US Illegally placed concrete blocks have taken over public parking in Seattle. Why are they there?

Nikolas_Zijlstra · Jul 31, 2022

Seattle is a lost cause. Glass it to prevent further spread.

Spicey McHaggis · Jul 31, 2022

Elbow Greased Strength said:
Back in the day hobos were strict about keeping the jungle clean and tidy and never went on the dole where they traveled.

Back in the day, the police were allowed a bit more leeway in terms of nightstick privileges as well. Any hobos who strayed to far out of line or overstayed their welcome could look forward to a quick trip out of town with a few hard knocks to send the message home.

Elbow Greased Strength · Jul 31, 2022

Spicey McHaggis said:
Back in the day, the police were allowed a bit more leeway in terms of nightstick privileges as well. Any hobos who strayed to far out of line or overstayed their welcome could look forward to a quick trip out of town with a few hard knocks to send the message home.

Sometimes the hobos would take matters into their own hands as well, especially regarding chomos and other sex pests.

northstar747 · Jul 31, 2022

why does Seattle have rep for smack.

Also been told there are RV land lords who own the RV pay to have it towed to new places and rent them out.

But like I keep pointing out, homeless like to be near people who will give them money, people who have things they can trade for money, and most importantly a supply of drugs or booze.

Having homeless drug addicts camping near your home or buisness is just not gonna fly.

Exigent Circumcisions · Jul 31, 2022

Stormy Daniel's Lawyer said:
Residents are winning at Homeless Jenga...

You could go around burning the fucking things down in the middle of the night and nobody would be the wiser.

IAmNotAlpharius · Jul 31, 2022

Hey look the community is policing itself.

God's drunkest driver · Jul 31, 2022

How else can you city-dwellers torment the RV dwelling junkies enough that they'll leave? It's easier to torment the tent cities, throwing smoke bombs into their rows, getting stink bomb juice all over their tents, or by getting their plugs arrested. What are they going to do? Call the cops? I'd much rather have a row of ugly concrete block in front of my business than a row of beat up 40 year old RVs with trash piling up around them and sewage leaking from their drains. Thank God I live in the boonies. There aren't many drug dealers to score heroin from or street lamp posts to steal electricity from out here so the bums have no reason to come here.

Cpl. Long Dong Silver · Jul 31, 2022

Spicey McHaggis said:
Honestly if they wanted to actually improve their lives, the best solution would be for them to ~~drive their rvs to somewhere with a lower cost of living and low skill labor~~ run a garden hose from their exhaust into the drivers compartment and run the engine for a couple hours.

Also

“The new mayor ran on a law-and-order platform and this is the law,” said Bill Kirlin-Hackett, the director of the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness, which runs the Scofflaw Mitigation/Vehicle Residency Outreach Program. “We just find it to be quite hypocritical.”

Fuck this mealy-mouthed bleeding heart faggot.

I've gotten to the point where I think we just need to use the Patrick Bateman method on the American homeless.

TowinKarz · Jul 31, 2022

All you need to know is, people with VEHICLES they are using as their HOMES are being told to MOVE THEM and complaining they have NOWHERE TO GO and NOWHERE TO LIVE.

I wonder what's going up at a faster rate in this country, our crushing stupidity, or, our willingness to fake being crushingly stupid to avoid having to take responsibility for what we've done?

P.S. - Ol' Unkle TowinKarz can give a 400-level master's course on why the WORST thing an apartment complex can do that's guaranteed to turn even the most livable of units into a favela in as little as a week is to NOT remove illegally parked cars..... the problems just grow from there in true broken-windows fashion.

If nobody cares you don't have a parking permit, well, they won't care if you store your buddy's rusty and unable-to-pass inspection there, right? And if they don't care about the project car, they certainly won't care about the weed in the trunk that he has to store there less he get kicked out of his current place, right? And if they don't care about that, they won't care if you start selling some on the side to make a few bucks....right? And if they..... well, you get the idea.

Every place that ever told us to stop towing because they were tired of complaints from whiny residents whose "just visiting" friends were towed reversed themselves in a months time, max, because they got even MORE tired of complaints from neighboring units AND the police about the about acre-wide unauthorized block parties in their lot, complete with loud music, flying beer bottles, stranger danger and occasional stabbings.

To say nothing of there suddenly being no parking spaces for those who were paying up to $800 a month to have one... as every available spot and then some filled up with people who'd rather not pay for public parking, project cars, wrecked cars of those looking to dodge a DUI or the stripped-out hulls of probably-stolen cars missing everything but the original robot-welded frame.

Sometimes I'd just drive in and make a lap or two, even without a complaint, just to see the results: the sound of a diesel engine in the parking lot at 2 AM would cause a dozen doors to fly open and 30 cars to clear out..... it was like kicking an anthill.

For reference sake, from my own archives:

Here's what illegally parked vehicles look like in a well-regulated apartment lot, patrolled by us 24/7:

And here's what one looks like in an unregulated lot that told us we don't have to check it every day:

And so does this

And this

And this

Don't EVER let assholes put down roots, they will stay until you yank them out, and by then will have choked out the grass anyway.

Freshly Baked Socks · Jul 31, 2022

I live in a West Coast Liberal Utopia Metropolis, and there are 4 different RV dwellers living on my block. This population has been steady for about two years, with no end in sight. I expect it will get twice as bad before it gets better.

I remember being a kid in this neighborhood, and as recent as 10 years ago if your vehicle didn't move in 72hrs it was towed and impounded. That's totally out the window now. One of these vehicles has been resting on 3 tires and a jack-stand for a whole year. I keep extra watch on that one because it is parked next to the bus stop, and is listed as a sex offenders residence on the state registry.

Sage In All Fields · Jul 31, 2022

*blocks ur parking spot*

Stoneheart · Jul 31, 2022

can you just go out and take those concrete blocks for free?

northstar747 · Jul 31, 2022

https://archive.ph/myvLD

Heres a article from rolling stone back in 1996 about all the smack problems in Seattle

The details are just crazy.

Nearly every store on Broadway — the central shopping and dining street in Seattle’s Capitol Hill — is a junkie landmark. The Jack-in-the-Box is where Kurt Cobain used to wait out the hours before connections, until fame found him. The Taco Bell has a single-occupancy bathroom you can lock, in case you’re far from home and need a clean, private place to fix. Behind the Broadway Market there’s the brick apartment building where one of the hill’s many dealers will buzz you in until fairly late in the evening, and the parking garage beneath the market — if you still have a car and can spare $1 per half-hour — is an even cleaner and more private location to shoot. Hill residents will direct you to the neighborhood’s two call-back pay phones (where pages to dealers can be placed and returned), by the locksmith’s and in front of Dick’s drive-in restaurant. Fred Meyer, a drug store, will sell you needles over the counter without a prescription — which is legal in Washington — in bags of 10 for $3.

Fridays and Mondays there’s a needle exchange out toward Seneca Avenue, and if you’re willing to swing downtown, there’s an outdoor booth on Second and Pike that makes exchanges every business day. North of them both, looming over downtown, is the Space Needle. The Needle has lately become an unintentionally ironic symbol of the city’s heroin problem. A lot of bad jokes have been made at its expense — and they’re made constantly, each time the hills drop away and the cityscape parts and some sore-armed, tight-pupiled Capitol Hill resident catches sight of the spire — but it’s the Needle that helped convince Anne Simpson that the time had come to kick.
“I was sitting at work,” the 23-year-old waitress explains, “and two tourists were at the bar reading their little map. They turned to the bartender and asked, ‘Where’s that needle thing?’ And without thinking I looked up and went, ‘You mean needle exchange? That’s over on Seneca.’ That’s when I knew I had to get clean and that I had to get away from here to do it.”
Anne came to Seattle, a place she’d seen in movies like Singles, from Texas, where her father worked in construction and her mother was a social worker. “I’d seen junkies all my life and knew the downfalls,” she says. “I fought off addiction really hard.” Anne started by smoking heroin once a week. Then it was twice a week, still under control. Then came needles and a dealer — in her case, Mark Wofford — and now, as Anne ruefully says, “I’ve pretty much shot a whole compact car into my arm.” She turns and looks out the window. “This is just a very junkie-friendly place. In Seattle there’s almost no reason not to use.”
Always, there’s the talk of quitting. Junkies dream of escape to a place without temptation; dealers dread imprisonment. Mark the dealer and his girlfriend Katie were about to make their evening Broadway runs when a friend stopped them on the sidewalk. Some dangerously pure heroin had made its way into Mark’s supply. Two of his clients had overdosed in front of the Safeway supermarket; another had been found near the Jack-in-the-Box. Broadway, teeming with police cars and ambulances, was lit up like a carnival. The police already had Mark’s rough description, and bicycle cops — who stick mostly to Broadway — were whizzing along the dark residential streets in search of him.

Katie had the night’s 12-gram “half-piece” (a full dealer’s piece in Seattle weighs 24 to 26 grams) stashed in her bra, and the two of them had just enough time to scramble into a stranger’s garage and hide beneath a car before a police cruiser turned the corner and began training its searchlight along the houses. They hid all night. For weeks afterward, Mark couldn’t sleep: “I’d lie there with my ears perked like a dog,” he says, “listening for the door to get kicked in, for cops pulling up in my driveway, everything. I mean, I’d been doing it for almost a year, and the life expectancy of a Capitol Hill heroin dealer is six months.”
Mark — tall and soft-spoken, with a sandy-eye-lashed handsomeness and a junkie’s astonishing slimness — has decided to quit dealing and get clean. It’s a decision that will reverberate through the community of users who’ve come to depend on him. It’s a decision he made even though at 21 he had become one of the hill’s top three dealers, even though he and Katie were received as drug royalty by most hill users, even though the city was furnishing him with a steady stream of new clients.
Mark says it is the music that brings them. “Some of our biggest, most famous musicians are known heroin users,” he says. “People have been coming [to Seattle] since ’91 and ’92, and they probably think, ‘Oh, man, I got a band, I’m going to get signed, and I’m going to try heroin.’ Or maybe they didn’t think about the heroin, maybe they just wanted to get their band checked out. And then the heroin came along.”
No one is sure how heroin became so inextricably linked with Seattle — popular theories: port town, grim weather. What is not disputed is the drug’s pervasive presence. “My treatment experience tells me that heroin use is much more prevalent here than it’s ever been,” says Scott Martin, an emergency-room social worker at the city’s Harborview Medical Center. “Since I began working in Seattle in 1972, the number of methadone centers has doubled, and the number of treatment facilities for drug addiction has exploded. That amount of growth is incredible.”

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The Drug Abuse Warning Network has been charting the national heroin rise for years: There was a 34 percent increase in heroin-related emergency-room incidents from 1991 to 1992, followed by a 32 percent jump in 1993, with a third uptick in 1994 (the most recent year for which figures are available). But these numbers have hardly kept pace with the numbers in King County, where Seattle is located: From 1986 to 1994, heroin fatalities increased nearly 300 percent. And of course there have been the heroin-related music deaths, which listed together look like a kind of grim new alternative Grammy category: Cobain, and Kristen Pfaff of Hole in 1994; Stefanie Sargent of 7 Year Bitch in 1992; Andrew Wood of Mother Love Bone in 1990.
The attention that these youthful deaths have brought to Seattle has not delighted long-term residents. “It’s causing fallout,” complains the Seattle photographer Alice Wheeler, who moved here in 1981, “and part of the fallout is kids moving to Seattle to be junkies. All these runaways come here for that lifestyle: Share big houses with a bunch of people, crash here, crash there. There were junkies in the punk scene when I got here; there were always whispers about people. Heroin had always been Seattle’s dark little secret, and it’s a shameful secret. But the new generation of junkies who’ve moved here are not ashamed at all. They nod visibly in public; it’s a badge of honor.”
The street kids on Capitol Hill have two favorite spots for “spare changing.” There’s the cash machine at Seafirst Bank (if they’re trying to put together the necessary $20 for an eighth of a gram), and then there’s the lot in front of Dick’s (if they’re after a hamburger). On warm, sunny days — rare in Seattle — they sit together in big cross-legged groups in front of Payless Drug Store, whip on sunglasses, lean back and take in the sky.
Teal is a 17-year-old runaway from Pennsylvania with shaved temples and a fringe of lavender bangs in front of her eyes; Philip, 18, who has a soul-patch and wears a floppy brown cap, grew up in Arkansas. Philip began shooting two years ago. “The first time I did it, I was really scared,” he says. “My friend was gonna hit me up. I was like, ‘No, don’t do it — do it — don’t do it.’ And then he did it, and it was the best drug I’ve tried.” Teal did her first shot this year, “because of the way people talk about it,” she says. Seattle, the kids say, is a good city for junkies: “easy to scam, easy to fix.”

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There’s a sense of community on the hill, even among street kids: Neither Teal nor Philip has an apartment; both have friends who let them couch surf and stay on for a few days in each place. In the summer, Philip says, there are lots of good places to sleep outdoors — “as long as you check first for sprinklers.”
Street kids make up a small percentage of King County’s estimated 10,000 to 15,000 intravenous-drug users. Often they are like Will Stephans, 28, who’s lived in the city for seven years. Raised in the upper-middle-class suburbs of Denver, he moved to Seattle because he wanted to live in a city with a thriving music scene. He already had a name for the band he hoped to found: Automatique. He also dreamed of finding a counterculture that mixed drugs with creativity. For a while he alternated between bunking with relatives and surfing his friend’s apartments.
Now he’s a resident of the downtown federal housing projects, where he gets by on welfare and food stamps. As he explains with a wince of smile, he’s been “married to the horsey” for six years. He has a black beard, pale skin and, on both cheeks, red cuts that don’t appear to be healing.
When Will needs extra money to score, he waits by the sidewalk for older men in cars, offering blow jobs for $20, money upfront. When he gets it, he runs — “services not rendered,” he says. This type of work takes a sharp eye: “I try to go for frail and weak, but you never know when someone is actually going to be able to thwart your efforts at ripping them off.”
Sometimes, Will speaks with the corrosive irony of someone whose youthful guesses have mostly turned out to be wrong. Other times, using words like ennui or synchronization, or describing the odor of his housing complex as “the rancid smell of cooking chunks of poverty,” he sounds as though he’s quoting an unpublished essay that’s gone through a few too many drafts. Will intends to give his rock & roll dream one more year; if it doesn’t work, he says, he’s going to leave Seattle, go back to college in Colorado.
“It seems to me that the drug culture is largely filled with, you know, white kids from classic, mildly privileged, white suburban backgrounds like mine,” Will says. “We all have comfort zones to fall back on. And for a lot of us, it’s like when people go into the military. They have some experience that maybe kicks their butt a little. Being strung out, handling withdrawal — all of it tests your mettle. And some people are going to end up lost souls; there’s going to be some carnage. But I mean, in a world where one’s identity can be this vague, soupy mix, this is something that might boil the real you out of you.”

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Anne Simpson knows how hard it is to kick, how the drug’s pull gets stronger after she’s been away from it. “I’d go through my withdrawals, stay clean for a week or two — three was the longest,” she says. “Then I’d think, ‘Well, I obviously don’t have a problem. I can go ahead and use once and not get addicted’ — and within a few days, I’d be strung out again.” This time she swears she will quit for real. A week ago she duct-taped her last needle to a sheet of paper, wrote out the words “not an option” and thumbtacked it to the wall. Having her dealer out of commission makes her even more optimistic. “I think what really killed me was actually getting a connection in the first place,” she says. “Mark could get it for me every day and bring it to my house. So it becomes like, OK, for 40 bucks you could go out drinking with friends and possibly have a good time. Or you could buy heroin and be guaranteed a good time. So it’s nice having Mark out of business.”
Mark’s retirement, now four days old, hasn’t been as rewarding for his friends who still use. Eric, whose sweet features and shaved head give him the disarming look of a hard-boiled angel, is a 25-year-old veteran of the Air Force (peacetime enlistees call it the Chair Force). He makes sandwiches at a local deli, and until very recently his days have passed with the maintaining junkie’s tranced, wonderful simplicity. A wake-up shot, bliss, work for five hours; an afternoon shot, bliss, hang out for five hours; an evening shot, bliss, sleep. Mark’s retirement has complicated this schedule. Eric doesn’t have any other connections, and he’s almost out of dope. After midnight he goes for a walk on Broadway and returns to Anne’s Capitol Hill apartment with Greg, who squats in an abandoned building in the university district.
Greg is tall and bird thin, and his motions are slow and gliding — he seems to move on heroin time. He used to run deliveries for Mark, he knows lots of dealers, and he and Eric decide to cop together.
In Seattle, if you know your way around, heroin is like takeout food. You can have your dope delivered — phone a pager number, wait for a call back, set up your meeting — or you can resort to a downtown drive-through. It’s nearly 1 in the morning and as Greg begins phoning, it becomes clear that delivery is pretty much a losing proposition. So Eric and Greg head downtown to First Avenue and Pike and look for Mexican men in doorways. Black tar — chiva, Seattle’s heroin staple — comes from Mexico, and these men can arrange downtown deals.

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After a quick consultation, a stocky, ponytailed guy leads Eric and Greg up the block. (It’s understood that after copping, they’ll kick down some of their dope to him — the standard amount is one-quarter of the score.) He leads them to a woman in a long, quilted down jacket, but her price is too high. He leads them around the corner to a Chicano couple talking by a parking meter. Greg walks into a doorway and glides out a moment later with his fist wrapped around a wax-paper bundle of what looks like beef jerky but is in fact a quarter-gram of black tar.
Back at Anne’s apartment, the preparations begin. Greg removes a spoon and an orange-capped syringe from his coat pocket. Eric lays out an alcohol prep pad, a penknife, a cotton ball and a glass of water on the coffee table. He sets to it meticulously, as if this is another Air Force duty to be mastered, like fixing engines or breaking down a rifle. They squirt water on the tar, hold lighters under their spoons and stir. Eric uses his knife, Greg the end of his needle, and there’s the scratchy sound of metal against metal. The air fills with the smell of cooking heroin, which is a little like burned vinegar.
Anne says, looking on, “I think what I miss more than heroin sometimes is just the ritual of shooting.” Eric agrees. “You get addicted to the needle,” he says. “Just the process of sticking something into your vein, having such a direct involvement with your body — I mean, I’d probably shoot food now if I could.” Eric draws the mixture into his syringe and injects it into the crook of his elbow. The result is powerful and close to immediate. His lilac-colored lids drop down over his eyes, his mouth opens; his head rolls forward, and his fingers delicately twitch.
Greg, a seven-year needle veteran, flexes his left hand until the veins stand out. He tries shooting the tip of his thumb, then between his knuckles, but the veins are too small to hold the contents of the injection. After a long search, he finds a workable spot in the palm of his hand. Anne watches, eyes glittery.
The off ramp, a club on Eastlake, has a proud history. Mother Love Bone played there. Soundgarden played there. Pearl Jam played there. More recently, the club has developed a new reputation. Sitting at the bar, three members of the popular local band Whyte Out can spot the dealers, who drift alertly among the tables. They circulate like waiters — if you look at one of them long enough, he will slip over and recite his bill of fare. The members of Whyte Out are black, from Cleveland, New York and Chicago. They are mystified by the Seattle association of heroin and glamour. Dope has been a factor of inner-city life for decades, but back home it has the opposite association. “It’s the loser drug, man,” says T-Roy, the drummer. “It means you’ve given up. We don’t understand it.”

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Kenneth Carter, the guitarist, laughs. “Except here, nobody seems to be losing,” he says. “Everybody seems to be winning.” They’ve seen other local bands use heroin as a shortcut to street credibility and integrity, to indie-label deals and tours. “There’s a certain allure,” T-Roy explains. “People will go see a band because it’s like, I heard they’re the most dangerous band on the street.’ You know? I heard they’re fucked up. Let’s go.’ ” He takes a sip of vodka and frowns. “But maybe it’s because of our culture, man, and being black. The idea of talking about let’s go score some heroin, that thought is a little too intense to collectively play with.”
In the beginning, we did some fun stuff,” Dustin Cowan says, nodding at Ellen Wallace, his girlfriend. They would shoot each other up, the way lovers will sometimes tilt each other’s glasses or place food in each other’s mouths. Or they would shoot together, pull the needles out and immediately kiss, so they could enjoy the pleasures of rushing and kissing at once. In bed, Dustin says, “I’d be lying on the bottom, and Ellen would straddle me, and we’d be having sex with a needle ready.” Ellen continues, “And then when I’d start to orgasm, I’d hit him, so that in a way we were both having an orgasm at the same time.”
Dustin and Ellen are 19 and 18. Dustin’s father is a well-paid executive from a nearby state, and his family owns a vacation home; Ellen grew up solidly middle-class. The couple moved to Seattle together to go to school. Instead, they found dope connections, got strung out and stopped attending class.
“It was just too hard to come up with the cash we needed and still make it to school on time,” says Dustin. “And then while we were in class, we’d be thinking about how it was taking up hours when we could be out making money to score.
“The way we live now is, we spend every waking moment putting money together,” he continues. “We get out of bed and do our wake-up — hopefully we have a wake-up waiting for us. And then we have to go right out and start making money so that we don’t get sick in the afternoon. Then we come home, do another shot and go right back out to make more money. And we might be able to sit down for a half-hour and feel it if we’re lucky. But usually not. And by the time we get in from making money at night so that we can have a wake-up, it’s usually 3 o’clock and we’re so exhausted we just go straight to bed. We have no time to do anything else. I mean, we haven’t seen a movie, gone to a concert, done anything we used to do together anymore. This is all we do. We just try to make money.”

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In the mornings, Ellen and Dustin spare-change together on Broadway. In the afternoons they split up. Dustin’s job is boosting; he shoplifts cigarettes by the carton, wine, books, bluejeans. CDs, though, are his speciality. He and a partner work together: One steals, the other returns. Ellen works with a partner, too: Jo, a statuesque, short-haired 28-year-old who is a third-generation Seattle junkie. She looks the way you’d imagine a Northwesterner, as if she could start a homestead or stare down a grizzly.
Ellen and Jo run their scam on the Date Line, a Seattle telephone matchmaking service. Once they’ve convinced a man he should pay to have sex with one of them (Jo does an excellent schoolgirl voice; their slogan is “nothing anal or painful”), they then convince him to pay in advance. They have an elaborate story: Jo has been locked out of her apartment and needs the money upfront to pay her landlord or they can’t use her bedroom. The trick then drives her to Dustin and Ellen’s apartment building. Promising she’ll be right back, she goes inside and never returns. They watch through the blinds while the john walks frustrated circles, and Ellen goes out to cop their dope. At night, Dustin and Ellen meet up to spare-change again in the bars downtown.
The apartment they come home to manages to feel empty and cluttered at the same time. There are spoons and orange syringe caps under most of the furniture; there’s no television or stereo — they pawned both of them months ago. There are boxes of packed possessions in the corners and against the walls; the toilet hasn’t worked for weeks, and Ellen and Dustin have been using the largest drain available: in the bathtub. This leaves them no place to shower. All of their resources, all of their working energy, has gone into heroin, which, in the drug’s sneakiest twist, no longer even gets them high.
Ellen’s veins have started to collapse — the smaller the person, the thinner the vein — and it’s impossible to find a vein that will hold the shot. So Ellen has moved to “muscling,” which means pushing the needle into a fleshy spot like the buttocks or shoulder and waiting for the dope to slowly be absorbed. There’s little or no high produced by this method; the body’s craving is simply quieted. (Addicts will sometimes begin shooting their necks in this case, which is comparatively dangerous and leaves a line of vampire dots by the throat.) And Dustin’s tolerance has exceeded the couple’s capacity to fund it. After a year, Dustin and Ellen no longer talk in terms of sharing highs or rushing: They speak of either being dope sick or getting well.

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Today has been a successful day. Jo has left another frustrated john to circle the building. Dustin’s partner has come back with seven box sets of CDs; he sits down while Dustin gets up to return them. When he comes back, everyone has enough money to cop. Dustin pages their dealer. Ellen goes outside to score, and when she comes back, Eric and Katie are with her. Eric has been trying to contact Ellen for the name of her dealer; and Katie, fresh from 12 days of being clean, is looking for dope. She and Jo are friends; they embrace. “I wanna do some drugs,” she says. She makes everyone promise not to tell Anne; she knows Anne will be disappointed. Katie has purple hair and eyes the cold, striking blue of a Siberian husky’s. On her face is a look of embarrassed, excited hunger. Katie’s face is full of want.
She asks to talk to Jo in the bedroom. Jo sits on the bedspread with her hands folded over the small white box in her lap — she keeps her works in a first-aid kit. Katie wants to buy Jo’s extra dope, but she hasn’t got enough money. As a dealer’s girlfriend, she never had to bargain or even buy dope at all. “I only have $20,” Katie explains. “That’s a 30 piece,” Jo says. Katie stammers, “Oh, can you just sort of…? I can’t even shoot that much.” Jo smiles and says, “OK. You can have the whole piece.” Katie seems surprised. She stops stammering. “You were always very nice to me,” she says. The two women hug, and Jo says, patting her back, “Oh! You’ve always had that nice smell! I remember that.” And then Katie lies down on the bed, and Jo cooks up her shot, feels at Katie’s throat for the vein and injects her in the neck. In the other room, everyone else has finished shooting. They’re sitting on the couch or sprawled in easy chairs, and for a moment, before they have to go back out and get more money, everyone is well.
Kurt Cobain’s death is understood differently on the hill than it’s understood in most quarters. People still remember the singer as a couch surfer, as a junkie. It must have been a surreal experience for denizens of the hill to open fashion magazines in the fall of 1992, when Seventh Avenue went grunge, and thin, beautiful models were dressed like the users at Jack-in-the-Box, like the spare-changers in front of the Seafirst. It must have seemed like a junkie’s dream.

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Mark’s attempt at kicking has lasted 12 days. He has spent the afternoon with two friends, shooting up, and he seems at once both disgusted with himself and strangely composed. “The first time I tried to get clean was about two years ago,” he says. “I’d been clean for a month, maybe two months. And at that point — this is before I started dealing — I’d really decided that I wanted to be clean or I wanted to be dead. I was totally broke; everything had crumbled so far to bits that I just wanted to be clean or dead. Then, you know, I’d still get drunk and shoot dope. That happened a couple times, and when it did, I woke up just wanting to kill myself And so the morning I heard he’d died, I knew he’d been struggling with kicking for a long time. And, you know, the first thing that went through my mind was, I understand. There were all these people in the media giving their ideas about, ‘Oh, Kurt couldn’t handle the fame.’ But, you know, when all you’re trying to do is be clean and you can’t do it, you feel worthless. You think, well, what the fuck am I good for, then? I understood.”
Anne has been clean for six weeks now, and she’s decided to stay in Seattle. For her, the hardest part is probably over. The rest have chosen escape. Dustin and Ellen have left for the country to try to kick, taking with them, by Ellen’s count, “codeines, Valiums, clonidine, Klonopins, methadone, hospital-grade Tylenol, Phenergan and speed, plus NyQuil.” Eric’s flown back to the East Coast, where he’s toughed his way through eight days of withdrawal. His mom, having seen enough movies to know, asked him, “Are you a junkie?”
Anne is even feeling a bit confident now. She’s over the roughest part and is even allowing herself a dangerous little flight of junkie nostalgia. She has a new escape plan. “I sometimes think if I went on vacation,” she says, “I would take a chunk with me. My tolerance is so low I could probably get high for two days on a 20 piece. And that’s all I’d do. As long as I’m in a strange situation where there weren’t dealers, where I couldn’t find it again, I’m sure I would stop. But that place isn’t Seattle.”

Glowie Hunter Art Bell · Jul 31, 2022

KiwiFuzz said:
We are so fucked in this country.

Ah yes let's use one of worst cities in the country, in a region known for its existence opposing the general ideology of the country it sits within, as an example of the entire country

Spicey McHaggis · Jul 31, 2022

TowinKarz said:
All you need to know is, people with VEHICLES they are using as their HOMES are being told to MOVE THEM and complaining they have NOWHERE TO GO and NOWHERE TO LIVE.

I wonder what's going up at a faster rate in this country, our crushing stupidity, or, our willingness to fake being crushingly stupid to avoid having to take responsibility for what we've done?

P.S. - Ol' Unkle TowinKarz can give a 400-level master's course on why the WORST thing an apartment complex can do that's guaranteed to turn even the most livable of units into a favela in as little as a week is to NOT remove illegally parked cars..... the problems just grow from there in true broken-windows fashion.

Every place that ever told us to stop towing because they were tired of complaints from whiny residents reversed themselves in a months time, max, because they got even MORE tired of complaints about acre-wide unauthorized block parties in their lot, complete with loud music, flying beer bottles and occasional stabbings.

It's the ugly truth the bleeding heart types don't want to face about the homeless or these types of vagrants; they're in shit situations for a reason, and actively choose to stay in those situations. There's certainly a handful of decent people in those groups that are down on their luck, but they tend to fix their lives pretty quickly. They're definitely the exception rather than the rule though.

mold · Jul 31, 2022

Glowie Hunter Art Bell said:
Ah yes let's use one of worst cities in the country, in a region known for its existence opposing the general ideology of the country it sits within, as an example of the entire country

it's a region that is pretty much totally fine outside of the big cities too

Butcher Pete · Jul 31, 2022

Elbow Greased Strength said:
As bad as it may be here at times, everywhere else is worse. The US is by far the cleanest dirty shirt in the world right now.

Lol no.

EDIT: You’re right, it’s terrible out here. You and your fellow Americans should never come here never-ever.

I mean, we don’t even have any niggers for you to worship!

Nacho Man Randy Salsa · Jul 31, 2022

Good old class warfare.

Homegrown Homophobia · Jul 31, 2022

God's drunkest driver said:
How else can you city-dwellers torment the RV dwelling junkies enough that they'll leave? It's easier to torment the tent cities, throwing smoke bombs into their rows, getting stink bomb juice all over their tents, or by getting their plugs arrested. What are they going to do? Call the cops? I'd much rather have a row of ugly concrete block in front of my business than a row of beat up 40 year old RVs with trash piling up around them and sewage leaking from their drains. Thank God I live in the boonies. There aren't many drug dealers to score heroin from or street lamp posts to steal electricity from out here so the bums have no reason to come here.

I'm all for fucking with homeless and vigilantism against them. In Southern California there used to be an anti-meth zombie instagram page called eggthetweaker where the guy running the account would burn coal in front of their camps in his truck and also throw eggs at tweakers (So no surprise why he got his page shut down).

I personally love to shout shit at them while begging at intersections while driving and I should even get honorary Slav status for throwing a cup full of ice at a Gypsy begging on a highway offramp.

As you said what the hell are they going to do, go to the police?

pylosurf · Jul 31, 2022

northstar747 said:
Also been told there are RV land lords who own the RV pay to have it towed to new places and rent them out.

True. They call it RV Ranching. There are people who own dozens of non-functional RVs that they just drag around the city and rent to gronks.

US Illegally placed concrete blocks have taken over public parking in Seattle. Why are they there?

Disproportionate enforcement

Why businesses put blocks down

Where city stands on enforcement

Nikolas_Zijlstra

Spicey McHaggis

Elbow Greased Strength

Here, have some oranges.

northstar747

Exigent Circumcisions

heads before beds

IAmNotAlpharius

https://youtube.com/watch?v=AmrFT_v_M40

God's drunkest driver

Blessed with his gifts of oblivious pedestrians

Cpl. Long Dong Silver

Mad Lad

TowinKarz

I Escaped Confinement for THIS?!

Freshly Baked Socks

Sage In All Fields

Make People Scared Again

Stoneheart

Well hung, and snow white tan

northstar747

Glowie Hunter Art Bell

"We are All Terminal" - Art Bell

Spicey McHaggis

mold

Butcher Pete

OOGA BOOGA, NIGGA

Nacho Man Randy Salsa

Kiwi Farms World Champion

Homegrown Homophobia

pylosurf

December 2019 Unlurk Cohort

US Illegally placed concrete blocks have taken over public parking in Seattle. Why are they there?

Disproportionate enforcement​

Why businesses put blocks down​

Where city stands on enforcement​

Here, have some oranges.

heads before beds

https://youtube.com/watch?v=AmrFT_v_M40

Blessed with his gifts of oblivious pedestrians

Mad Lad

I Escaped Confinement for THIS?!

Make People Scared Again

Well hung, and snow white tan

"We are All Terminal" - Art Bell

OOGA BOOGA, NIGGA

Kiwi Farms World Champion

December 2019 Unlurk Cohort

Disproportionate enforcement

Why businesses put blocks down

Where city stands on enforcement