…that snow in the city should be seen as an adventure rather than an ordeal, Eli Sanders chimes in with thoughts on how to embrace and extend isolated incidents of a “culture of street joy.”

So we’ve finally had it. The Big One. The Perfect Storm (Western Washington version). The utter catastrophe the TV stations breathlessly threatened/promised every fall and winter since at least 1991.

I won’t disparge the impact this has had on the homeless (who deserve a better lot in life year round).

And the big snow’s timing has left thousands unable to leave or enter the area for holiday reunions; not to mention leaving already-troubled retailers bereft of holiday shoppers.

And, no matter what week it occurs, a snow like this will be tough for car commuters and truck shippers. This time, it also hit bus and train travelers hard.

But damn if it isn’t the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

And the most joyous.

The first non-sticky flakes of Saturday the 13th were all the “white Christmas” miracle I’d come to expect here in the ol’ Puget Sound convergence zone. It was lite; it was white; it went away.

The local newscasts (which, like their counterparts on stations across the country, are built and budgeted exactly for these huge visual-crisis moments) promised/threatened an even huger blast the following Wednesday.

It didn’t happen.

Those of us who’d been through this in the past figured, “Ah, of course. They’ll always threaten but not deliver.”

Then, in the predawn hours of Thursday, the big snow came.

And came.

And came some more.

For four days.

Without getting into crude sexual puns, let me simply state how much I’ve loved it.

As I’ve written here in the past, snow in Seattle is a rare treat. It turns us all into children. Most of us can’t do our normal daily dreary work lives. All we can do is play, and coccoon, and enjoy the company of whoever’s closest to us, and reconnect with those in our most immediate vicinity.

And enjoy the blanket of pure precipitory wonder.

But by this point, even a Snow Miser like me feels a little melancholy while walking through the winter wonderland.

Can there be such a thing as too much beauty, too much joy?

When does it turn into, as the cliche goes, a “great and terrible beauty”?

Sooner for many other people than for me, that’s for sure.

But now, I’m starting to feel the ten-day itch.

At some point, any holiday from the ordinary must conclude.

Lovers who’ve ignored the world beyond one another’s arms must resume doing whatever they do to stay fed. Children must return to school. Trucks must be able to get stuff to and from us. The wheels of commerce must turn again.

But the visceral memories remain—of street sledding on flattened cardboard boxes, of mugs of cocoa or Irish coffee thawing frozen fingers, of strangers becoming instant allies inthe great adventure, of our normal wintery dim grey turned blinding white.

A final thought: It just so happened that this snowapalooza occurred around and on the solstice, the day after which everything becomes just a little brighter. This has been the last winter solstice of the Bush era; the economy’s in the undisputed dumps, the nation’s civic fabric is in tatters, but the hope of better times already beckons.

(Apologies to Lynda Barry): A coalition of local government and nonprofit groups has issued its fourth triannual Communities Count report, documenting how King County residents live and/or survive. The full report’s online; a highly condensed version was issued as a tabloid circular in Thursday’s local dailies.

A lot of it’s not pretty, as seen in these headlines from the report’s newsprint version:

“The gap between rich and poor continues to grow.”

“Almost half of all jobs available in King County do not pay a living wage.”

“The richest fifth earn nearly half of the county’s income.”

“Public transportation doesn’t work for working parents.”

“Too many lack health insurance.”

“Domestic violence continues to be a major problem.”

These research-backed statements are based on long-term trends that far predate the current crap in the “larger” economy. The material lives of non-zillionaires have sputtered, stuttered, and slowly sank WHILE the urban condo towers and the suburban McMansions sprouted, while the financial markets boomed, while countless purveyors of “luxury” products and services emerged, while upscale slick local magazines came into print hawking fabulous leisure lifestyles.

Teenagers have bodies. They have sexualities. They have occasional tendancies toward ill-advised behavior. Get used to it.

The Census Bureau confirms it. The economy’s sucked for years for most non-zillionaire Americans.

I write this item most years. This year, my first impulse was to simply call for anything but Palin (or Joe the Plumber). But there are other alternate suggestions: Mad Men‘s retro-swank dudes and dudettes. Keith and Rachel. Rachel and Pat. Darcy Burner’s “” T-shirt. Wall-E. A ruined stockbroker. The young Kirk and Spock. The geezer Indiana Jones. And kind reader Eric Scharf suggests, “You gotta give props to anyone industrious enough to fabricate a giant acorn costume.”

…but I’m still not panicking about the supposed verge of national economic collapse. However, one Dmitri Davydov sees parallels and differences between what happened to the ol’ USSR and what might happen here. One big diff, according to Davydov: Soviet citizens were used to making do without material plenty or the prospect of material plenty.

This year’s most famous (real) pregnant teen happens to live in a town that’s a homonym for the name of last year’s most famous (fictional) pregnant teen. The result, of course, is a Photoshopped movie poster advertising that quirky comedy hit, Juneau!

In recent months, the local news media have rediscovered crime in Belltown. This happens every year or two. By year’s end, they’ll surely cycle back to ranting about exurban meth labs and copper-wire thieves at construction sites.

The situation here will remain.

For decades, the City’s unofficially moved drug dealers and streetwalkers (whose industries cannot be eradicated) along to wherever they’d seem less visible—from Chinatown to lower Pike Street, then to upper Pike/Pine, then to Second and Bell.

As long as this was a sparsely populated commercial district, unsightly forms of commerce could occur in relative discretion.

But Belltown is now a high-rising abode for the affluent.

It’s also a nightlife zone, where the legal drug of alcohol is sold and consumed in quantity.

This brings a lot of people here. At night.

Some of them get noisy and rude, especially after closing time. Some of them also consume non-legal drugs. (Remember, illicut-drug buyers are often rowdier than illicut-drug sellers.)

So what can be done?

A consistently stronger police presence can help deal with the 2:15 a.m. fights, and could drive illicit-drug marketing further into the shadows. But the underlying situation would remain.

Our little half-square-mile will still have drinkers and druggers and street people and frat boys and little-black-dress girls and corporate executives and people who belong to two or more of these categories.

It’ll be a piece of work to get all these folks to coexist more peacefully.

And that would really be a news story.

I’ve been trying to develop a simple essay/open letter, perhaps in the form of a .pdf e-booklet, to help persuade remaining conservative voters toward the Progressive side in this and future elections.

My brother, the unemployed naturopath, would like a simple side-by-side book. Each two-page spread would juxtapose something George W. Bush said a few years ago with something he said more recently on the same topic.

I foresee two problems with this approach:

• Examples of overt double-headedness from Bush himself are relatively rare; he’s notorious for living in, and publicly promoting, a reality distortion field of facts-be-damned consistency.
• Bush’s name isn’t appearing on any more ballots. Despite the liberal blogosphere’s catch phrases about “Bush’s third term” and “John McSame,” this election’s not really a referendum on the Bush legacy. It’s about how we’ll deal with that legacy’s multiple tragic results.

So: What other approaches could one take?

I’m currently thinking of a values-based approach. I’d ask my intended readers what they truly believe in–perhaps faith, prosperity, health, safety, security, opportunity, truth, beauty, public ethics, an honest reward for honest work, or simply a good burger at a decent price.

Then I’d explain, item by item, how the right-wing coalition’s various components have afted against all of these values, and how they’ve instead propagated greed, fear, graft, corruption, recession, and needless bloodshed.

Then I’d show how each of these values is far better served by a progressive-populist movement (as respectfully differentiated both from conservative DLC Democrats and from exclusionist college-town “radicals”).

I won’t expect such a document to convert everyone. Not every follower of conservatism does so out of any true adherence to higher values, however defined. Some are just plain bigots, war lovers, and extreme nationalists. I call these folk “tribal conservatives.” They’ll stick with their chosen tribe to the end.

Then there are the folk who care only about money and other forms of raw power, and who’ve sided with the Right as their best bet for achieving those aims. They won’t likely switch either. If they do vote Dem this November, it would be a mere conversion of convenience.

But we have a chance with the people who still believe in something beyond themselves, at least a little.

I’m interested in any advice from you as to how to win them over.

It seems like just six days ago, instead of six years ago, that the headlines were full of gloom-n’-doom about economic hardship and consumer cutbacks.

Then, for a while, the media (particularly much of the “alt” media) were back to ignoring the poor and the working families, preferring to inhabit (or imagine) a world of unlimited luxury.

Around here, this meant slick magazines and online shopping guides dedicated to the highest and best possible spending of money. It meant “progressive” local politicians who unashamedly sucked up to the upper castes, and to the merchants and real-estate developers who outfitted and supplied upper-caste households. It meant hundreds of elegant bistros and whole grocery chains dedicated to ever-dearer visions of The Good Life.

Now, though, we’ve got front-page wire stories talking about Americans’ supposed “newfound frugality.”

As if tens of millions of us haven’t been pinching pennies all along.

In my current stompin’ grounds of Belltown, the alleged Good Life has been what it all was supposed to have been about for a long time. I’ve got old condo ads from 1992 offering up fantasy visions of unparalleled beauty and elegance, quoting old British aristocrats in wedding-invitation typefaces.

Later in the decade came the big billboards with the manically grinning young couples striding happily into their utterly fabulous view homes.

But behind the marketing images, there were a lot of young couples whose parents had donated down payments, hoping to get their kids into home ownership while it still could sorta happen.

There were law-firm junior partners and hospital physicians living just beyond their means, trusting/hoping their careers would grow to match their mortgages.

There were AARP-agers downsizing from bigger homes elsewhere with more stuff in them.

There were Microsoft stock-option early retirees, who’d pinned the whole rest of their lives on the premise that their accumulated nest eggs would remain uneaten by inflation.

They, and much of the rest of us, now await whatever’s next, wondering how to stay afloat.

Warning: The following essay mixes metaphors pretty much without discipline.

This day after Indie Day finds much of the nation in a pensive mood, waiting for the pages to turn and for 1/20/09 to show up already.

Meanwhile, the reign of Nixon 2.0 drags on in a seemingly interminable final act. It’s beyond my old metaphor of the annoying jam band that will never leave the stage with its trite 45-minute noodling routines. It’s more like the emotionally abusive old relative who ruins every family gathering by reciting the same endless, unfunny racist “jokes” and always messing up the punch lines. Nobody tells him to shut the hell up anymore, because they know he won’t.

During this time, everything’s winding down. The thievery on high gets more desperate and more overt. The cast of crooks gets more blatantly maniacal.

(Next in our metaphor megamix: The pre-climax of an old mad scientist movie when the mad scientist goes utterly kabong and starts declaring himself to be immortal and invincible, just before his monster/alien ally/chemical formula/hypnotic spell turns around to attack him.)

Yes, a few industries with close ties to the Thief-in-Chief are reaping obscene profits, while the economy as a whole is speeding into reverse.

Yes, this stupid/tragic/inane/unneeded war drags on and on.

Yes, the graft, the corruption, the sweetheart dealing, the money grubbing, and the power grabbing all have gotten as blatant as you could imagine, then went beyond that, and still keep going beyond that.

Yes, the nationalism/tribalism excuse for a state religion of FUD (computer-world-ese for “fear, uncertainty, and doubt”) keeps getting trotted out in the face of decreasing belief.

Yes, the environmental health of this and all the other continents gets ever more precarious.

And yet—

There’s still so much in this land for which to be grateful.

There’s still so much wealth (material and other) from which we can rebuild the old wastes.

But we can’t wait until January, or even November.

We need to build upon all the values that make up America-at-its-best. The loveable human-mongrel melting pot, the can-do spirit, the love of adventure, the love of novelty, the optimism, the devil-may-care foolishness, the risk-taking, the what-if imagining.

Those are all vital aspects of what’s made this country great.

Those other things, the bigotry and the fearmongering and the inter-tribal hate, those aren’t really American.

Alas, those traits can be found in every big society on Earth and a lot of the smaller ones.

And since America is a huge mix-tape of folks from all those places, it’s only natural that we’d pick up on those cultures’ dark sides, and that they’d have melded into one big all-American dark side.

But for every yang there’s a yin and vice versa.

This X-Treme-osity is America’s weakness and her strength.

And it’s how we’re going to get out of this mess-of-messes.

Greta Christina intelligently discusses a topic about which I’ve occasionally and incoherently ranted—non-thinking and anti-thinking in “alternative” culture.

The nonexistent (outside Africa) hetero AIDS scare that was supposed to hit us any year now has cost governments and health groups about a billion bucks. Bucks that could’ve been spent on treatments and possible preventions for those who really did have it, or who really were at risk.

Another TV season has come and gone. Ratings across the channel spectrum continued to plummet, even on shows/channels that weren’t hit by the writers’ strike.

And with the explosion in programming across broadcast and cable channels, telecasters are constantly on the lookout for entertainment forms that haven’t yet been adapted to the screen.

Saturday Night Live, as you’ll recall, was born from trends in stage sketch comedy that hadn’t yet been brought to TV on a regular basis.

Later years brought us televised karaoke, poker, ballroom dancing, shows based on video blogs and webcams, travelogue shows at pubilc-drunkenness events, and even prime-time bingo.

So: What else is out there, to feed programmers’ ravenous appetites for stealable concepts?

Here are a few ideas. (If any readers successfully package a series based on one of these, you may pay me a modest royalty.)

• Poetry slams
• Jam bands
• The entire worlds of classical music, opera, ballet
• Modern dance
• “Legitimate” theater
• Conceptual performance art
• Easter egg hunts
• Neo-burlesque
• Alternative circus acts, such as Circus Contraption
• Drag cabarets/pageants
• Mr./Ms. Leather contests
• Drum circles
• Sewing circles
• Storytelling competitions
• “Cuddle parties”
• Role-playing games (not cartoons based on the characters in the games, but actual sit-down game playing)

Please feel free to suggest your own.