SPOKANE QUEASY WITH BIG EASY

In my small town town, we’ve got a lively place called Big Easy where music finds its nightclub mate. It’s a jive place. For one, Ani DeFranco played there last month.

Now the CONSERVATIVE TOWN FATHERS have got their drooping eyelids on the place because people drink at the club, and, of course, people get drunk when they drink, and drunks, naturally, get into fights from time to time and even urinate wild in the street. Now that makes the TOWN FATHERS pee their pants, this pissing in the street, and they just gotta get down on the quick Easy with a slow conservative policeman’s beat.

What those slow stodgies don’t know’s that for a city to be live, upbeat, vibrant and youthful, you gotta break a few yeggs on the way from down to up. Talented, youthful people crave creative juices, excitement and adventure. They know you can’t boom without some busted chops. As long as I’m not down there getting my own chops busted (it’s my choice), I don’t care if someone pisses in the gutter or up against a building as long as Spokane sheds its stodgy image and goes boom, not bust. You gotta make a choice: become a place where youthful, talented people want to be or rot away like an old dingy wallowing in a backwater.

Boom towns have always been places where trouble happens along with the economic leap. I remember pulling into Gillette, Wyoming back in the early 70’s. Dust and bustle everywhere, streets being widened and buildings leaping skyward. I was passing through, but I was thirsty from blowing through all that desert, so I stopped at a package store to get me a six pack and coming out the door as I pulled in was a steel toed miracle of manhood, with eyes blackened and stitches in his cheeks and lips puffy from a certain fight.

“Yahoo,” I thought, “this be the place!” But I had another opportunity bursting wide in Cheney, W and A, or I’da sure as hell stopped to squat where IT was blooming.

I say let Spokane boom, let piss run wild in the streets. Let fist fights erupt and blood run down the cheeks. Let lips get puffy and young dudes puff huffy. Town fathers, wake up and live! Get on or get off the ball, but just get out of the way and let youth have its day.

For safety, one thing I’d do is light that city up like a Mardi Gras float, put lights in every alley, from every building hang them, and if the minions of the law in this police state city don’t like it, I’d tell ‘em to go down to New Orleans and learn how to run a party city, learn how to let people have juice without slowing down the progress. (If you don’t understand the words “police state” ask yourself who in Spokane town decides these things about who parties where and when and how.) And I’m serious about asking New Orleans how it does what it does without shutting down the party.

Ten-four, Spokane town.


EDWARDS HO!

Funny that one of the children left behind, Bush, should trumpet John Edwards’ lack of experience to be in the White House when Bush himself has been four years in that office and’s still as stupid and inexperienced as the day he got there.



"A single sentence will suffice for modern man: He fornicated and read the papers." —Albert Camus (But even this was before the advent of Fox Bush News TV and talk "without thinking" radio. And then there's George Bush. Story is that his library was recently burned up—both volumes. Bush was inconsolable. He hadn't finished coloring the second one.)