© Dr. Wes Browning Frequently Asked Questions:

Where does the “©” come from?

Answer: I used to be a member of the StreetLife Art Gallery (no longer in existence), which was a studio/gallery where homeless and formerly homeless artists could create and display art, and keep all the proceeds from the sale of their own art. It was originally called the Homeless Art Gallery and was founded by Michael Howell, a formerly homeless painter, best known for his paintings of street people. Michael had a habit of declaring copyright on all of his paintings on both the front and the back, often in three or more places. I thought that was absurd. If one copyright declaration doesn’t do the trick, repeating it won’t work any better. It’s like thinking that the way to get through to Helen Keller is to shout at her. So I expressed my amusement by signing all my bread-and-butter art (the stuff I expected to sell, i.e. the humorous pieces) with the name “© Wes Browning.”

Where does the “Dr.” come from?

Answer: I earned a doctorate in mathematics from Cornell University. The degree was officially conferred in January 1979. My area of specialty was Topology. My thesis had to do with the classification of homotopy types of various sorts of geometric gadgets that are called two dimensional because they’re made of two dimensional pieces, but they need four dimensions to be constructed in general because if you constructed them in three dimensions the different pieces of construction material would poke through each other and wreck it. To be more specific, it was about two-dimensional CW-complexes with finite fundamental groups, if that means anything to you. I’m not going to say anything more about it here.

Are you and Perfess’r Harris the same person?

Answer: No. Here’s some ways you can tell us apart. A) I’m older and prettier. B) He’s the Director of Real Change and I’m not. C) Tim hates couscous. I like couscous, with garlic, chopped black olives, crumbled feta cheese, and jalapeño slices. D) The state lets Tim drive. I’m not allowed to drive anymore because of the little screwup in ‘87 involving me, my cab, a Honda pulling out of a parking space to do a U-turn in front of me and my cab, and some whiny crap about the speed limit. I don’t think 55 is too fast for a city arterial, as long as people stay the hell out of my way.

Were you ever really homeless?

Answer: Four times, for a total of 3 years 8 months. That’s eleven months average each, if you like averages. I like averages, they’re fun.

What would you like on your pizza?

Answer: Anchovies if they have it, pepperoni if they don’t. Plus mushrooms and black olives and jalapeño slices.

How did you get involved with Real Change?

Answer: Around February or March 1994, Tim Harris came to what would later be called StreetLife to propose a working relationship between the gallery and the soon to be published Real Change. I was in charge of the gallery at the time; Michael Howell was out. I told Tim “we’ll see” but actually I suspected him of being an FBI agent come to spy on homeless activists in Seattle. Clever front ‹ a street paper. But later when the first issue was ready to go to press Tim came back and selected one of my paintings (Pele) for the first cover. Since he had such good taste I knew he couldn’t be an FBI agent after all. So my initial involvement was that of supplying my own art.

Then what?

Answer: The Editorial Committee, then and now, is a grass roots committee drawn from the community of homeless people, formerly homeless people, and embedded activists. It guides the content of Real Change. One day, about two or three months after the first issue I was waiting for a committee meeting to end so I could go somewhere with the one of the members. In those days the meetings were in the front and I was sitting right next to it. During the meeting I felt compelled to butt in and mouth off about something. They said that if I was going to do that I should do it at the table. So I became a member of the Editorial Committee my own self.

Then what?

Answer: A month or two later the question came up then (as it still regularly does), “what does the paper need that it doesn’t already have?” and I said it needed a humor column, because the subject is awfully heavy. They said, “You do it.”

Why “Adventures in Poetry”?

Answer: Earlier I had volunteered to lead off the first Real Change Bad Art Show Benefit by getting up on stage and reciting bad poetry. I figured I shouldn’t display my paintings as bad art, because I was trying to get people to think my paintings were good. But I never cared if people thought my poetry sucked or not. So anyway, the audience seemed to agree with me that, yes, these were indeed very bad poems, and they laughed at them. That inspired me to try to inject humor into the column by inserting further pieces of wretched bad poetry. I didn’t know how that would work, hence “Adventures,” as opposed to “Routines.”

Why “Adventures in Irony”?

Answer: Several years into Adventures in Poetry I stopped including bad poetry. There were a couple reasons for this. A) A psychiatrist talked me into trying the anti-depressant Paxil. For me, Paxil turned out to be zombie-in-a-pill, and I couldn’t even write the column for one month, much less write poetry, even bad poetry. Even after I stopped taking Paxil, although I could write prose again immediately, there was a long period that I couldn’t write bad poetry. B) Meanwhile I was also gaining in confidence in my ability to keep the humor up in other ways. So I thought, well, maybe this isn’t so bad, let’s go with the flow. And pretty soon I didn’t miss the poetry. But I started getting complaints from readers who accused me of false advertising for keeping “Poetry” in the title. I told them all that even when I was including poetry I thought the poetry in the title had always referred to metaphors drenching my topics within my prose, and that it was my prose that was the true poetry, but they wouldn’t buy that, so finally as we switched to weekly publication I changed the title to “Adventures in Irony.” Nobody can tell me I don’t include irony.

What was the deal with the carrot man picture and why is it gone?

Answer: As an artist I doodled a lot. One day, early ‘95, I was having lunch in the old Frontier Room with a couple of other Editorial Committee members. One of them was Stan Burriss. I mentioned casually that I liked to do doodles of carrot people, meaning heads of people shaped like carrots. Stan said that was impossible, nobody can draw the head of a person and have it be shaped like a carrot. Needless to say, Stan Burriss has some difficulties in the visualization department. So I took a napkin and showed him that it could be done. For some reason, even though I don’t normally do caricatures and hadn’t intended to do one this time, the carrot-head man I drew to show Stan ended up looking just like me. I saved it and some months later when the column began I got Tim to scan it and run it as my self-portrait for the column. It’s gone now because Tim wanted a new photo image to go with the new overall look of the paper when we went weekly.

Why were you homeless?

Answer: The first (1974) and third (1988) times everyone in the extremely cheap apartment house I was living in at the time was evicted to make way for rent increases or demolition, after the building had changed hands, and I wasn’t able to find so cheap a place right away. The second time (1984) I was severely mentally ill with rather extreme symptoms of Chronic Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD), which symptoms were not helped by a divorce that they in turn helped precipitate. The last time I was homeless (1996-1997) I was left unemployed by the collapse of the janitorial company that I had been working for.

How did you eat?

Answer: Actually I had income all four times. The first time I was a graduate student with a teaching assistantship that paid $300/month. The second time, in spite of the mental illness, I worked as a lease night-shift cab driver. I made very little money at it (less than $200/month), but it paid for one full meal and a snack every day. The third time I was getting around $339/month on GAU-disability and the fourth time I was selling art and doing what I call art-stunts to get by.

What do you mean by art-stunts?

Answer: Just stunts to encourage people to help me out with funds, short of panhandling. My favorite example was the day I offered up the naming rights to all my body parts for a fee of one dollar per part. Tim bought my liver and named it Intrepid. I promised not to tell anyone what Anitra Freeman bought the naming rights to.

Who is Anitra Freeman?

Answer: When I was last homeless, Anitra Freeman, who was by then a member of the Editorial Committee of Real Change, let me stay overnight in her apartment 3 or 4 nights per week. I had to sleep on her floor for most of that time. So she became to be referred to as Anitra “on whose kitchen floor I have sometimes slept” Freeman. But in July of ‘97 we started sleeping closer than that, after I quit smoking (a condition she put on making that sort of change.)

Who is Cindy, and why haven’t we heard from her lately?

Answer: Cindy Holly (not her given name) was and still is my Muse. She is the ancient Muse of Other, a Muse of Few Words. Her true name is known only to me. To reveal your Muse’s true name is a good way to get muse-slapped; I’m smarter than that. Currently she’s a brunette and she looks 35, but actually she’s ageless and immortal. Even though I am not writing bad poetry for the column I still get help from Cindy to write what I do write. Without her I could never keep my column under its allotted 666 words. (OK, the allotment is actually 650 words, but I manage to go over regularly. In my mind the allotment is 666.) I haven’t talked about Cindy’s help lately because the Bush Administration has given me too many other things to talk about. But the next time there’s a lull in the news don’t be surprised if Cindy pops up.

Why have you put all of your old columns on this website? Some/most/all of them were crap.

Answer: They sure were! I’ve included them all because they are proof that writing doesn’t come easy for me, so when people read what little good stuff that’s there they’ll appreciate the effort that must have gone into it, and how much I’ve overcome my lack of native talent.

Besides writing columns and being on the Editorial Committee, what else do you do at Real Change?

Answer A) Most importantly, I feed the cat, Sid Vicious. B) I clown around in the office. C) I am a member of the Real Change Homeless Speaker’s Bureau, so I go out a lot to speak to classes and such. D) I man the vendor desk on Saturdays, distributing papers to our vendors, for pay. E) I’m on the Real Change Board of Directors. (But because of “D” I have no vote on staff issues.)

Besides all that, what do you do that’s not involved with Real Change?

Answer: Mostly I vegetate. I’m thinking of resuming the graphic art again, but thinking isn’t doing, right?

What’s up with the Polynesian-inspired artwork and the habit of always wearing tropical shirts?

Answer: By a strange fluke my first language was Hawaiian, even though my parents spoke English. Or maybe it wasn’t a fluke, since they brought it on. While we lived at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, and I was one year old, my parents ran over me with their car, causing severe brain damage and putting me in a coma for four months. When I woke up out of the coma it was determined that most of the damage was to my speech development. It delayed my speech. By the time I was ready to start speaking I had happened to come into contact with Hawaiian civilian maintenance workers (from Ni’ihau) and picked up Hawaiian from them. Eventually we left Hawaii and my Hawaiian fell into such disuse that I can’t speak it at all now, but I still remember clearly how different speaking Hawaiian felt to me, and the experience colors my thinking and art. But it isn’t the only inspiration for my art, and it may only seem so because it tends to overpower other inspirations. The tropical shirts, on the other hand, are simply in defiance of Seattle’s weather, and a rebellion against straight lines and drab colors.

What’s your favorite kind of ice cream?

I don’t eat sweets, thank you. Please may I have a big bowl of jalapeño slices, instead?