Elf Sternberg

I live in the one subdivision in all of Washington that has the state’s Justice Training Center. I’ve mentioned it before because I’m always interested in how those who the state has chosen to convey the power of life and death over its citizens, are trained and how they carry themselves. Since I like to take walks in the afternoon, I often walk past or even through the center, since its exercise field is open to the public when the police aren’t using it.

As I walked through the exercise field and then up the driveway to the exit, I passed by a new building labeled “City Simulator,” surrounded by a chain link fence with those “authorized personnel only” signs all over it. Inside that fence about twenty to twenty five police officers, the names of multiple jurisdictions printed on the backs of their black uniforms, stood around an arrangement of cars, guns drawn.

They were practicing, as near as I can tell, using the cars as bulwarks if they ever found themselves in a firefight. But what alarmed we was just how careless they were. My short time in IPSC taught me all the rules, such as never aim your gun at anything you don’t intend to shoot, and never, ever aim it at another human being unless you intend to kill them. These officers were crouching behind the cars as they’d been taught, but they were not at all careful about the downrange and were pointing their guns directly at other officers. Worse, one or two weren’t even crouching, they were just standing, holding their pistols in a firing stance and sighting along them, using doorways, trees, and even their fellow officers as potential targets.

If I wanted to exit the way I’d planned, I would have had to walk around the east and north edges of that lot. I seriously ‘noped’ at that and walked back the way I came, putting the main conference building between myself and that irresponsible and dangerous display of gun handling.

Around 7:30pm or so, Omaha worried that there was a helicopter overhead just to the northwest of us, hovering, green and red lights blinking on its undercarriage. I said it looked like it hovered over the grocer's, and we agreed that since she needed a few extra ingredients for tomorrow's dinner I should go to the grocer's and see if I could see anything.

I saw a dead man.

The main arterial road that runs north-south through my town, the aptly named 1st Avenue, which remarkably lines up almost perfectly with the 1st Avenue in Seattle thirteen miles to the north, has a quarter-mile stretch with almost no street lights, no controlled intersections, and rolling terrain. It's a broad, four-plus-one street that in our subarctic winters gets as dark as the inside of a boot. On the east side of this stretch are a series of cheap apartment complexes— cheap because they're the last construction allowed before the Seattle/Tacoma Airport complex's safety zone, so they get all the airport noise. On the west side of the stretch are a few small businesses: A hardware store, a Thai restaurant, a hair salon, and a fairly skeevy dive bar.

Last night a man leaving the dive bar tried to cross this dark, broad boulevard. An older woman with older eyes, driving an older BMW with older lights, didn't see him until she hit him, and he hit her windshield.

The road that leads from my home to the grocer's was open, but the intersection onto 1st Avenue was closed. I parked at the grocer and walked to the bar, a block away. A crowd was watching, just outside the yellow police tape, and there in front of us was the whole scene.

There was the body, lying on the ground, a white sheet over it. Under the bright, temporary crime scene investigation lights I could see blood stains on it. Fifteen feet away the faded blue, boxy sedan, its windshield cracked, sat motionless, pointed away from the victim, skid marks on the road showing where she'd hit the brakes.

I spoke with some of the people there, and they all pretty much agreed on the scenario. People cross that stretch there all the time; they can't be bothered to walk the two blocks to the controlled intersection, then walk back two blocks to get to small businesses. Especially not after a night of drinking, possibly heavy drinking— after all, it's not as if many people are going to work tomorrow.

On the eve of Thanksgiving, I saw a dead man. Two families, the victim's and the driver's, will spend the holiday dealing with the aftermath of one more banal, pedestrian fatality.

I went home and told Omaha what I'd seen. We continued cooking. She made dessert, and I manhandled the turkey as her tendinitis is troubling her. It all seemed so ordinary. So safe. I hope it remains so.

Midnight. Omaha and I were just getting ready to go to bed when we heard the sound of crunching vegetation and a revving engine behind our house. I looked out the window and there were headlights abutting our property.

My house sits on a plot of line that backs up to a greenbelt– a county-mandated strip of land that provides sound insulation from the nearby airport. It's still private land, but the owner gets special tax incentives not to develop it. So it's basically a belt of undeveloped forest about 50 meters wide and a few blocks long. There's a footpath through it that Omaha and I take to reach the nearest grocery.

Some idiot had driven up the footpath and was now gunning the engine, trying to get out. I grabbed my clothes and a flashlight and went out. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"Aw, sorry man, I think we're stuck. Can you give me a push?" He was a young man, white, in his late 20s, thin, wiry, strong-looking. His companion was a woman, mid-30s, white, thinner, with a definitive hard-used look to her. I agreed to help push. Anything to get him out of here. His car was a Ford Excursion, a big beast of an SUV. As she got behind the wheel, he and I tried to push him out, but his back wheels were dug in hard into the soft dirt.

We tried to push the truck anyway. She got behind the wheel, and when I said, "Put it in reverse and back out slowly," he then told me, "There's something wrong with the transmission. We don't got no reverse."

You have got to be kidding me.

When they gave up with the attempt, he said, "Fuck, man, my mom's gonna be so pissed. We thought this was a shortcut."

I explained to him that no, it wasn't a shortcut, it wasn't a dirt road, it wasn't even good enough for a *car* and there was no way out except backing up. "Well, then, we're fucked." He looked at his girfriend. "Let's get our stuff."

"Where's my wallet?" she whined.

They hemmed and hawed and tried to find everything they needed. They littered the ground around the car with a 1.5 liter drink container– drained– and a couple of shreds of paper. "Sorry, man, we were just looking for a good place to smoke a blunt." That sounded like a more likely story. He felt his pockets. "Aw, fuck, I think I lost the blunt, too."

"Don't worry about it," his girlfriend said as she retrieved a box of cigarettes and a can of beer– Pabst Blue Ribbon– from her side of the car. "Now I can't find *my* wallet," she said.

"Don't worry about it," he said. He made apologies and explained that he lived in the cul-de-sac just west of us, which is somewhat believable. Omaha joined us and watched the Keystone Kops routine as the two of them walked around the car, over and over and over, looking for their stuff. Eventually, they came to the conclusion that it was time to go. Omaha and I walked them back down the footpath to the road. Along the way, he stops and says, "Oops! I dropped something." Omaha and I directed our flashlights to the ground, and he picked up a plastic card. "My food stamp card! Can't lose that!"

I thought, "Wait, you can afford weed, but you're on food stamps?" I didn't say it out loud. We eventually came to where the footpath exits onto the major road. They were apologetic, and probably drunk, and stoned, and it was all very silly.

If they lived to the west of us, why did they turn eastward when they reached the road? The only things to the east are a convenience store, a laundromat and a bar. And I don't think the laundromat is open at this hour.

The truck is still there. We hope someone comes and gets it soon. Tomorrow morning, I'll have to explain to the neighbors why there's a new truck in the greenbelt.

Omaha and I were at the airport to pick up Kouryou-chan, who was returning from Rome on an intercontinental flight with her friends. We were looking forward to seeing just how exhausted she was. The airport was crowded, especially the space we were in, with gleaming escalators leading up from the bowels of customs to the reception level, and then across the platform ascending further to the promised release of taxis and parking. There were at least a hundred people standing around.

A woman fell down the escalator leading up. The escalator, fortunately, detected the sudden emergent shift in weight and froze, an alarm buzzer ringing loudly. To her enormous luck, she landed on her luggage rather than the sharp edges of the escalator itself, but she was upside-down and pinned down by the awkwardness of the position and her own substantial weight.

I ran toward the crisis. I was one of only two who did.

She insisted she was unhurt. She was extremely grateful for our help, and I ended up carrying her luggage up the escalator as the other fellow helped her reach the top flight and the skyway to the parking garage.

When I was taking CPR classes, they called that "hero training," the knowledge that if you're fit and capable, you should always run toward the crisis. You're in a position to help. Hero training was little more than the awareness that most individuals will assume the problem belongs to other people. People will just stand around and seek out social affirmation that something should be done, that someone else will take care of the problem.

A lifetime of living of with someone with epilepsy has only reinforced this training. I only wish I could apply it toward my personal life.

 Omaha and I went out for lunch today, and while we were getting our bagels I noticed that the man sitting at the table next to ours had a weird looking tablet, but it was the chicklet keyboard that gave it away.  "Look," I told Omaha, "A Microsoft Surface in the wild."

The guy overheard me and snorted.  "Yeah.  Kinda weird, huh?"

"How good is it?"

He shrugged.  "It's not great.  But I need it for Excel."

And that encapsulates much of Microsoft's marketing since Windows 3.1.

This morning, Omaha and I went, as we do every month, to Kouryou-chan's school to do light landscaping and grounds work duty. While I was up on the roof, I looked down and saw a very large, very fat squirrel standing up in front of my coffee tumbler, one of the steel kind with a closeable lid. He had it in his forepaws like he was about to drink from it-- the lid was closed. I yelled at him and he roared off.

I mean, do squirrels even like coffee? That would have been one wired squirrel!

Come to think of it, it's entirely possible that he's encountered coffee before. There are three (count 'em, three!) cafes within a block of the school.

Last night, before the movie began, there was a "turn off your cellphones" PSA that had a fuzzy little orange creature trying to hush everyone around him on their cellphones and chomping down on snacks too loudly. At first, I thought he was just one of those strangely hideous CGI creatures that some studios think is cute. But then he shouted out, "I am the Lorax! I speak for the audience!" He then gave a spiel about being silent in the theater, followed by a "Don't forget to see me, the Lorax, in the upcoming..."

I damn near hurled my dinner on the row before me. You would too, if you were revolted by seeing the ongoing sodomization of Dr. Seuss's corpse like that.

This afternoon, several of us went out to lunch at a great, great ethnic Russian restaurant nestled deep inside Pike Place Market and well-shielded from the cold weather. As we were waiting for our food, the Russian-language radio feed playing from the open kitchen space played Ya Soshla S'Uma, the original Russian version of Tatu's All The Things She Said. Remember them, the faux lesbian studio act that always ended every lip synch with a kiss that looked more and more reluctantly drugged the longer the act wore on? Yeah, the original video: still hot.

Kinda blew my mind. I haven't heard from them in years. I actually bought their US release album, 200 KmH In The Wrong Lane, which was a fairly serviceable piece of pop music. I'll have to put it on my MP3 player when I get home.

Grief! That videa hit our shores in 2000. I think the only reason I saw it was 'cause CompuServe had bandwidth to spare.

I will be the first to admit that I find the idea of She-Hulk fondling herself, and the full set of superheroine PSAs about doing breast self-exams probably has its heart in the right place.

However, it gives me pause when I appreciate that a similarly conceived and executed set about testicular cancer would probably not be equally vell-received. Tony Stark fondling himself in the shower might be hot for me, but probably not for most people. And the idea of Nightcrawler giving himself a prostate massage is, well, my cup of tea, but I understand I'm not in a majority.

I was in a cafe' near my house yesterday, and saw a poster on the wall in the back, where the community notices are hung. It was a fairly large poster, very well-designed in a dark gunmetal gradient with vector floral arrangements on the top and a beautifully chosen serif font printed large in goldenrod, and it read: "Return to Security!" The body of the text read in part, "Come listen to a special presentation and discover God's Plan For Your Financial Security!" and the address of a local Seventh-day Adventist church.

I didn't write down the name of the huckster putting it on, but I bet his financial security is pretty much set: at the bottom of the poster, it read: "$99 per family."