…instead of writing to this Web site:

• Finished the fourth edited draft of my forthcoming ebook, Take Control of Digital TV. It’s gonna be a blast when it comes out, which will be before the end of the year.
• Finished the gorgeous November Belltown Messenger. It should be out this weekend, at all the usual dropoff spots.
• Recovering from one of them there eight-day cold or flu bugs. A nasty li’l bugger this one was. Last Friday and Saturday, when I was barely staying awake for an hour or two at a time, I was reminded of my father’s sleepy final years.
• Waited on a new day job, which I hope will appear damn soon. Otherwise, it’s the return of desperate fiscal straits, a situation I’m damned sick and tired of, as much as I’m sick of being tired and tired of being sick.

Immediately after the new Belltown Messenger came out, I buried myself into a freelance project that won’t see the bright light o’ day for another month. So here are some of the things that have happened this past week or so:

RONNIE BARKER, RIP: In the early ’80s, during one of my many long-term bouts with chronic depression, I became utterly fond of the Two Ronnies sketch comedy show, which KING-TV had picked up (yes, a BBC show airing an American commercial station, albeit at 2:30 a.m. or some such.) The station had just introduced 24-hour telecasting (the first in Seattle to do so), filling up the wee hours with moldie-oldie movies, repeats of the 11 p.m. news, and BBC imports brought over here by Time-Life Television. The Two Ronnies was the best of this motley schedule. It featured cute skits, whimsical monologue stories by Barker’s partner Ronnie Corbett, and fake news bits aqt the beginning and end that relied on time-tested comedy shticks and wordplay rather than anything “topical.” Barker was a genius. And now, as he would say, “It’s goodnight from him.”

AUGUST WILSON, RIP: With the beloved playwright’s demise, Rebecca Wells now ascends to the niche title of the best writer living in Seattle who never writes about Seattle.

STRIP UPDATE: Because a judge stopped ’em from maintaining a permanent “temporary moratorium” on new adult entertainment clubs, the Seattle City Council adopted a draconian set of restrictions on how they can operate. Like the late, unlamented Teen Dance Ordinance of the mid-’90s, this is a not-so-thinly disguised attempt to harass an unwanted entertainment genre into nonexistence. A Reuters dispatch claimed the move was ironic in the face of Seattle’s “liberal,” “tolerant” reputation.

I could’ve told ’em different.

What the nation sees as our supposed blue-state radicalism is really baby-boomer smugness; i.e., just another kind of conservatism. We’re a city whose sociocultural establishment thinks glass bowls are “art” and easy-listening sax solos are “jazz.” We’re a city that loves “diversity,” as long as it’s limited to upscale white women, upscale white gays, and dead black musicians.

We’re a city that only tolerates sex if that scary-sticky-gooey topic can be subsumed under a more acceptable rubric such as individual “empowerment.” So we embrace a certain peep-show parlor where a thick glass curtain keeps the genders neatly apart; but an establishment where women and (gasp!) men could share the same space, even (shudder!) touch one another? Must be stopped!

At least there’s some solace that four City Council members bravely voted against the ban-in-all-but-name, and that affected entrepreneurs are already planning to take the city to court.

…hardly written a thing for this site this week. But wait ’til you see what I have done, specifically the orangey October Belltown Messenger! It’s even more fab than the previous ish, complete with yummy color photos by yrs. truly. Distro starts today at over 100 dropoff spots.

…upon the Puget Sound basin. A few deciduous-tree leaves have already begun to turn color. A graceful, tasteful cloud cover has provided its natural sunscreen the past several mornings. Temperatures have become, well, more temperate. And sundown is again greeting us before 8 p.m. It’s a wonderful time to be alive in this, thankfully hurricane-free, segment of the globe.

And the perfect accessory for autumnal living has arrived. I speak, of course, of the fabulous new Belltown Messenger newspaper. It’s a small one, but packed with infotainment at its most infotaining, including three (count ’em) text pieces and seven glorious b/w photos by yrs. truly. Pick one up at a dropoff spot near you, or read online.

The first issue of the new-look Belltown Messenger will be off to the printer on Monday. Editing the various texts and contriving the paper’s redesign has meant the first full work week I’ve had in more than a year, and it’s felt good (both the working and the end work). It’s still just a small monthly tab, but I hope to help it grow.

…of the first moi-edited issue of the Belltown Messenger, here are some pix I took last Thursday at the second annual Fashion 1st Boutique Fashion Show. Some 100 models showed off the wares of 16 area boutiques, most of them in Belltown.

Tom Douglas’s Palace Ballroom banquet facility was packed to the walls with an almost all-female audience. The event’s advertised hours were 6 to 9. The first two of those hours were devoted to drinking and schmoozing, before the runway saw any action.

Once the models started a-struttin’, they continued at a brisk, businesslike pace.

This model is selling Ottica eyewear. (What else?)

And here’s the organizer of this year’s event, Joan Kelly, with a spokesman from the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, which got a percentage of the $40 ticket price and the $120 “trash belts” being sold in the lobby. The event was dedicated to its first-year organizer, Jared Seegmiller, who’d died earlier this year after a brief bout with a rare form of heart cancer.

…posted any original content on this site in a week. I can be like that, especially when I’m on multiple deadlines on paying projects like I am now.

But there’s good news. The reinvention of the Belltown Messenger continues apace. Not all our planned changes will necessarily make it into the September issue, but they’ll get in eventually.

…the anniversary of the original French Revolution, was celebrated on Thursday in Post Alley by the kind folk at Cafe Campagne.

Highlighting the spirited fate was a rousing cancan dance show by members of the Atomic Bombshells burlesque troupe. Their spirited, athletic performance totally belied a recent Stranger essay that defined neo-burlesque as primarily a tool for boosting the performers’ egos, not for entertaining audiences. These dancers are pure entertainers of the highest order.

Please remember two things about France:

• They helped us in the Revolutionary War, and really tried to dissuade us from the mega-folly that is the current war-without-end;
• They gained and lost democracy a couple of times. Let’s not let that happen here.

…an electrical fire closed the Speakeasy Cafe forever, the building that housed Seattle’s first Internet cafe (and the final incarnation of the 211 Club billiard parlor) was finally demolished.

According to street rumors, the building owners had made every attempt at a rehab/reconstruction plan. But, as these pix show, the ol’ structure was too far gone. In its place will come yet another mixed-use development.

…the stories of a would-be suicide bomber at the new Seattle U.S. Courthouse, I immediately thought of Perry Manley. My ol’ acquaintance Cydney Gillis had run into Manley a month or so ago. She wrote for Real Change about Manley’s crusade to abolish child support. Read her story and get an insight into a mind crippled by an all-encompassing obsession.

…a few freelance deadlines out of the way. (Oh, it’s so nice to finally have work coming in again, after a nearly two-year drought!) So I’ll take a few moments to describe my new (or is it “neo-“?) life in Belltown.

I’m at the Nexxus Caffé on Second Avenue this morning. I’m staring out the window, watching the post-rush-hour pedestrians about their business. The young Japanese women attending the Art Institute. The down-and-outers looking for the unemployment office (it moved to the new YWCA shelter building on Third). The condo construction crews on smoke breaks. The Pike Place Market tourists who’ve finally found a parking space. The mixed-race couples toting plastic blue baby strollers. The bicycle messengers laden with bright yellow backpacks. The homeless men trudging worn-out large garbage bags. The lunch crews from upscale restaurants reporting for work, allowing themselves one last moment of honest faces before they have to play perky. Truckers delivering big sacks of potatoes and onions to the upscale restaurants. Crinkly-faced but impeccably-dressed old men. Day-care leaders herding small packs of barely-walking-age children. Young black men hiding their bodies within oversize athletic wear, hiding their minds within iPods. Well-preserved women cooing their way out of the day spas. The loving boyfriend of an former unrequited crush of mine, grabbing to-go portions of coffee and muffins for a long day of computer-jockeying.

Later in the day, I’ll be likely to see the shoppers toting huge bags bearing the logo of The-Store-Formerly-Known-As-The-Bon-Marché. Sullen suburban teens lining up at the Moore; indie-rock shoegazers lining up at the Crocodile. Overgrown fratboys strutting and shouting their way toward the First Avenue bars. Sonics fans, full of hope and alcohol, on their way to the arena or the sports bars. Upscale restaurant diners shouting business deals and/or babysitter instructions into cell phones. The Lava Lounge/Shorty’s/Rendezvous/Mama’s/Whiskey Bar crowd, cavorting and flirting and gossipping along their moveable feast.

In the almost three weeks I’ve been back in Belltown, this is the first time I’ve been outside this early. I’ll have to make it a habit. This passing parade is a lot more fun than any dumb ol’ judge show, and I can make up my own storylines.

In other personal news, I’m now more or less completely unpacked and moved in. Housewarming party news will follow.

Updating on any regular basis will resume next week, once the Net connection’s hooked up at the new place. I’ve successfully moved back into beautiful bodacious Belltown. I’m feeling great about it. The only snag so far: My brother had to quit early on moving day due to that nasty cold bug that’s going around, so I have to get ten boxes’ worth of stuff, plus an awkwardly large computer desk, out of the old place before the sale officially closes this evening.

…the onetime Seattle illusttator-cartoonist known for her “Victorian Lowbrow” art and her triangle-slash logo, now has a website full of artowrk, cool ephemera for sale, and remembrances about the crazy days of old Belltown.

…harps that self-proclaimed “born again Christians” today are often just as non-monogamous, money-obsessed, and otherwise un-pious as everybody else.

What this guy sees as a scandal, I see as a sign of hope and faith. We’re all just plain ol’ humans on this planet. Nobody’s all that superior to anybody else. It’s not doctrine or ideology that’s gonna “save” us; it’s how we take care of ourselves and one another.

Which is what I should’ve told the guy who stalked me across Belltown on Sunday morning.

I was wandering the sidewalks, snapping pix of the rapidly disappearing snow. Suddenly, outside the Crocodile, a clean cut young man with steely eyes and a rigid smile stood in front of me. “Good morning. Have you heard about Jesus?”

I could have told him the line by the guy in the original Swept Away, who, upon finding a crucifix on the desert island, grumbles that Jesus is everywhere, just like Coca-Cola. But instead I smiled and said, “Of course,” and walked away.

“I hope he sees you in heaven.”

“I’m sure I will.” (I declined the temptation to add, “I’ll tell him ‘hi’ for you.”)

He followed me east on Blanchard. He yelled, “You have an evil spirit. A rebellious spirit. It must be made right.”

I ignored him, forgetting the painful lesson I’d learned on childhood playgrounds: Ignoring bullies doesn’t stop them. It just makes them harrangue you worse.

I sprinted onto Third Avenue. He followed.

I darted into Dan’s Belltown Grocery. He followed. He confronted me by the frozen pizzas. “Would you like to go to church today?”

“I do sometimes. But it’s to a church of my choice.”

“What would that church be?”

“Either the University Friends Center or the Church of New Thought in Laurelhurst.”

He mumbled something about the need to beware of false churches (presumably meaning all other than his own).

I strode out of the store and back onto Third. I darted across the street, hoping to snag myself a table for one at Ralph’s or Top Pot. He finally walked in a different direction.

I now know I shouldn’t have been as obsessed as I was with my own selfish, egoic privacy. I should have talked nicer to him. I should have asked him to consider the benefits of trading his narrow-minded sense of mistaken certainty for the universe-expanding adventure of doubt, a world (and a God) bigger than any of our own finite minds can imagine.

Specifically, un-themed floats, clowns, and pirates.

I’ve no idea what this critter is, except that it belongs to the Group Health Credit Union.