This story takes place on a Sunday afternoon at a certain decidedly non-touristy Irish pub somewhere in the greater downtown zone. (I won’t name it, because I don’t want ’em to get into any potential trouble for continuing to serve visibly intoxicated patrons.)

On a large-screen TV, the injury-plagued Sonics were somehow clobbering the San Antonio Spurs, to even up their current playoff series at two games apiece (only to fall behind again in Game Five two nights later.)

The spectacle inside the bar, in front of the screen, was even more captivating.

The first thing you’d notice, had you been there, would have been the two very young, very thin, very drunk women, whooping and hollering and flirting with everyone in sight. One wore a Mariners cap; the other wore a Red Sox cap. They’d apparently been on a girls’-day-out at Safeco Field. I say “apparently” because, while they both talked at quantity and with volume, what they said didn’t always make sense.

Among their favorite flirting targets was a tall, lanky young man seated at the bar, clad in a sweatshirt and a backwards Seattle University cap. He spoke with well-practiced Eminem-esque body language and a fake-gangsta “wigger” accent. But the musical-legend references he uttered were not in praise of hiphop royalty but the Beatles and Stones.

Over the course of our very public chat, he mentioned to me and to the drunk women that he’d been faithful to his current girlfriend fora year and a half, a commitment he hadn’t previously thought himself capable of. He also listed a series of drug possession and dealing arrests he’d undergone between the ages of 11 and 18; now, at 24, he was proud to be out of trouble and planned to stay that way.

I observed all this, mostly silently, interjecting these three with questions only at strategic intervals. I was behaving as I often do, emerging into the public sphere only to hide inside my own mind (with the aid of a book and a Sunday crossword page).

Someone seated next to me was even more withdrawn. She was making no eye contact with anyone, except when she needed another drink. She concentrated on the careful penmanship she was applying to a hardbound journal, into which she’d spent the past hour writing (as she later mentioned) about an on-the-rocks relationship.

She broke the ice with me, asking how my puzzle-solving was coming along, and sympathizing with me about that one stubborn corner. But the gangsta wannabe was more adept about opening her up. I returned from a restroom break to find him and her deep in conversation. His voice had changed, the bombastic bravado replaced by a sensitive near-whisper. He insisted to the journal writer that she could make a living as a poet, which she countered with the time-worn adage that it just couldn’t be done. He told her she shouldn’t let her soul be held hostage by any loser boyfriend.

As their conversation became more intimate, I redirected my attention toward the basketball game. About 45 minutes later, the poetess stumbled her way off of her bar stool and around me and the other patrons. She’d previously done as great a job of hiding her state of inebriation as she’d done of guarding her feelings. The white-gangsta dude did his best to keep her from falling down. I asked him to make sure she got home OK; he assured me he would.

After those two left, the thin drunk women (who’d left the bar in the company of an older man and had since come back) reasserted their command on the other bar patrons’ collective attention. They made big, loud, repetitive comments about the joys of chicken wings with Miller Lite. Somehow, I ceased caring.

PBS ASKS, is there a Pacific Northwest accent? (Found by Slumberland.)

…John Bradshaw on the Family on the Wisdom channel. Bradshaw’s lecture series, originally made for PBS in 1985, discusses family dysfunction as a pivot point for just about everything that goes wrong with individuals and societies: “Any time you’re not your true self, you can be taken.”

Among his points: If you know how people from non-nurturing families come to think, you can manipulate them very brutally. He cited a couple of authors, including Alice Miller, who’d seen the horrors of Hitlerism in ol’ Adolf’s own ultra-authoritarian childhood family, and in the more general hierarchical, patriarchal, and anti-freedom nature of typical German family structures.

Now I finally know why the most anti-life, anti-freedom, anti-environmental, anti-equality, anti-gay, anti-women, anti-children, anti-sex, and pro-violence forces in the US use “The Family” as their ideological excuse and stick the name “Family” in the names of their propaganda groups.

Once again, it’s time for the annual return of the MISCmedia In/Out List, the longest-running and most accurate list of its type anywhere in the western quadrant of the northern hemisphere.

As long-term readers know, this is a prediciton of what will become hot and not-so-hot in the months to come. If you think everything hot now will just keep getting hotter forever, I’ve got some Thailand beachfront timeshares to sell you.

…the real difference between the “two Americas” is one of family models—we believe in balanced parenting, they believe in “the strict father.”

…insists on “The Optimism of Uncertainty:” “To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives.”

…insists progressives should scoff at talk of a right-wing “mandate”: Editor’s Cut: “There are two Nations–not Bush’s America and some dissenters… I’d be willing to bet that numerically there are more of us.”

It’s not strange that Seattle would host singles’ nights for “plus size” people. It’s slightly strange that an Indianapolis paper considered it a story worth reprinting.

Every now and then, my ex-colleagues at the Stranger put out some decent writing. The most recent example: The Urban Archipelago—It’s the Cities, Stupid. Credited only to “the Editors,” it’s a 6,000-word manifesto praising the intelligence, progressivism, and open-mindedness of city dwellers (i.e., the target audiences of papers such as the Stranger). It asks us to see the Great National Divide not as one between regions or states, but between city folk (including college-town folk) and country folk (including exurban folk), between the enlightened Us in coffeehouse-land and the ignorant Them in Wal-Mart-land.

It’s self-servin’, of course. But it’s passionately written, and it’s got a practical point.

On election night, the Democrats held their party at the Westin downtown. The Republicans held theirs in Bellevue. The Big Two parties have market-segmented themselves to the point where there are few true “swing” districts. Dems are the City Mice—the ol’ ward-heelers and union organizers, the immigrants, the intellectuals, the scientists, the culture vultures, the free thinkers, the internationalists. Repos are the Country Mice—the oil and mining and highway lobbies, the back-country bigots, the “Real America” zealots.

One of the big historical differences between the US and Europe has been the former’s rural socio-political power. Henry Ford, when he wasn’t out funding proto-Nazi books, used to vocally promote the automobile as the machine that would free “real” Americans from the tyranny of decadent “urban” culture (which then was a code word for Jews, not blacks) and preserve the US as a wholesome, Protestant, Caucasian place. Cleaned-up versions of this ideology were cited in the ’50s to support the then-new suburban sprawl phenomenon.

But it hasn’t just been right-wingers citing the alleged purity of country life. Commune hippies, nature poets, earth mamas, NPR essayists, radical ecologists, tree-huggers, and the occasional indie filmmaker have, over the years, bought into the “city bad/country good” line.

I grew up in what was the country at the time (it’s now total McManison sprawl, just down the road from that proposed NASCAR race track site). I got myself to a real town as soon as I could, and never looked back. I believe in cities. I believe in urban culture, in urban diversity, in urban leadership, and in urban innovation.

Yet I also know there can be open-minded people in small places and closed-minded people in large places. (Cf. racial antagonisms in Boston, Chicago, Philly, L.A., etc.) But in cities there’s hope for coexistence. There’s hope for a better tomorrow in all sorts of aspects. In the exurbs, there are only gates and fences and big moats of parking and dreams of retreating to an idealized, never-was past.

…a few brief lessons in “How to Talk About Voting”:

“For everyone volunteering to protect voters at the polls or in public hearings, or are writing about the election — say as a reporter, as a blogger, as a citizen journalist, or who have friends who are — or, you witness an incident of voter intimidation or harassment, and end up being interviewed by the press, keep in mind the following points:Rule # 1: Do not use their language. Always reframe.

Since the war and court case frameworks benefit conservatives avoid terms like:

fight, battleground, pre-emptive

lawyers, teams of lawyers, courts, judges, litigation and so on

These just reinforce their strategy — don’t hand them a gift….

Rule #2: Know your values and reframe based on those values. This means think about what voting, and the election really mean to you, and talk about that. Treat it as an opportunity to disarm their rhetoric.”

…“Five Big Trends” for ’05 and beyond:

“1) Pop culture and politics have fused.2) Content has been dethroned as king.

3) The Democrats have emerged as a vibrant opposition party.

4) The citizenry have awkwardly begun to trust again.

5) Small Fought Big to a Standstill.”

…the biggest cause of global instability’s poverty, not religion.

…why the Bush cult of personality still persists. I’d answer: It’s hard to give up a deep, possessive love, especially a one-sided, dysfunctional one.

…in the New York Press that Putin’s scheme to consolidate power in Russia has eerie, but unsurprising, home connections:

“Many of us who spent the ’90s in Russia became aware over time that the aim of the United States was to create a rump state that would allow economic interests to strip assets at will. The population in this scheme was to be good for consuming foreign goods produced abroad with Russia’s own cheaply sold raw materials. The aim was a castrated state, anarchy, a vast, confused territory of captive consumers, cheap labor and unguarded oil and aluminum.Some of us who came home after seeing this began to realize that the same process is underway in the United States: the erosion of the tax base, the gradual appropriation of the tools of government by economic interests, a massive, disorganized population useless to everybody except as shoppers. That is their revolution: smashing states everywhere and creating a scattered global nation of villas and tax shelters, as inaccessible as Olympus, forbidding entry even to mighty dictators.”

…in a little invective entitled “Get Out And Vote And Scream,” suggests we imagine a happier time in the near future:

“We know that 20 years hence, there will be no Reagan-like legacy for Shrub. There will be no renamed airports or honorary expressways or revisionist rose-colored history books arguing the good and the bad of his epic much-loved presidency, because there is so little good and so very, very much bad and there is absolutely no love anywhere.We already know that history will look very, very unkindly upon this most booblike, lie-torn, appallingly underqualified of American presidents. Of this we can rest assured. Of this we will only look back and be incredibly grateful it didn’t last all that long….

You simply have to get out and vote and scream and then roll up this ugly hunk of living history into a tight little ball of hot gelatinous goo and hurl it at the wall of time and see what sticks.”