to how well I can write your pages most specifically concerned with homelessness, now that I'm spending immense effort on a plan to avoid that status going forward, I just don't know.  I probably won't really be able to write that kind of page well, but until I get to writing one, won't know how much effect that'll have.  None of this break's planned pages are all that homelessness-specific.

Anyway, until we meet again, happy days and happy nights.

[1] I realise park restrooms are no longer of much interest to my fellow humans.  I think it's worth continuing to pay attention to them, and particularly in winter, because I think it's quite possible that the next respiratory pandemic will not politely wait to manifest until July of whatever year.  So it's fortunate that my two long breaks, while this continues, will be in August-September and December.

Buildings of the UW's Seattle Campus, part I: Preface

Dear Diary,

The University of Washington's Seattle campus includes over 200 buildings; the exact number depends on exactly what one considers a building.

Some minor basics

It's useful to know that the UW itself considers the Seattle campus to consist of four individual campuses:  Central, East, South and West.

I photographed most of the parks of West, South and East campuses in December 2020, when there were few people around.  Because I have these photos, and haven't seen much reason to add parks to the lists I made for those campuses then, I'm set to tell you, dear Diary, about them any time.  My preference, however, at this point, is to integrate them into the deluxe sets of hikes I started last year with three of the eleven regions into which I've divided North Seattle, and have continued this year by beginning two more regions.

West Campus is part of Brooklyn as I've defined it, a sixth of one of the regions I'm covering this autumn.  Central and South Campuses are another part of that region (slightly bigger than Brooklyn), but my photos of Central Campus parks were probably less comprehensive, and anyway were on the phone stolen in July 2020; I'm waiting for Thanksgiving weekend as the earliest realistic date I can re-take them, and if campus is too crowded then, may have to wait until late December again.  East Campus, meanwhile, is in a different region whose parks I don't expect to get to this year at all.

In most respects, UW is very consistent about this list of four campuses, but there's one exception:  the numbering of parking lots.  Parking lots in East, West and South Campuses have numbers like E1, S1 or W12.  However, parking lots in Central Campus have numbers like C1 or N5.  Central Campus has way too many parks to talk about in one page anyway, so I expect to divide it the same way.  I see most of the parks of north-Central Campus as fitting into two tiers, and most of those of central-Central Campus as fitting into three columns.  Since Central Campus also has by far the most buildings, I'll probably split it the same way in this page, too.

Many of the named roads of the UW can be and are driven, and have no separated pedestrian paths.  Few if any of the drivers drive fast, so it's hardly ever actually dangerous, but to be a pedestrian at the UW is for me, at least, a minor adrenaline rush.   Another detail about those roads:  Many are named for the counties of Washington.  (King County is one of the few not included.)  In West Campus, which I'm covering first, there are only three examples:  Pacific St, Cowlitz Road and Lincoln Way.  Corresponding to the fact that many of the roads can be driven, few are gravel, but gravel (and even dirt) paths aren't so rare as to be surprising, in campus parks in general and West Campus parks in particular.

Why I'm talking about the buildings

Anyway, why is a blog about parks a place to talk about over 200 buildings?  Because you aren't a blog about parks, you're a blog about running water, dear Diary, and buildings in general have that.  I've already written about at least that many library buildings, and near as I can tell, pages I write about libraries are reliably more popular than those about parks.

In addition, please remember that when, last year, I introduced you to Seattle Center, I noted that it has in common with the present UW Seattle campus that it was shaped by a major fair, and also that both places are strongly parklike places in Seattle that aren't run by Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation.  Seattle Center is city-owned, while UW is state-owned, but this remains true.

Well, one important way these differ is that Seattle Center, like Seattle's parks department, has drinking water fountains outdoors.  In addition, Seattle Center has a restroom building whose doors open to the outdoors, as do many Seattle parks.  UW's Seattle campus, however, has neither of these things, with one limited exception in the South Campus, restrooms whose doors open to the outdoors, but are locked with a code requirement. [1]

So the only ways to get water on UW's Seattle campus, in general, are to bring it in, or to rely on one or more building(s).

Since your real topic, dear Diary, has always been running water, then, the UW's buildings are on-topic for you.

[1] I haven't actually tried to open every door on every building on campus.  It's conceivable, I suppose, that some door I haven't tried opens onto restrooms.  But there's a certain amount of crowdsourced information about this.  During the lockdowns, many people asked me where restrooms could be found.  Surely at least some of these people had tried some doors.  In addition, before the pandemic, a friend of mine had a parking slot in the central garage, and mentioned often seeing human Number Two and Number One in that garage.  Although this problem peaked every time the football team had a home game, presumably at least some of the problem was thanks to homeless people.  En masse, homeless people are pretty reliable as testers of doors.  Ultimately, this goes back to a principle I enunciated already in your pages in 2020.  If a water fountain, say, is buried amidst blackberry bushes, it effectively doesn't exist.  Water fountains and restrooms only matter if they're findable.  And during the lockdowns, nobody could find either on UW's campus.

Public campus, private buildings

All of that said, many of the university's buildings are in one sense or another not open to the public.  Although the university is publicly owned, as we've already discussed, you and I, dear Diary, not all publicly owned buildings are or should be open to the public, and the university actually offers an excellent set of examples as to why that might be the case.  The university owns a cyclotron and a wind tunnel, just for starters.   It also owns a plethora of buildings people live in by virtue of various kinds of leases.  It owns several buildings devoted to child care or even primary or secondary education.  Many of its buildings are primarily places for its non-academic staff to do their jobs, including places like power plants (several) which aren't normally open to the public in the outside world even when publicly owned.  Also as in most places, its theatres, stadia, and so on - its entertainment facilities, essentially - are usually locked when not in use.

The inscrutable

However, this leaves many other buildings which may or may not be open to the public.  Particularly in the northwestern U-District, the area I've called University Heights, but also in northern Brooklyn, several of the buildings shown on its map are actually rented, and so the owner's policies, as well as the university's, are relevant.  Beyond that, however, I think the main problem is that the university's policies are inscrutable; I further think that this inscrutability is intentional.

Some of this may be due to sloppy thinking.  As I've focused on this topic for the past couple of weeks, I've concluded that there are at least four audiences for information about any specific university building's hours, four groups for which the university might, in an ideal world, wish to offer different hours.

1. People specifically linked to that building as employees - employees of the university who have offices there; members or employees of athletic teams about to play in the building; etc.  People of this kind often don't care about posted hours because they have keys or equivalent access.
   
2. People specifically linked to that building as customers - students who have classes there; spectators about to watch a dance performance in the building; actual customers of things like coffee shops; etc.  People of this kind often don't care about posted hours because they take for granted that what they're there for fits within those hours.
   
3. People "affiliated with" the university, as students, faculty, or staff.
4. The general public.

Many buildings' hours signage fails to acknowledge this fact.  Many others acknowledge it only in the negative - "Authorized personnel only", most obviously.  Here are the few I found that take the trouble to differentiate hours based on which audience is involved:

As a result, as a general rule, buildings' posted hours are not reliable guidance as to whether one can lawfully enter the building.  In addition, possibly as a sign of transition between an old hours regime and a new one, an increasing number of buildings have multiple hours signs.

Notice the wrong sign as one enters, and one can become a trespasser without knowing it.  This is especially problematic at buildings, such as the Communications Building and Savery Hall, where the different hours are posted at different doors.

(That said, here's what I'm finding:  At many of those buildings, I'm not yet sure about all, the shorter schedule governs the locks.  Separately, in general, I'm not finding students in buildings on days when those buildings are officially closed.  With a few notable exceptions, but fewer than I'd expected, door schedules seem to apply both to students in general and to the general public.  I am, however, seeing students in some buildings whose hours have been shortened, after the building's official hours are over.)

More problematically, buildings' posted policies are also not reliable guidance as to whether one may enter.  Plenty of locked buildings have signs saying, in essence, "Hi!  I'm locked."  Plenty of others don't.  Plenty of unlocked buildings also have signs saying, usually more weakly, "Hi!  I'm locked.", but are in fact physically open to the public.  (Gowen Hall, just above, is one of these, as seen in that photo.  It's where the Tateuchi East Asia Library is, so the whole idea of "authorized visitors", taken literally, suggests that being literate in Chinese makes one potentially dangerous to people at the university.)  And again, plenty of others don't.

At this point it's very easy to make an obvious objection to this line of thinking.  Maybe the university just can't afford to lock all its buildings.  Its main means of locking buildings that get a lot of visitors is with card readers, a fairly modern technology that its older buildings may be hard or expensive to retrofit with.  There's evidence for this view:  some doors advertise that they're specifically closed, I infer for lack of card readers:

This, however, ignores two issues.  One is that the university is still, as recently as during the pandemic, building doors without card readers.

The text shown in that photo also clarifies why the university keeps its hours and building policies inscrutable:  So that "persons creating disruptions and/or obstructive behavior" can be subjected to the sanctions for criminal trespass, which include but aren't limited to prosecution.

And who defines disruptive or obstructive behaviour?  Well, recently, dear Diary, I told you about the Husky Union Building's definitions, but in most cases, I'm pretty sure the definition is in the eye of the beholder.  Which leads to the second issue with that objection.  Another major way university building policies are enforced, besides card readers and much less expensive, is peer pressure.  Human beings affiliated with the university explaining to human beings not affiliated with the university that the latter aren't welcome in some building.

The only dorm I think has a locked door during day or evening hours is Haggett, which is empty, awaiting demolition and replacement.  In my surveys of campus buildings, I've visited every dorm and many of the apartment buildings.  Apartment buildings' doors I tried were locked, but I only tried a few.  I didn't try the doors of any dorm except Haggett, but saw in many cases that they were quite obviously unlocked.  Some have clearly posted policies I saw that say explicitly that people outside category 1 above aren't welcome, that the only people who belong there are the specific dorm's residents and staff.  I didn't see such signs at all the dorms; perhaps some are lacking them, but also, I made a point of spending as little time as I could around the dorms, precisely because, even without anyone saying anything to me, I was well aware that as a middle-aged man, I was already outside the pale even being near those dorms.  I expect that if I'd barged into one, even if no staffer intercepted me, I'd be subjected to howls of outrage and calls to the UW Police long before I found a restroom.

In actual fact, the one time I've entered Smith Hall, the only building on the (Liberal Arts) Quad posted as closed to the public (but not locked), I was escorted out by a denizen of that building almost immediately.  (I don't consider it coincidental that signs listing building hours at Smith Hall which I saw when I did my original surveys are now all torn down.)  At one time, I spent the earlier parts of the mornings of major holidays outside, near the Communications Building.  Now, that building has been officially closed to the public as long as I've known of it, but on those major holidays, people in it often opened a back door - actually propped it open - anyway, almost certainly for the benefit of those of us waiting outside, and I went in to use the restroom several times (and, at least once, to explore; see what I mean about crowdsourcing, dear Diary?).  About half of those times, UW Police showed up before I left the restroom, presumably summoned by someone in the building other than the one who'd propped the door open.  (According to that back door yesterday, Communications is supposed to be open, though not to the public, on holidays.  The front door, which memory claims did open on holidays, currently says nothing of the sort.)

Flipside, some days ago, by no means looking or smelling my best and carrying three satchels, I passed unchallenged through the Social Work Building, Founders Hall, PACCAR Hall, and Foster Library.

Different buildings have different cultures, but offending anyone, voluntarily or otherwise, at a building posted as closed to the public, is asking for trouble.

Arbiters of trouble

Two important audiences for the behaviour of visitors unaffiliated with the university are the UW Police and a security force that UW started deploying shortly before the pandemic.

The UW Police are, in my experience, the kinds of professionals one wants to deal with when one is in trouble.  They know their laws, they seem to play fair by them.  Pleading a misleading hours sign to a UW Police officer is quite likely to have a good outcome, as long as the sign actually exists and says what one thought it said.  Flipside, UW Police are much less likely to be sympathetic if one is in a building, like Gowen Hall, posted as officially not open to the public.  But even then, in my encounters with them in the Communications Building, they consistently waited for me to finish in the restroom, and I don't remember them ever threatening me outright with arrest.

On the other hand, the security people, who are not sworn officers and are not armed, have consistently struck me as not very professional.  Savery Hall used to be an important place for me.  My first encounters with UW security came when they started enforcing new, shorter, hours for Savery, before the pandemic, and before those hours were posted.  (Which they now are, though they seem to get torn down often.)  Security people didn't consistently notice that I was in the building.  But when they did, they insisted that I leave without any justification other than their say-so.  Later, during the pandemic, I spent a lot of time on a sheltered bench outside the Bank of America Executive Education Center (much of that time, writing you, dear Diary).  Security people at least thrice threatened to have the UW Police arrest me for vagrancy, on the grounds that someone in charge of that building didn't want me there.  This reliably ended embarrassingly for the security people, with the summoned police officer patiently explaining that vagrancy laws aren't enforceable and the UW campus is a public place.  But these incidents didn't make my life any easier.

My methods now

I can't write over 200 books of hours, or even for however many buildings have open doors at all.

So I'm using a four-step process.  

1. I've already listed everything on UW's map that I consider a building, grouped by location.
2. For each building, I've visited and summarised what's posted about access and hours.
3. For each building, I've visited during normal business hours (and specifically during posted hours, if any), and seen whether whatever I interpret as the front door opens when I try.
   
4. Whatever post-processing is needed.  This includes verifying UW ownership (significant for West Campus, trivial for Central and South Campuses, and I haven't yet checked for East Campus).  It also includes trying doors during stated hours on weekends and during evenings; so far this is done for Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday, but not for weekday evenings.
   

I'm not sure how soon I'll finish this work, but necessarily not today.  In the meantime, dear Diary, I wanted to write this so that what I say about the West Campus parks will make more sense.

That said, one important thing:  My park maps show UW buildings, like other public buildings, in blue (if open to the public) or, I think, teal (if not).  For the UW buildings, on the maps I'm using for the parks, blue merely indicates that the building is physically open (and not residential); it doesn't indicate that the public is welcome there.  In this page, the maps will be more complicated.

All for now, dear Diary.  I've finally got Brooklyn mapped, so expect to start writing about its parks today.  Happy hours until then.

Introduction to my hikes of the U-District and Ravenna

Dear Diary,

Whoopee!  I'm almost ready to tell you about my hikes of one week ago.  Within a few days I hope to be completely ready; as things stand, I'm ready for the first three parts, anyway.

I liked the scale of the maps I made for downtown so much that I decided to standardise on that scale.  It's proving useful for North Seattle as well, but inconveniently, I don't yet know enough to make maps on that scale as large enough as I want them.

So these hikes are going to be narrated with more than one map per page.  Here's an overview:

"Three Hikes in Ravenna" will be illustrated by maps A, B and D.  I intend to begin writing the three parts of this page I plan tonight.

"Three Hikes in University Heights" will be illustrated by maps A and C.  I intend to begin writing the one part of this page I plan tomorrow.

"Four [or more] Hikes in Brooklyn" will be illustrated by map E.  I hope to begin writing it on Tuesday, October 18.

And whenever I can, which will probably be months from now, "Many Hikes on Campus" will be illustrated by maps E, F and G.

Spoiler:  There's very little news.  The water fountain in "lower" Ravenna Park has completely stopped working, possibly because of vandalism; however, its water is running non-stop, so it's as wasteful as it can reasonably be.  Otherwise, the park water fountains in this area - "upper" Ravenna Park, Cowen Park, University Playground and Christie Park - all work fine.  The shell of the street fountain that used to be in front of the University Temple is still behind the fence of that vacant lot.  The restrooms in "upper" Ravenna Park and the women's room in "lower" Ravenna Park are all open; the men's room in "lower" Ravenna Park and both restrooms at each of Cowen Park and University Playground are not open.  (Come winter, the only open park restroom in this area will be the women's room in "lower" Ravenna, if that.)  Oh, and most of North Passage Point is fenced off because concrete chips are falling from the bottom of the I-5 bridge.

There is, however, one very little bit of big news, which I hope to tell you about in detail before months from now, dear Diary.  The University of Washington's Seattle campus, to quote someone to whom I described you yesterday, "is becoming a locked campus".  So for the time being, while I can't photograph any of the popular parks on campus because they're thronged all day long, I'm visiting the buildings instead, and observing their hours.  Just in the few days I've been doing this, I've seen several hours changes, but in broad outline, the quote is true.  Concretely, I spent my days at the UW mostly in five buildings, at least fourteen hours inside per day.  If I become homeless again in the near future, one of those buildings will be closed to me, and the other four's hours have been cut very much.  I've already found a few examples of other buildings becoming more accessible, but none in ways that would actually make a difference.  So I'd certainly have to spend holidays outside, and weekends during breaks outside, and probably could spend no more than twelve hours per day inside during regular quarters, and no more than eight in summer quarter and breaks.

Between this, the park restrooms' closures, and the closure of the Urban Rest Stop's U-District branch, it's become immensely harder to be homeless in the U-District lately.  No doubt if I were to ask anyone who made the relevant decisions about this, they'd say it was all a coincidence.  They'd mention COVID-19, the difficulty of hiring anyone (people are so hard to find right now that I've managed to stay unemployed for seven months!), and budget tightness.  But, well, to whatever extent I'm a journalist at all, I'm not the kind of journalist who asks people like that questions like that.  I'm just going to document what I can of the facts I observe, and leave your readers to decide what they mean.

This problem is much bigger than the libraries, but I hope anyway to tell you, dear Diary, about the public university libraries - meaning the major state schools, mainly UW but also Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington State University in Vancouver, Evergreen State College (which now offers some masters' degrees, so I'm counting it as a university), and also the campuses without libraries of Central Washington University and Western Washington University in Everett and Eastern Washington University in Sammamish.  Tuesday, October 18.

As a reminder, here's the key I'm using:

To unpack:

Open land (without concern for how easy it is to walk through) is green if it's represented by the City of Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation.  It's blue if it's owned by any other governmental unit.  And it's black if it's privately owned.

Open land is also olive green if it's owned by the Seattle parks department, if it's closed to the public in some way (usually a fence, for open land).  Similarly, it's whatever that different bluish colour is called if it's owned by some other governmental unit, and dark gray if it's privately owned.

Buildings are the same colours but only in outline.  (Usually, closed buildings are just locked.)

Restrooms are shown as small rectangular outlines.  There are four cases:  Are they on open land, or somewhere else?  And are they open to the public (at least some of the time) or are they closed?  In practise, I needn't have worried quite so much.  Essentially all buildings open to the public have working restrooms, though not all such buildings have public working restrooms.  A restroom that isn't working or isn't public is red.  (The careful reader will notice that this is a change from the key.  Sorry, but I'd rather spend time writing up the results of the hikes than updating that key.)  A public restroom that is working is the colour of the owner, or if it's on open or closed land (which is usually the case), it's white.

Water fountains are shown as small round outlines.  They have the same colour pattern as restrooms.

All for now, dear Diary.  Let me try to get at least part of "Three Hikes in Ravenna" written up tonight.  But if not, have a good night, and I should manage to write the first part by tomorrow morning.

Away from the Manger

Dear Diary,

In the Gospel of Luke, chapter 2, verse 7, we read:  "And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn."  This was because she (Mary) and her husband Joseph had traveled from their actual home in Nazareth to Bethlehem.

Jesus Christ, in other words, according to Luke (no other Gospel mentions these elements) was born similar to the veteran mentioned in part I of the previous page of this series - homeless by situation, but not by way of life.

There are not a lot of mangers in Seattle.  And there's a great deal more rain than there is in Nazareth and Bethlehem.  So much so, in fact, that the main issue for survival outside here is protection from rain, though cold, heat, and other circumstances can also kill.

The first page of this series was not just a brief, ironic news report.  It was also meant as a demonstration that the city is serious about keeping homeless people from using tents or vehicles to protect themselves from the rain.  Both tents and vehicles are useful, in Seattle, mainly on public property - parks or sidewalks, for tents; streets, for vehicles.  And even inconsequential public property like the rocks south of S King St under I-5 is now off limits.

Tents and vehicles have two other important traits, as shelter for the homeless, in comparison to their main competitors, sleeping bags and indoor shelters.  First, they enable the accumulation of property.  Second, they're very visible.

Now, it would be entirely cynical to think the city's leaders object to tents and vehicles because they're visible.  So I must conclude that the objection is that they allow homeless people to accumulate property.   Presumably the homeless are actually the sacrificial goats - look, more Bible! - of the capitalist system, the ones forbidden to accumulate the way everyone else is encouraged to.  How someone like me, or my best homeless friend, with paid storage, fits in, I couldn't speculate.

In any event, the second page of this series was not just an endless, loquacious, self-indulgent recounting of my memories.  It was also a demonstration of a couple of facts.  First, there probably aren't enough private non-housing doorways in Seattle for all the unsheltered homeless.  I ended up two miles from the place I spent my days.  Second, faced with enough homeless people, commercial land-owners will not tolerate them.  In Laurelhurst, I and my few peers were accepted.  In the U-District, the parts of it I lived in anyhow, we at least weren't interfered with much.  But on Capitol Hill, miles of fencing have been erected with the simple goal of keeping homeless people out in the rain.

Let's look at that phrase:  homeless people.  All of the homeless are members of a particular species, Homo sapiens.  And while we who belong to this species like to compliment ourselves on how diverse we are, we do have some things in common.

Most humans are adaptible.

Most humans are resourceful.

Most humans wish to survive.

I hear your readers objecting, dear Diary:  "But what about drug addicts?  The mentally ill?  The incompetent?"

And in fact, I'm pretty sure all three categories are over-represented among the homeless.  But I am evidence that the mentally ill can be adaptible, resourceful, and wish to survive.  I've met addicts who were the same way.

I'm also a relatively passive man, which is a more serious impediment, and one I'm not sure is actually over-represented among the homeless.

So what's my point?

I took the light rail a bunch this weekend, re-visiting the doorways I chose to sleep in on the basis of how dry they were.  I was awed by the size of those dry subway platforms.

There are many churches in town with dry naves.

If homeless people are in fact people, then sooner or later they'll notice these facts too.  Then what?

There are also many residential porches in Seattle.  The building I'm writing from has one.  Are the city's leaders really determined to make homeless people turn to these?  I gave an example, in part II of the second page of this series, of campers in a private home's doorway.  Don't assume it can't happen again.

Most humans can collaborate.  Homeless people famously can't - the sociological term is "disaffiliation".  But if during this cold, wet winter collaboration is the only way to survive, the sociologists may find themselves surprised.  It's happened here before, hasn't it?  "Nickelsville", that's called.

What will it be, city leaders?  Would you rather see thousands of unsheltered homeless people die in the rain, or work together against you, or metastasise throughout the city, or will you walk the city back from the precipice you're hurtling towards?

Good night, dear Diary.  I make no predictions as to when or what the next page will be, but I'm not forgetting you.

Doorways I Have Known, part III: Recent Years

Dear Diary,

We're almost done with this stroll down memory lane, which ends with visits to places of your memory as well as of mine.

Laurelhurst

In Laurelhurst I found, again, different circumstances.  There were far fewer homeless people around, but there was competition for doorways again, because there were also fewer of those.  Laurelhurst is a pretty wealthy neighbourhood, and people gave me money again.  Although I was in a certain amount of shock from the disasters of 2016 (my Milwaukee storage unit's sale) and 2017 (my laptop's theft) and from my frequent changes of address in 2016-2018, I wasn't anywhere near as lost and lorn as I'd been on Broadway, so I suspect the changes reflect more on the neighbourhoods I've lived in, as well as on the prevalence of homeless people in those neighbourhoods, than on my own bearing.  I'll mention specific gifts below.

3717 1/2 NE 45th St

Then and Now:  Marlai Thai Cuisine and Museum Quality Framing

I was a very bad neighbour during the couple of years I slept here.

Open Street Map well represents the jagged outline of the building at the southwest corner of 38th Ave NE and 45th.  This results in a whole series of doorways with differing amounts of dry suitable for sleeping in.  There's also considerable complexity where the individual soffits that furnish that dry meet.

So, in particular, the doorway I'm talking about here slopes downward toward Marlai, whose only connection with it is Marlai's west wall.  People therefore slept on the high ground, at the MQF end of the doorway.  But that's where the soffits meet, or actually, don't quite meet, and as a result, when it rains, it rains right down on those people.  Thanks to good drainage (and the whole doorway's facing north, the first north face I'd slept in), the low end, towards Marlai, stays dry through the most relentless rains.  I was frankly contemptuous of these peers' fecklessness.  I'd learnt on Broadway already to scope out new places on rainy nights - that's why I think I went back to Galerias in spring 2013, as a base from which to reconnoiter - and couldn't believe they hadn't bothered.

I had a weapon against them, too.  I'd by that point for years been sweeping any doorway I slept in.  When I found the doorway I preferred occupied, I just switched next door, to the actual doorway of MQF, and started sweeping; I tried to be quiet, but didn't exactly weep when I failed.  Of the two people I think I drove away from their bad spot, one tolerated that, but after a few days went away; the other reliably got up and left right away.

The first, the one who stayed through my sweeping, looked Hispanic, and I think he was probably an employee of the taco truck across the street.  Frankly, I thought they should've done better by him, and maybe they did once I showed up; for much of the time I slept there, music blared from that taco truck until the wee hours of the night.  The other, I eventually concluded, the one who responded immediately once I started sweeping, was a white guy who was a sort of modern-day hunter-gatherer, following a set rotation; I noticed that he arrived on the same day of the week, the same number of weeks apart.

I forget why, but when leaves started falling in autumn 2018, I missed a few days, and came back to find an artistic arrangement of leaves across the doorway.  Obviously I couldn't sleep on that, so the best I could do was sweep the leaves toward a dryer part of the high ground for the night, and then try to produce my own artistic arrangement in the morning.  At any rate, nobody took the trouble to complain to me.  By autumn 2019 the leaf thing was old hat.

This was a pretty heavenly place to sleep.  There were almost no passersby at night, except when the bars back west on 45th closed, so I had endless privacy for building my bed.  There was lots of space.  The taco truck wasn't close enough for its music to keep me awake.  I very slowly unwound.  This is where I was sleeping when I got my first cart, and at first I was determined to sleep under it, so I'd know immediately if someone was stealing it.  Gradually I got less concerned about that.  This was the first place I took my shoes off to sleep.  Sometimes when I was too tired to build my bed properly, I would get as far as laying down my sleeping bag and just crash on that for an hour or two, or a few times for the whole night, waking each time to find the as-yet un-emptied satchels around me untouched.  On many nights, homeless people did pass the doorway, but apparently none were tempted by my stuff.  (Once, one did rather insistently want a book, but happily settled for one I hadn't enjoyed.)

Once, in 2020 I think, after UW had closed, I slept late enough for the MQF opener to arrive, but otherwise I had few interactions with that store (which has a side door on this doorway that they consistently put furniture in front of).  Only, once a week a truck would arrive delivering glass, which was interesting to watch the first few times, and consistently woke me.  I remember that during the lockdown there was some reason I needed to get MQF's attention, and I had to try several times before getting through.

I had more contacts with Marlai; I may have done the opposite of conflating here, remembered more nights than there actually were, but I don't think so.  Once after they'd closed, but before they'd left, and so before I'd done more than sweep, a distraught woman showed up begging me to call the police.  The Marlai employees came out, and eventually the man she was running from arrived too; at one point he attacked one of the Marlai group.  Turned out they were a couple from some small town whose child was at Children's Hospital; she'd been worried about his stability for a while, but under this new stress he'd gotten drunk and violent, and she hoped a night in jail would calm him down.  None of us bystanders was all that comfortable with the outcome, and the Marlai employee chose not to press charges.

Once Marlai got a steam cleaning, and for some reason the guys doing it couldn't park in back and work from there, but had to park on 45th.  They apologised for delaying my sleep - and one of them, to make it clear he meant it, gave me a really large, really warm hooded coat, that I can wear over other coats.  At the time I told him I mainly wanted it to cover my cart, because with only one coat I had to choose between protecting my books and protecting myself.  But in fact I relied on it heavily while hiking for you last winter, dear Diary, and I expect to wear it again this week.

Not long after those events, the snow of 2019 came.  Marlai's crew the first night were amazed that I was willing to try to sleep there under those circumstances - though there wasn't much snow in the doorway - and pooled their tips to give me that night.

Richer people of Laurelhurst gave me much larger amounts later, that in fact contributed to my being housed now during the snow of 2021.  But the gifts I remember from that doorway are the coat and $24 in tips.  Both contributed to my welfare immediately.  When I went downtown, thinking I'd need to go inside the coldest night (but the forecasts were wrong), and anyway wanting to warm up by day, my backpack was stolen, and that $24 enabled me to buy what I most immediately needed to replace.

I've often thought I ought to pay some sort of rent to the spaces I occupied while homeless.  I did little things in the HUB and Savery Hall, and submitted call number corrections at Suzzallo Library, in that spirit.  I made a point of shopping at Half Price Books during the years I slept in their doorway.  But I haven't, yet, visited the surviving locations of Samurai Noodle; I'm relieved to hear that American Apparel is still in business; I've yet to replace the glasses I got while homeless, both pairs broken, but I should probably get one pair at Sound Eye and Laser (source of the new pair in "Stealing from the Homeless"), and another at One Hour Optical.

Well, Marlai had closed by the time I got there on Christmas Eve, MQF long before, so they too have to wait.  But I haven't forgotten.

3717 NE 45th St

Then and Now:  Museum Quality Framing

I'd continued acquiring books relentlessly even after Half Price Books closed, at Little Free Libraries and from the University District Food Bank.  I stored many at Suzzallo Library (which turned into months of worry when the lockdown came), but also carried many with me.  As a result, I needed to build a pretty tall stack wallward of my head, when building my bed.  This doorway has an architectural feature that gets in the way of that.  Also, its dry is smaller.  Finally, this is the doorway used by the glass deliveries.  So I didn't like sleeping here, which made me as ruthless as I've described over the other spot.

3605 1/2 NE 45th St

Then and Now:  Flooring America

I think I tried to build my bed here several times, but succeeded only once.  Its orientation was opposite what I was used to, there's a small electrical fixture marring the right angle I relied on, and there's what I think is a permanent stain on the concrete that looks just like a wet spot.  And you can see, dear Diary, the dry isn't all that wide.

University of Washington

For the first six months, the students were away, and the mice, they did play.  Things got gradually more crowded on campus during the 2020-2021 school year, but I was housed before the UW finally sort-of-fully re-opened this past autumn quarter.  There was never a large number of homeless people on campus during the lockdown, never an encampment, but I'm not sure the number shrank much from when the buildings were open, either.

UW normally doesn't allow anyone to use its outdoor electrical outlets.  And it normally doesn't allow anyone to sleep on campus.  Both of these rules were waived once the lockdown started (as the electrical one had been waived during 2019's snow, far as I experienced), but everyone knew they could be re-imposed at any time, in any particular circumstance.

The main places I used on campus during its lockdown, the places I took photographs of on Christmas Eve, are places I'd used before the lockdown, places that were among the reasons I always reached Laurelhurst, and before it University Way or even Roosevelt, after other homeless people did.

4205 Mary Gates Memorial Drive NE

Then and Now:  Ceramic and Metal Arts Building

This building is in the East Campus, which is downhill from the main campus.  It has a west-facing courtyard that can be a good place to rest after the hike downhill or before the one uphill, and there's a bench for the purpose.  Also, it has University Wi-Fi, though not an electrical outlet.  But it has very, very little reliable dry.  I slept on that bench, sitting up, watching out for the police who liked to take breaks in the parking lot adjacent, any number of times in the summers of 2019 and 2020, and each time fantasised that that could continue, forgetting what this photo shows all too clearly:

Some faculty member or administrator took the trouble, in September 2020, to warn me that I couldn't continue using that bench that year.  The first students to return, that quarter, were the athletes and the artists, and thanks to social distancing, several classes were expected to meet in the courtyard that fall.  It was kind of him to give me that warning, but both of us had forgotten the rain which would've enforced my absence anyway.

4110 East Stevens Way NE

Then and Now:  Padelford Hall

Padelford Hall and a connected multi-level parking garage sprawl across the hill between Central and East campuses.  I became familiar with the intricacies of the climb through Padelford in my first months in Laurelhurst, before the cart.  I liked to work late at night in this space near the top, which as you can see, dear Diary, has a sort of desk.

Once I had the cart, I couldn't do that any more, had to hike outside the whole way, but come the lockdown, I remembered a plaza towards the top with acres of dry (OK, that's an exaggeration, but ...).  You, dear Diary, were born there.  I say you were born of a visit to Magnuson Park, but the place I actually got Blogspot to accept your first pages was this plaza.

It had several disadvantages, however, as a place to spend the lockdown.  It had electrical outlets and Wi-Fi, and even a vending machine, but every place to sit within reach of this plaza is subject to rain.  I also had to disassemble my cart to get it down the stairs to the plaza, which wasn't any kind of fun in the rain.

It's also heavily frequented, and as we learnt more about social distancing, that became more and more problematic.  I took to hiding in the deadest corner of the plaza, traffic-wise, this one:

Another disadvantage, for me personally, at least, was harassment.  This mostly took the form of theft.  I experienced, I think, six thefts at UW during the lockdown, and four of those were here.  But also, at one point someone called the police on me.  This is when a police officer informed me that removing my satchels from my cart constituted "camping", and as such was illegal.  I wish I were making this up.  And on the day in the summer of 2020 when my phone was stolen while charging on a bench outside this plaza, someone took the trouble to do Number One in the corner I'd been using.  I thought the photo above would show the remaining salt stain, but apparently not.  The friend who gave me the carts knows a criminologist who agreed with me that there was a pattern here.  Many, many departments are headquartered in Padelford Hall, and while one of those is Mathematics, most of the rest are pillars of the academic left:  English, Gender Studies, you name it.  But someone in that building, I think, did not like coming into regular contact with a smelly homeless man.

(That said, that isn't why I'm not linking to Padelford's home page above.  Padelford has not physically closed this plaza off to the homeless, which is my criterion, though I assume the rule against sleeping is re-imposed.  I'm not linking because I can't find anything suitable as a home page for Padelford.)

So I moved on.  There are outlets in the Allen Library mall, and there's a bench, but it's carefully placed so that when it rains, rain will usually blow onto it.  And when it's not raining, that bench is pretty popular.  I didn't spend much time there (though enough for one of the other thefts to happen), but rather in two other places.

4069 Spokane Lane

Then and Now:  Kane Hall

Again I didn't find a reasonable home page for the building.  But in this case there's also a clear sign of disapproval of how the homeless behaved here during the lockdown.

Kane Hall has two doorways on its north side with electrical outlets.  As of March 2020, the western doorway's outlet didn't work, but the eastern doorway's did.  So on days I wasn't lucky enough to get a better place, such as the one next on this tour, I would charge my phone here, or later in the lockdown, the battery I used to charge my phone.

 

There's no seating within the doorways, but near the eastern doorway, there's a bunch of seating on a plaza.

So for one thing, that's the remaining theft; in summer 2020, while I dozed on that plaza, the battery was stolen while charging.  I tried a couple of ways to replace it before finding one that worked, and that discouraged long hikes for you those weeks, dear Diary.  After that, I only allowed myself to doze when I wasn't charging anything, which made for some pretty weary six-hour stints of battery charging.

But for another thing, Kane Hall's doorways were often appallingly messy during the lockdown.  This is because some kids, probably from Roots, made Kane their headquarters, and some of these kids evidently hadn't learnt anything at all about cleanliness in their lives.  Most of the activity was actually upstairs from the doorways; Kane has a gigantic semi-outdoor second floor, maybe even really an acre of dry, partly protected from the wind, with outlets ...  Pretty much all that a crowd of homeless kids could want.

 

But it seems this particular epicene couple were most often the ones crowded out from there, to spill their sodas and tear apart their ramen cups in the same doorway I used.  I normally considered the cart's wheels enough insulation between my stuff and pretty much any kind of dirt, but hesitated on a regular basis to drive them through what those kids laid down.  And the thing is, I'm pretty sure I saw the woman of the couple. once, presenting herself as the hip edgy person appropriate to her age online and in conversations, with no sign of the filth she seemed content to live in.

Well, there have been consequences.

That's the outlet in the doorway, not one of those upstairs, but they're all covered like that now.

4275 East Stevens Way NE

Then and Now:  Bank of America Executive Education Center

This was the place where I wrote many of your pages, dear Diary, where I did many of the other things I whiled away the empty hours of the lockdown with.  For some reason the builders of this building put a huge porch in, and then ran a bench along the long side of that porch.

 

I'd stopped at this location before the lockdown to work or watch K-dramas late.  Only once had I encountered anyone who belonged to the building, a couple apparently of South Asian descent of whom the man sneeringly insisted that my only goal was to sleep there.  I think, a few weeks later, I took him up on that offer once or twice, but mostly what I wanted that bench for, in 2018, was a place to use Wi-Fi.  Once I'd moved to Laurelhurst, it was out of my way, and I don't think I turned to it early in the lockdown.

But as Padelford became increasingly untenable and Kane increasingly awful, I was more and more inclined to come here, carefully sitting at the far end of the bench from the door for social distancing.  The reaction from within the building was split.  I'm pretty sure ordinary employees didn't pay much attention.  One, a Muslim, once gave me a sandwich she'd bought, which had turned out to have bacon in it.  But the UW had inaugurated an unarmed security force, alongside its armed police, shortly before the lockdown, and someone within that building thought it was a good idea to get these security guards to get rid of me.  They threatened me with prosecution for loitering, and called police on me, who wearily explained that loitering laws were not enforceable on public property.  This cycle happened two or three times.  But compared to the problems at Padelford, this was trivial.

I don't think anyone in my earlier life would've predicted that English scholars would persecute me, but business scholars would embrace me, but that's more or less what I found during UW's lockdown.

As my time to get housed approached, I changed many of my ways.  Some events had led me to realise that the Stranger issues I'd been using under my sleeping bag weren't actually doing anything to keep me warm, and I finally pitched them all into my storage sometime, I think, in January.  In February I lived in SeaTac, as you know, dear Diary.  And in March I simply could not convince myself to build my bed again, so spent essentially every night, until I moved into the home whence I'm writing, on that bench.

But months before that, I'd moved to a different neighbourhood altogether, off and on, for the Wi-Fi.

View Ridge

After my phone was stolen, my new phone didn't have University Wi-Fi until a friend on the faculty figured out how to confer it on me, around Thanksgiving.  So for several months, if I wanted to do anything with Wi-Fi, I had to trudge to a public library.  For things like updates, the University branch was good enough, but it was hard to find a place to sit that also got a good signal from inside the building, to say nothing of the competition, so sustained work had to happen elsewhere.

6801 35th Ave NE

Then and Now:  Seattle Public Library, Northeast branch

I've more or less told you this story before, dear Diary, when it happened, and it doesn't really need much re-hashing.  There was competition here too, both for the Wi-Fi and for the three sheltered benches on the library's porch.  There was a man who never spoke to me, but made his disapproval of my sleeping there, far too close to where he wanted to sleep, very clear.  Library staff were unhappy with me but took no definite actions until "curbside pickup" came along, which they used as an excuse to remove all three benches.  By then I'd already tired of my silent critic, and told him I'd be elsewhere at night, so slept in the View Ridge Playfield shelter.

The main reason I've put this byway into this page is that two of the benches are back, and actually have been back for months - I took the photo below in late September.  The backed one on which that man preferred to sleep, the one honouring Sahir Dibee, has been replaced with an unbacked one similar to the other two.

I'm greatly relieved that at least one thing "those awful homeless" could have been blamed for has not, after all, come to pass.

Well, dear Diary, this is the end of our walk down memory lane, and of part two of the current series of pages I'm writing in you.  Part three is, like part one, much shorter, and I hope to write it this evening, but, well, this series has repeatedly frustrated my timing hopes, so we'll see.  Happy hours, and if necessary days, until then.

Doorways I Have Known, part II: The U-District

Dear Diary,

For most purposes, I considered myself to have moved to the University District in autumn 2014, although during the first months of 2015, I worked, and so had to spend at least some nights on Capitol Hill.  I stayed in the U-District for roughly four years, then moved to Laurelhurst; either way, though, I actually spent my days at UW.  Come the lockdowns, I increasingly also spent nights at UW, until this year I got housed.  So in contrast to part I's concerning a single street, this part bounces around, and so will the next.

I'd forgotten, until I went back and looked at Broadway, the extent to which I was part of a community of homeless people there in 2012-2014.  But by the time I moved north, I figured I'd learnt enough.  I hadn't, really, but since that was what I thought, I avoided the main concentrations of homeless people in the area.  (I also knew by then that many of the homeless in the U-District were kids; although in 2014 I wasn't yet 50, I certainly wasn't a kid.)  Roughly speaking, having spent some hours today re-reading e-mails I sent in those years, I now think I spent 2014-2017 trying desperately to return to the housed world (but at the same time diving ever deeper into Korean TV and music), and 2018-2019 recovering from that effort's total failure.

People's reactions to me were different here.  Until the pandemic, I suffered only one serious theft, and not where I slept.  On the other hand, considerably fewer people gave me money.  I'm not sure whether that's because I was more confident, projecting less of a lost look, or because people in the U-District have less money to give than partiers on Broadway, but either way, it was true.  Finally, both actual acts of violence against me while I was homeless, though relatively minor, happened in the U-District, at the hands of young men who were probably college students.

The University District

4709 Roosevelt Way NE

Then:  Half Price Books

Now:  University Volkswagen extension

The main place I slept from 2014 to 2017 was Half Price Books' doorway.  I'd already started sleeping there when visiting the U-District overnight, pretty much from the beginning of my homelessness; this amused the people who worked at the Capitol Hill HPB, where I spent a lot of time both before and after becoming homeless, until it closed.

Roosevelt was, at that time, betwixt and between.  There were homeless people camped in University Playground, Roots was near University Way, and each was just three blocks from Roosevelt, but for some reason the two worlds didn't meet.  Roosevelt didn't have the crowds of rich students to try to beg from or interact with, it didn't have tent space, it didn't even have many doorways.

The doorway I used, I shared with the customers of the hookah lounge down the street.  Throughout the time I stayed there, visitors chafed at the idea that anyone would appropriate this perfectly good place to smoke a cigarette out of the rain, and because it took a long time for wet footprints to dry on rainy nights, I spent quite a few nights either staying up late, or in one of the alternate spots mentioned below.  But the regulars got used to me, and even tried to intercede with the visitors from time to time.  One regular gave me a job lead, though it didn't pan out.

This was where I first started using my copies of Seattle Weekly and The Stranger as sleeping bag pads.  That resulted from another suggestion from a regular, who pointed out that I wouldn't care about wet pavement if I had something between my sleeping bag and the wet spot.  I cared anyway, because I cared about those papers, but not as much; occasionally that gained me an extra half-hour of sleep.

I was sleeping here in January 2016 when my Milwaukee storage unit, into which I'd put most of the payment for "Stealing from the Homeless", was sold for non-payment of rent.  Before that time I'd already started accumulating books from HPB's "recycling" dumpster, but after that I was on a mission.  My books in Milwaukee had been taken to an HPB there; I wanted to see what I could replace in Seattle.  Not much, but it became an excuse for an extravaganza of book acquisition.  Because I didn't change clothes often, I was unwilling to climb into HPB's trash dumpster, but others happily did that, and I accumulated a fair number of CDs and DVDs from those they pulled out of the dumpster but left behind.  For a time I had two umbrellas, and was willing to use them to try to pull something I really wanted out of that dumpster, too.

Ironically, all this, which one would think would lead to serious annoyance on the part of the HPB staff, actually led, in the final months, to their seeing me much, much more favourably.  A local guy apparently lost a family member, and reacted to his grief by going around setting fires.  (Or at least this is the story he told that got him out of prosecution.)  One fire he set was in that recycling dumpster.  I was one of several homeless people in the vicinity who responded; my particular contribution happened to include the actual call to the fire department, and although the flames never threatened the building, once the employees found that out, I quite unfairly became their fair-haired boy.  I was happily able to sort of return the favour not much later.  Some man came and left a bag of housewares next to me, claiming I'd find them useful.  I'm guessing he'd fought with the intended recipient; they were small, fancy items, for most of which no homeless man would have any use at all.  After a couple of nights during which nobody reclaimed the bag, I handed it to the store's assistant manager, for the benefit of newcomers to Seattle on the staff, keeping only a small cutting board.

Sometime probably in 2016, I saw a man down by Trader Joe's, on the next block, weaving around waving a sleeping bag in the air.  Maybe a quarter hour later, he'd made his way to the HPB doorway, but his sleeping bag hadn't.  So he proposed to share mine.  He made it clear that this was a sexual overture, explaining that he'd used to be popular with ladies, but not so much any more - he was both visibly and audibly a formerly handsome ageing drunk - so he thought he'd try changing his luck.  Strangely, I wasn't interested, and this led to my avoiding this doorway for several months.  I'm actually unclear on the chronology of my stays in two other doorways in the U-District, but suspect I went to only one at that time, then returned to HPB for its final months in 2017.

What made the HPB doorway reliably dry was an awning, but that awning was deteriorating the whole time I slept there, and not long after they closed, had deteriorated so much that the doorway was no longer reliably dry, and when University VW came in, the awning came down.  So although I doubt UVW really cares what happens in that doorway, which they don't use, I've never seen anyone else try to sleep there.  I tried again occasionally later, but the hookah bar's clientele seemed completely to have turned over, and it just wasn't any fun, besides being wet when it rained.

The next two places were my alternate sites, for when I couldn't wait for HPB's doorway to dry out.  My main one:

4555 Roosevelt Way NE

Then:  Princeton Review

Now:  Academy for Precision Learning

This has a large dry, but not a reliable one; the pavement slopes down toward the building, and sometimes water leaps the gaps in it that, under other circumstances, create the dry.  Also, this is the first place I was physically attacked while homeless; a young man passing by one night kicked me in my back, though not hard.  So I really didn't like to sleep here, but still sometimes had to.

1105 NE 47th St

Then:  Vacant

Now:  7-Eleven, back door

This was the third place I found open last night, besides the two places already mentioned on Broadway.  What's more, I found a middle-aged white man hunkered down in this back doorway, which was blocked on the inside by a small display, so clearly not meant for regular use, but still, I was amazed he was allowed to be there.

He courteously got out of my way to take the photo.  We talked some, and agreed to meet again so I could put him in touch with cold weather gear; he gave me his number so that could happen.  However, he ghosted me today.  I ended up deciding I couldn't in good conscience keep my sleeping bags, though they're where I actually continue to sleep, not having bought a bed yet, given the impending weather; if I'd found him tonight, he'd have them now, but instead a plainly confused young white man, who reminded me a bit of myself in 2012, on Broadway, got them.

(By the way, dear Diary, I misinterpreted the evidence this morning.  Tonight I saw the face of the guy who was under a blanket on Broadway this morning, and he's definitely white.  I was going by his hands, so maybe he just had gloves on.)

I'm not sure I slept in this doorway more than once.  I'd gotten used to bigger spaces, and couldn't make this smaller one work.

Next, such neighbours as I had on or near Roosevelt.

4751 Roosevelt Way NE

Then and Now:  A private home

There was a group of men, probably American Indian, who used to sleep in one of this house's two doorways, with their legs sticking out into the wet.  Since I normally took 50th to get to HPB, I saw them quite often.  They spent a lot of time making fun of each other, and were happy to change pace by making fun of me instead; I took it poorly, but we had one or two civil interactions as well.  They flatly refused to believe that they were actually sleeping in a private doorway until the home's owner finally boarded it up.  I think they were already gone by the time of the fire.

911 NE 50th St

Then:  The Seven Gables Theatre

Now:  A vacant lot

Each night, someone set up a kind of fortress on the theatre's porch, and then took it down each morning.  (I'd rejected sleeping there long before, because of the wooden floor, I think a mat, and also the theatre's late hours.)

I met a man the night of the HPB dumpster fire.  This man later chased the pyro for blocks; although the pyro got away, the other man's description enabled a later arrest.  So this man was the real hero of that night.

I didn't know that at the time, though, and didn't recognise him when we met again in Laurelhurst, probably in 2018.  He told me that he was both of the people described in the above paragraphs, and thought he'd been looking out for me when I slept at HPB, too.  (When did he find the time to do that, what with all the fort-building?)  He was a black man, somewhat younger than me and somewhat taller.  The last I saw of him, he was upset over the disappearance of some pallets he'd stored in a Laurelhurst woods, and he left on a bicycle.

The theatre closed in 2017, like HPB and Ristorante Doria - basically all the shops on the block were put out of business at least partly by long-running construction across the street at UVW, except a massage shop that I think is still a Seattle Police Department sting, and the hookah lounge.  Apparently, in December 2020, when the building was occupied by squatters (a fact heavily emphasised by KING), it burned down.

A false alarm:

4746 11th Ave NE

Then:  Seattle Behavior Consulting and Therapy

Now:  Apparently vacant

I was firmly convinced, for years of my homelessness, that the only proper way to comb my hair was in front of glass, even though I rarely looked.  (Now I routinely comb my hair nowhere near a mirror.  Go figure.)  When HPB put in its windows treatments that are still there, I started combing my hair on the porch of this place, which I'd never have considered for sleeping on.  Every single time, this elicited a swift and emphatic security response, as if I'd slept there too.  Now, mental health places make efforts to protect their clients' privacy, which the layout of this corner store must have made difficult, so I can understand instructions to security to watch for people hanging out on the porch, but we're talking 7 A.M. here, so I still think it was strange.

My purpose in combing my hair there was that the glass was out of the way of pedestrians, which basically no glass further along on my way to Safeway, where I daily anticipated meeting people I knew, was.  I don't remember how I ultimately solved the problem, or maybe it was obviated by events (my moving, for example).

Now the other two places where I sustainedly slept in the U-District.

5030 Roosevelt Way NE

Then and Now:  Scarecrow Video

This was the second or third place, after Hardware and perhaps what's now Lifelong's side door on Broadway, where I slept despite a warning sign.  There's currently a "Conditions of Entry" sign in their window, as shown in the photo below; I don't remember whether that was the sign I worried about then.

I remember sleeping there for months, maybe even more than a year.  (If so, this is where I was sleeping in November 2017 when my fourth laptop was stolen - though at a UW library, not here - and I more or less gave up.)  Already on Broadway I'd learned that it was important to dry the soles of my shoes before going to bed (most of my homelessness, I didn't want to risk theft of my shoes, which actually happened one day to one of the Indians mentioned above).  At HPB (and One Hour Optical) I'd also started sweeping the doorway with those dried-out soles.  At Scarecrow I wore out a pair of shoes or two sweeping, because that's one huge doorway.  (Wet leaves were common, and several times, for some strange reason, someone spilled a large amount of popcorn across the doorway.)

I remember two endings to my stay at the other place, and only one ending to this one.  Also, I sent an e-mail in 2018 saying I was sleeping in a really big doorway (almost the only mention, in all those e-mails I re-read today, of my sleeping arrangements).  So I think I came here from HPB after HPB closed, and not during 2016, but I'm really not sure.

There are no ideal options for this doorway.  Scarecrow's night return slots are on one of its walls, the main doors on the other.  I chose to block the main doors.  Staffers mentioned to me that some customers were still afraid to use the night return slots while I was there.  Also, although I always waited until all the employees were gone, there was someone who liked to come in before I even woke up in the morning, something like 5 A.M., and apparently resented having to use the back door.

Also, there's an affordable housing building across the street, whose residents liked to hang out outside.  A rather more annoying foible I'd developed than the hair-combing one was that I didn't want any woman to see certain stages of my bed-building.  Some nights, at this location, that tic kept me up really late.

The end came one night when I got sick, and actually vomited into my sleeping bag.  I'm pretty sure to this day that I got it all, but I thought I really had to warn Scarecrow staff in case the smell lingered, and of course the only person I could reach was the one who resented me.  After I'd washed my sleeping bag, the next night, while I was still sweeping that doorway, a police car came by, and the officer told me the store had requested them to deter anyone from being there at night.

This is the only place where I slept while homeless that called the police on me, and with a story behind it that can only smirch their names, but my interest in older Korean TV dramas is probably going to drive me to apply for membership sometime in the next year.  Life is strange.

5034 University Way NE

Then and Now:  Christian Science Reading Room

I think this is where I retreated from the man with the insulting come-on to.  Appropriate, perhaps.  I also think this is where I went after Scarecrow kicked me out.  So two stays between 2016 and 2018, if I have the chronology right.  Another memory claims I came back in 2019; if so, that was rather bad behaviour on my part, but, I think, understandable.

My only sleep site on the Ave was far enough north that there weren't vast hordes of students walking past, but still quite a few.  Both preserving the dry area, and dealing with my worry about women seeing me build my bed, were very hard here. 

On the other hand, this was the only place that supplied me with things to read while drying my shoes, so I wouldn't have to unwrap the books I'd bagged for the trip from the UW.  To this day they always have two pages of the latest Christian Science Monitor displayed at one end of their front windows, and two pages each of the Christian Bible and of Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health at the other.  I don't know about now, but each time I stayed there the pages shown changed several times per week.  I liked reading the Monitor, and considered it my duty, each time I did so, also to read the others, which was fine with me as regards the Bible, but I came to dislike both Eddy's ideas and her style, which left me feeling rather awkward sleeping there.

I had one temporary and one lasting problem with the neighbours there.  I don't mean homeless people.  The lasting problem was the farmers' market setting up very early each Saturday, a day when I could normally have afforded to sleep somewhat later.

I think the first end of my stays at this doorway came when I was attacked much more seriously than the kick at the Princeton Review one.  One night my hands were full because I was eating, and a very drunk, very tall young East Asian-descended man demanded that I shake his hand.  I refused, gesturing with the food in my hand, and although at that point several of his friends caught up with him and did what they could to restrain him, he worked himself up into a rage over my refusal of his friendship, and punched me, knocking me out briefly, and breaking the glasses I'm wearing right now, which I'd only gotten the year before.  I couldn't even find all the pieces, so I originally reported the incident to the police as a theft, then had to amend that once I finally located the rest of them.  I tend to be slow to react to things, so am not sure I immediately returned to HPB, but I was probably happy to within days.

During my second stay, if not also my first, some of the neighbours hung out on the east porch of University Heights.  At first I thought they were homeless people, and I still think at first they were, but over the months people on bicycles showed up whom I interpreted as drug dealers.  Because of my hangup over women watching me build my bed, I kept an eye on that porch, and I'm pretty sure none of its denizens appreciated that.

One night in, probably, 2018, a woman came up to me around 2 or 3 A.M.  She whined that she was homeless, and had lost her "protector".  She wanted me to be her new one.  Thing is, I was pretty sure I recognised her as one of the putative dealers' customers.  So I refused.  She then asked for warmer clothing than she had on.  As it happened, I had a jacket to spare.  It had some sentimental value, once a gift and long of good use, but was worn out, probably even had holes in it.  But I could spare it, so I gave it to her.  At which point her pose of homelessness vanished; because the jacket had holes in it, it was unacceptable, and she drove the point home by physically tearing it into very small pieces, which she left for me to clean up.  I took this whole episode as an explicit warning from the drug dealers, and left for Laurelhurst the next night.

I'm tolerably confident in the reality of my 2019 stay.  What happened was that year's snow, closing the UW.  For three days I went downtown, and although I didn't actually stay at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall shelter, after being told that three separate places I tried to build my bed were unacceptable, I thought I'd picked up bedbugs there or at the Armory.  Now, people like to blame all vermin on homeless people's poor hygiene.  In the case of rats, say, there's some truth to that - ever since the sweep described in the first part of this series, I've been seeing a rat run across that rocky area every night.  But in reality, bedbugs like hiding places of kinds homeless people are usually ill-equipped to supply.  So I wasn't really worried that I'd keep the bedbugs, but that I'd carry them to wherever I next slept.  In this context, I think I must have cold-bloodedly decided that a reading room was more likely to have experience with the problem than the retail stores in whose doorways I slept in Laurelhurst, and so spent a few days there until confident I wasn't carrying them any more.  I then visited while the room was open to warn them of the potential problem.

What convinces me that this stay happened, despite the slur it is on my character, is that I'm pretty sure I remember a time when those drug dealers were no longer visiting U-Heights, and feeling very smug over that.

 

So I'm sorry, dear Diary, to disappoint your estimate of your author, but I hope you can forgive me.  There's at least one other bad thing to come, but it's no longer officially Christmas, I obviously can't meet even my revised schedule for this series, but it's time to try to sleep without my sleeping bags.  Good night, dear Diary.  I'll be telling you more tomorrow, obviously.