Mind full of worry. Mind full of what-the-hell-do-I think-I�m-doing. Mind full of something. It is my November. I�m at C.H. dot N., where the tables are just high enough and the chairs just low enough to make typing uncomfortable, and I�m here because my car is down on Dexter getting a new windshield after a mishap this weekend involving the solid muscle of Steve�s thigh and the solid metal of the Club. I rode up on the 8 bus and they�re going to call me on my cell phone when I can come get the car.

What a pleasure to read this Nick Gillespie interview after the one with Savage I linked to a few entries ago. Gillespie takes himself so much less seriously and comes off as so much more like a grown-up. Late last week I had taken some notes for another rant about Strangerism, this time as encapsulated in Charles Mudede�s "Death Farm: The Geography of Pig Farmer Robert Picton, the Man Suspected of Having Killed Over 60 Vancouver, BC, Sex Workers." There was a single paragraph in that article? essay? report? � oh, right, in that *geography* that got on my nerves about a dozen different ways, a record even for the Stranger, and at one point over the weekend (though I would later abandon the diary entry that surrounded it) I began to compile a list. Here is the paragraph at issue:

[Former coordinator of a center for sex workers Elaine] Allan seems angered by my pessimism, but a short drive around the neighborhood � with its fathers cutting lawns, mother planting flowers, children riding mountain bikes, all within meters of the death farm � makes it clear that the indifference the police demonstrated toward the vanishing women is identical to the indifference this suburban community is demonstrating toward the body parts recovered in its midst.

1. The fathers cut lawns and the mothers plant flowers? Nothing sexist about that!
2. If I were the fact checker at the Stranger, I�d want the names and phone numbers of at least two fathers who were cutting lawns and at least two mothers who were planting flowers in the neighborhood in question, all during the time span of a short drive. I�m going to go out on a limb and say that these were not provided. The reason I would have wanted them is partly that Mudede�s picture is too self-servingly perfect, his prose is too glib. Something smells wrong. Or, to the Stranger, does it smell exactly right? (Is there a fact checker at the Stranger? The masthead does not list one. Dear onetime fact checker, is one of the rewards for the poor sucker who has to do this job a title that is somewhat loftier than his or her duties? If you read this, will you let me know? I just got interested. Thanks.)
3. What is the word "suburban" doing here? Mudede has already belabored the point that the neighborhood is in a suburban area. It adds nothing to the meaning of the sentence as it its written; the word�s irrelevance turns it into a veiled accusation. Mudede is probably correct with respect to some of the article�s contentions that the police failed to connect the dots on the series of disappearances because the disappeared were prostitutes and drug addicts � see rant below � but what�s he got against suburbanites? Reverse discrimination is not the answer. (Elsewhere in the article: "It was around this time, when the Picktons became millionaires, that the women began to go missing in alarming numbers from the DES." Subtle.)
4. Note my qualifiers in the previous sentence � he�s probably right, some of the contentions. I mean, who the fuck knows? The police dropped the ball on the investigation, true. But is it fair to call that indifference? "Ignorance" would have been kinder. Near the beginning of the article, Mudede refers to "the lack of bodies, coupled with the police department�s prejudices and contempt for the pimps, drug dealers, addicts, and sex workers who make up over a third of the DES� 15,000 residents�" I�ll bet you five bucks that nobody fact-checked the prejudices and contempt either (in fact it doesn�t sound like Mudede talked to anyone on the law enforcement side of the investigation). It�s not fair for Mudede to treat them as if they are indisputable. And is it fair to fault the police�s stalled investigation when it�s manifestly true that they didn�t have any material evidence to investigate? It is horrible that so many people died. One feels bad for the victims� families unless one�s heart is made of stone. And yes, Picton is a very bad man who was indeed charged with attempted murder a few years before the serial-killer case broke, in a case that in retrospect looks like it should have gone to trial. But many of the women who disappeared had been living off the grid, no fixed address and no regular contact with families � here, the issues of prostitution and/or drug addiction are red herrings � and with a history of dropping in and out of sight. Can�t we concede that while the police may (and may not) have dropped the ball, as cold as that sounds when "the ball" = a body count in the dozens, the harder it is to see the dots the harder it is to connect them? (I can hear Mudede now accusing me of blaming the victims.) What exactly is he proposing that the Vancouver police should have done? It is interesting that he doesn�t offer any suggestions. "Vancouver's police had next to nothing: no bodies, no physical evidence, no autopsies to perform," he writes. Well, yes. Turning this fact into an indictment of the police department�s morality is the bloody byproduct of conflict-and-divisiveness as editorial policy.
5. And even granting the hypothetical that the police were indifferent, how is that indifference identical to the equally hypothetical indifference of the yard-beautifying suburbanites? And does Mudede honestly think that anyone could be indifferent to the pieces parts of dozens of women being recovered from within shouting distance of their houses? Is indifference even a quality that is demonstrable? What looks like indifference could be something else, for instance shock and denial. "Seeming indifference" would have been much more journalistically jake.
6. And actually I don�t think Mudede even talking about indifference towards the body parts � what he means is indifference towards the fact of their recovery. It is not clear whether the object of the alleged police indifference is the missing women or the investigation of their disappearances, but this is less glaring because based on the article Mudede could be making either charge.
7. How does Mudede suggest these people pass the time, anyway? Should they be gawking at the edge of the police tape that demarcates the crime scene? Should they stop tending their gardens in tribute to the dead women�s memories? Maybe they should erect small crosses and makeshift memorials on their lawns instead of mowing them. No, then he�d just bag on them for being superficial and consumeristic and perhaps toss in a righteous pomo potshot at the benightedness of Christianity to the effect that the cross is nothing but a self-serving sop.
8. This one�s really for the copy editor. I did a Google search for "cut the lawn" and got 5520 hits. "Mow the lawn" yielded 51,400. Even if the former is grammatically correct � it sounds funny to me but I don�t think it is verboten � the paper should have gone with the more common usage. Also I�m not comfortable with "demonstrated," especially not the second instance of it.
9. "Death farm." Oh stop. The luridness of this phrase is almost excusable in the context of a tabloid-style headline, but that�s it.

OK, enough. I met a guy once who�d known Mudede, friend of a friend or something, and he told me that in even the most casual conversation Mudede�s single and ever-flogged intellectual reference point was Mikhail Bakhtin. Ha! That�s hilarious. And, come to think of it, probably all you need to know.

I�m worried about coming off as cranky-old-ladyish or bitter when I go after something like Mudede�s piece. And I hate how people say things like God, don�t you have anything better to do than make fun of the Stranger? The equation of criticism with making fun is of course very Seattle, and it incenses me that wanting to hold esteemed local journalists to a more reasonable standard of accountability becomes a black mark against me � to Charles Mudede: no, I am not being a racist � I am the person who should have something better to do, I am the person who must have something wrong with her because I apparently do not. It depresses me that wanting things to come closer to, I don�t know, a Platonic ideal of goodness, Steve�s one percent, makes me a misanthropic harpy, and that once someone thinks of me that way, because of what it means to think it, I will not be able to change his or her mind and bring about understanding of the real project. Am I cut out for criticism after all, then? The authority I feel to engage in it fades in and out and it�s interesting, my skin is thin not with respect to people disagreeing with my conclusions � go ahead � but with their questioning of just that, my right to make them in the first place. (Would this change if I had some kind of credential? Yes, I am not thrilled to admit this but I think it would.) Like I went to see British Sea Power two Saturdays ago and it was stirring, amazing � a few days later I saw a capsule review of their stage show in the New Yorker listings and its glib and indulgent tone, the disrespect it did, made me almost physically angry � and I wanted to permanent-recordize it here but then I cowered, asking myself what right I had to act like a music critic when there are real music critics out there and I know where who do such terrific work, how could I be so arrogant to think that my contribution to the discourse would amount to anything? I asked myself this even though what I would have been describing was my experience, subjective and singular. Could I not have circumscribed it within those parameters and written about it that way? No, I replied.

And the notion of taking oneself seriously. I wish we had better, or different, words. Speaking of getting angry and incensed, my whole life the best results in that category have been when someone tells me to "lighten up." I think it�s our responsibility as sentient beings, I mean both to ourselves and each other, *not* to lighten up and to take ourselves, well, seriously � but "take yourself seriously" has a particular meaning and a connotation, so I have to (and do) use it that way.

And how � how? � to talk about what I am trying to do without giving the impression that I think I�m so great on account of it, that I am taking myself 100% the ugly kind of seriously. It�s not like that at all, it�s as basic and unremarkable as a function. I�m a girl with a high standards and a laptop, and that�s the whole story.

And how. I don�t know. Dude, where�s my car? They should have called me by now, it�s almost noon.