Inlander 01/07/2021

NEW OUTBREAKS THEY’VE HIT LOCAL HOMELESS SHELTERS PAGE 8 SYMBOLS OF JUSTICE INSPIRED BY THE GEORGE FLOYD TRAGEDY PAGE 23

PATRIOTISM OF VACCINES WHEN IT’S TIME, DO YOUR DUTY PAGE 6

NOW

JANUARY 7-13, 2021 | LONG LIVE THE FREE PRESS! (KINGS CAN GO TO HELL.)

WE SURVIVED.

WHAT?

Inspiration and insights from 13 local writers PAGE 12

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EDITOR’S NOTE

W

ith current politics revealing just how broken and divided our country is, it was strange to hear a politician, of all people, extolling the power of words and story to bring us together. “Storytelling and literature are more important than ever,” Barack Obama told a book critic last month, adding that “we need to explain to each other who we are and where we’re going. … You don’t have to be glued to the news broadcasts to sometimes feel as if we’re just locked in this Tower of Babel and can’t even hear the voices of the people next to us.”

At the Inlander, we believe that GREAT WRITING moves us, transports us, opens our eyes and allows us to see through others’ as well. With that, we asked some of our favorite local novelists, essayists and poets to provide a little inspiration to start 2021 off right. Find their smart, beautiful, dark and funny contributions beginning on page 12.

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1227 WEST SUMMIT PARKWAY, SPOKANE, WA 99201 PHONE: 509-325-0634 | EMAIL: INFO@INLANDER.COM THE INLANDER is a locally owned, independent newspaper founded on Oct. 20, 1993. It’s printed on newsprint that is at least 50 percent recycled; please recycle THE INLANDER after you’re done with it. One copy free per person per week; extra copies are $1 each (call x226). For ADVERTISING information, email advertising@inlander.com. To have a SUBSCRIPTION mailed to you, call x213 ($50 per year). To find one of our more than 1,000 NEWSRACKS where you can pick up a paper free every Thursday, call x226 or email frankd@inlander.com. THE INLANDER is a member of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia. All contents of this newspaper are protected by United States copyright law. © 2021, Inland Publications, Inc.

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JANUARY 7, 2021 INLANDER 3

Imagine the Possibilities Dedicating just 5 percent of your estate would yield huge benefits for the community

What can you give this week?

VOLUNTEER OPPORTUNITIES Crisis Response Advocates Needed - LUTHERAN COMMUNITY SERVICES NORTHWEST Volunteers are vital to the success of Lutheran Community Services Northwest’s (LCSNW) advocacy programs, and make it possible to staff our Sexual Assault Crisis line 24 hours a day, seven days per week. Please contact our Spokane office if you are interested in volunteering.

As a Crisis Response Advocate you will provide phone assistance and accompany victims of sexual assault and other crimes during exams at Spokane area hospitals. You will provide crisis intervention, support, referrals and information to survivors of sexual assault and other crimes, their families and loved ones. The next training session begins this month. Apply online or call 343-5007. lcsnw.org/volunteer/crisis-response-advocate

Store Clerks Wanted - HABITAT FOR HUMANITY-SPOKANE Enthusiastic volunteers are needed at the Habitat Store — a home improvement and goods store. One hundred percent of the proceeds sales of donated new and gently used merchandise at this store funds Habitat’s mission. The store depends on volunteers for everything from bringing in donated items to helping customers and arranging merchandise.

Shifts are available Monday- Saturday from 9 am to 5 pm. Please contact the volunteer coordinator at 509-720-6714 or at volunteercoordinator@habitat-spokane.org. habitat-spokane.volunteerhub.com

By Rachel Quick

A

s we reflect on a year of tremendous need, we should not let go of the fact that the decade ahead offers incredible possibilities for our region. One of those possibilities, based on demographic projections, is the substantial generational transfer of wealth that will take place in the next 10 years. People in Eastern Washington and North Idaho are expected to leave behind $42 billion over the next decade to beneficiaries upon their deaths, according to a 2019 study commissioned

by Innovia Foundation. This expected shift could have enormously positive results for our community. If just 5 percent of that wealth transfer was transformed into local philanthropy, we would invest $2 billion back into our communities to make dramatic improvements in our region’s future.

To better understand how our communities are responding to this 5 percent giving opportunity, we brought together a panel of four community representatives: Joe Poss, vice president for university advancement at Gonzaga University; Janice Baldwin, senior vice president of investment at Merrill Lynch; Rowena Pineda, director of community collaborations and equity at Spokane County United Way; and Katie Egland Cox, executive director of Kaniksu Land Trust.

The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified inequities in our communities, and we have this opportunity to change the way we are doing things. Just like we try to buy locally, we can invest locally.

These leaders shared their vision for how community-based philanthropy belongs to all of us as a tool that can transform our region and maximize the 5 percent wealth transfer opportunity.

Why is communitybased philanthropy so valuable?

Janice Baldwin: “Community-based philanthropy allows us to identify needs in the community that we are passionate about and create a legacy of meeting those needs in perpetuity.”

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Joe Poss: “Community philanthropy allows us to come together in support of the things and organizations that truly demonstrate what and who our community is.”

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How can community-based philanthropy make a difference?

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Restore dignity to sexual assault survivors leaving the hospital after a forensic medical exam. Shop LCSNW’s Amazon wish lists and provide some basic clothing items such as bras, camisoles and sweatshirts so survivors aren’t sent home in hospital gowns. Simply search for LCSN’s wish list on Amazon.com.

EVENTS AND BENEFITS Blue Jean Ball - COMMUNITIES IN SCHOOLS Kids bring a lot more to school than you realize. Some are struggling with hunger, homelessness and trauma. That’s why Communities in Schools staff is in schools every day to make sure kids get the support and resources they need. You can support this effort by donating to or attending the Blue Jean Ball. Donate to the silent auction now, or simply mark your calendar for Saturday, Feb. 20 starting at 5 pm. ciswaspokane.ejoinme.org/bluejeanball

Inlander.com/giveGUIDE2020

Rowena Pineda: “Community-based philanthropy is a wider net than we sometimes realize. Community-based philanthropy allows our strong and resilient BIPOC communities to use the power of philanthropy to meet their unique needs.”

Katie Egland Cox: “Our local endowments and grantmakers listen intently to the needs of our community. Community-based philanthropy challenges us to activate these partnerships, the key to greater and more lasting impact in meeting community needs.”

How can the 5 percent transfer of wealth opportunity make a difference?

Joe Poss: “Anybody can give 5 percent, and everyone in the community benefits.”

Rowena Pineda: “The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified inequities in our communities, and we have this opportunity to change the way we are doing things.

Just like we try to buy locally, we can invest locally.”

Katie Cox: “Wealth transfer in financial terms alone will not protect the rich quality of life that we all enjoy, but together we can thoughtfully impact the transfer of wealth invested in local lands, while also providing options for land protection to honor family legacy and connection to place.”

Janice Baldwin: “You can give 5 percent of your estate back to the community and create a lasting legacy that helps the community in which we live thrive.”

For more information, or to learn about ways you can join the 5 percent opportunity, contact your favorite nonprofit, or Innovia Foundation at www.innovia.org/5percent

Rachel Quick is an Innovia Foundation fellow and a senior at Whitworth University.

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COMMENT STAFF DIRECTORY PHONE: 509-325-0634 Ted S. McGregor Jr. (tedm@inlander.com) PUBLISHER

HOW WILL YOU SPEND YOUR $600 STIMULUS CHECK? JASON SHORES: Pay bills and maybe not worry about money for a week. Let’s be real $600 isn’t much; I can’t say I won’t spend it, but it’s hardly an amount that will do any kind of good. Glad to know the super rich will get more bailouts though.

J. Jeremy McGregor (x224) GENERAL MANAGER

EDITORIAL Jacob H. Fries (x261) EDITOR

Dan Nailen (x239) MANAGING EDITOR/ARTS & CULTURE Chey Scott (x225) FOOD & LISTINGS EDITOR Nathan Weinbender (x250) FILM & MUSIC EDITOR

Derek Harrison (x248) ART DIRECTOR

Chris Frisella COPY EDITOR

Wilson Criscione (x282), Daniel Walters (x263), Samantha Wohlfeil (x234) STAFF WRITERS

Young Kwak PHOTOGRAPHER

Caleb Walsh ILLUSTRATOR

Amy Alkon, Lawrence B.A. Hatter, Will Maupin CONTRIBUTORS

ADVERTISING Kristi Gotzian (x215) ADVERTISING DIRECTOR Carolyn Padgham-Walker (x214), Emily Walden (x260) SENIOR ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES

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PRODUCTION & SUPPORT Wayne Hunt (x232) DESIGN & PRODUCTION DIRECTOR Ali Blackwood (x228) CREATIVE LEAD

Derrick King (x238), Tom Stover (x265)

EDITOR’S NOTE

Normally, we ask our question of the week of people we randomly encounter on the street. But with the coronavirus pandemic, we instead asked our followers on social media to share their thoughts.

PATRICK HAYES: Find a good independent Subaru shop in Spokane, haul the Forester in on a trailer and get the transmission replaced with our checks. Tired of being trapped with no car.

Welcomeew2Ye0ar21w!!ith

Bring in the N bullseyes! lots of smiles and

REBECCAH BARE: Pay some medical bills and fix up some small projects around the house (we’re a family so it’s more than $600).

TA CUMMINGS: Pay my electric bill so it doesn’t get shut off. Still waiting on unemployment (week #25 of waiting).

Spokane 509-309-2722 3904 N Division St CDA 208-930-1476 2506 N. 4th St

HOLLY ROBERTSON: On my medical bills from having COVID. NAOMI HANVEY: It’s not a stimulus, it’s a survival check. I’m going to spend it on groceries.

SHANE MABREY: It’s going straight to mounting debt. The government won’t put need on their credit card, so it goes on mine.

DAVID LEETH: Donate it to the Democrat candidates in the Georgia Senate runoffs.

CHRIS WARREN: Set it aside to pay federal income tax… A lot of people will be in for a surprise when they do their taxes next year, and the year after.

SENIOR GRAPHIC DESIGNERS

Jessie Hynes (x231) GRAPHIC DESIGNER Frank DeCaro (x226) CIRCULATION MANAGER Travis Beck CIRCULATION SUPERVISOR

Jess Kennedy (x212) ADVERTISING SUPPORT

OPERATIONS Dee Ann Cook (x211) BUSINESS MANAGER Kristin Wagner (x210) ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE

SHANNON ORLANDO: Use it to buy toilet paper because it’s not enough to do anything else with.

JOSEPHINE KEEFE: Thank you kindly, elected officials of the United States government for this crumb of a stimulus check. Your generosity during these painful, dark, grief-filled times is indeed amazing to behold. Inspiring to think how quickly a bipartisan agreement was met during one of the darkest times since the Great Depression. Looking forward to bringing my electric bill up to current. n

JANUARY 7, 2021 INLANDER 5

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George Washington’s bold embrace of an extensive immunization program helped to win the Revolutionary War.

A Patriotic Duty George Washington’s brave decision to inoculate the Continental Army against smallpox contributed to America’s liberty — now it’s time to do our part

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6 INLANDER JANUARY 7, 2021

BY LAWRENCE B.A. HATTER

I

f you are a patriot, you will vaccinate yourself against COVID-19 as soon as it becomes available to you. In doing so, you will follow in the footsteps of George Washington, the “Father of Our Country,” who rejected dangerous conspiracy theories and, instead, followed the science to protect the Continental Army from being ravaged by disease. In 1777, General Washington’s bold embrace of an extensive immunization program helped to win the Revolutionary War; in 2021, simply rolling up your sleeve to receive the coronavirus vaccine will help all of us secure our freedom from the horrors of the pandemic.

Smallpox was the great killer of the 18th century. Smallpox is a highly contagious disease that is spread by face-to-face contact. Infected individuals expel tiny droplets by coughing and sneezing, which are easily inhaled by the virus’s next victim. After an incubation period of up to two weeks, victims develop a high fever and a

red rash on the tongue and in the mouth. The rash soon spreads across the body and develops into pustulating sores. Smallpox killed around one-third of its victims. The survivors bore telltale scars of their brush with death for the rest of their lives.

G

eorge Washington knew the devastating effects of smallpox firsthand. He contracted the disease in Barbados during his brother Lawrence’s convalescence from tuberculosis on the island in 1751. The strong, 19-year-old George was fortunate to experience a milder form of smallpox. Nevertheless, it took all his strength to fight off the virus over the course of several weeks.

CLINICAL RESEARCH Washington did not soon forget his brush with death in paradise. And when he took command of the Continental Army outside of Boston in 1775, he recognized that he had to fight smallpox, as well as the British Army, to secure American independence. Unlike most British soldiers fighting in North America, many American combatants had never been exposed to smallpox.

The Continental Army was a virgin population that would suffer far greater losses from a smallpox epidemic than would the British Army.

While we have the mighty arsenal of 21st-century epidemiology to help us wage our war against COVID-19, Washington faced a far more daunting task in his fight against smallpox. Modern vaccines did not exist in the 1770s, but physicians did employ a form of inoculation called variolation to try to lessen the severity of the disease. This involved implanting pustular material from an infectious patient into the wound of an uninfected person.

Variolation usually spread a milder form of smallpox, building immunity to the full-blown disease. Still, variolation could claim the lives of as much as 10 percent of Washington’s army.

Initially, Washington enforced a strict quarantine of sick soldiers and civilians to prevent widespread exposure in the army. By the winter of 1776, the general realized that the quarantine could only achieve so much. Washington ordered the mass inoculation of the Continental Army in Philadelphia in February 1777, an unprecedented public health program that was repeated at Valley Forge in 1778.

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“Words are too often planted in the mouths of the Founders by selfinterested politicians, looking to hoodwink their constituents.”

G

eneral Washington won his most famous victory against Great Britain at the Battle of Yorktown in 1780. But his decision to inoculate the Continental Army in 1777 made that victory possible by ensuring the defeat of an unseen foe: the smallpox virus. Washington’s decision was not an easy one. Variolation was not without risk, and he feared that the British forces would learn of his plan and attack his weakened army. Thankfully, Washington’s brave decision paid off.

Twenty years after Washington’s mass inoculation program, Edward Jenner popularized the first vaccine for smallpox as a safer alternative to variolation. The British scientist experimented with infecting individuals with the milder cowpox to create antibodies to protect against deadly smallpox. Sadly, Jenner’s experiments also inaugurated the “anti-vaxxer” movement. Based upon willful ignorance and sensationalism, popular cartoonists engaged in scaremongering by depicting cows erupting from the bodies of vaccinated patients. Sense ultimately prevailed, and the World Health Organization officially declared the eradication of smallpox in 1980.

Words are too often planted in the mouths of the Founders by self-interested politicians, looking to hoodwink their constituents by invoking the authority of Washington, Jefferson and their fellow revolutionaries. Make no mistake: George Washington was pro-inoculation. Moreover, he believed in using the power of the U.S. government to enforce quarantines and programs of mass inoculation to protect public health. It is heartening to see Vice President Mike Pence and President-Elect Joe Biden publicly receive the coronavirus vaccine. No matter what you think of their politics, they both did their patriotic duty. When your turn comes, so must you! n Lawrence B.A. Hatter is an award-winning author and associate professor of early American history at Washington State University. These views are his own and do not reflect those of WSU.

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Learn more at Inlander.com/Insider JANUARY 7, 2021 INLANDER 7

The Way Out Shelter Manager Gerriann Armstrong speaks with the Inlander in September. YOUNG KWAK PHOTO

HEALTH

SQUASHING COVID IN SHELTERS COVID outbreaks hit Spokane’s homeless shelters over the holidays, but containment efforts appear to be working

BY SAMANTHA WOHLFEIL

I

n some ways, it was surprising that Spokane’s homeless shelters weren’t hit with COVID-19 outbreaks sooner.

“We were expecting that congregate settings and shelters would be one of the first impacted by COVID because of the amount of people in one space not necessarily having their own space to isolate,” says Kylie Kingsbury, homeless outreach coordinator for the Spokane Regional Health District.

But shelters were largely able to stave off any outbreaks until November and December, when spread of the virus spiked throughout all sectors of the community with Halloween and then later holiday gatherings contributing to the problem.

Kingsbury and others involved in the shelter system say outbreaks were avoided for so long partly with help from lessons learned from norovirus and hepatitis outbreaks over the last few years. Those brought challenges of their own, but also improvements to many facilities including increased hand washing and sanitizer stations.

“It’s kind of great that it’s taken so long to have such a big impact in the shelter setting,” Kingsbury says. “I think that’s reflective of a lot of our shelter providers and how on top of prevention they were and I think also partnerships with the city and health district.”

The previous illness outbreaks also helped staff get trained to recognize symptoms of different conditions and isolate people as needed, and made it easier to implement

8 INLANDER JANUARY 7, 2021

isolation and contact tracing this year with the pandemic, says Dena Carr, who took over in July as director of House of Charity, a downtown shelter.

Since November, a handful of the 14 shelters that have been working with the health district have seen outbreaks, when two or more cases are connected in the same place, Kingsbury says. Some of the sites have seen dozens of cases connected to the same outbreak, with the largest so far affecting 59 people tested at the same shelter over the last month.

Each outbreak is unique, Kingsbury says, and the health district has helped facilities adapt their plans as needed.

Family Promise’s Open Doors, which provides shelter for families with children, had the earliest outbreak of more than 30 positive cases in early November. They opted to move people out of the shelter who had tested negative and isolate people in the shelter who’d tested positive, before later reopening for more normal operations. “[With] the Family Promise outbreak, at the very beginning it was by far more positive than there were negative, so it made more sense to move the negative people out and keep a semblance of normal life,” Kingsbury says. “But in our low-barrier sites we want to move the positive people out as soon as possible, and that’s generally what happens.”

Indeed, with the more recent outbreaks, as people test positive, they’re able to go to one of two county isolation

facilities that are available for any county resident who can’t isolate at home — not just those who are homeless.

Those are located at My Place Hotel or the Catholic Charities Immaculate Heart Retreat Center. Afterward, the health district helps coordinate their return to the shelter they came from.

Thankfully, weekly testing, testing on demand and isolating those who are positive appears to be working, with staff at different shelters reporting it’s helped quickly address outbreaks at their facilities.

“Whatever we’re doing, it’s working for the moment,” says Mike Shaw, CEO and founder of the Guardians Foundation, which operates the Cannon Street warming shelter. “We’re happy about that.”

HOW TO MANAGE AN OUTBREAK

Early on in the pandemic, Spokane’s homeless shelters got to work spacing out their day-use areas and beds to ensure at least 6 feet of social distancing. They implemented mask policies, and for a while, the health district led a team that screened every person who entered the shelters each night to check for fever and COVID symptoms such as a cough or difficulty breathing. Those who had symptoms could get tested and transported to isolation if needed.

But once COVID community spread started running through the Inland Northwest like wildfire, the testing process was changed. ...continued on page 11

JANUARY 7, 2021 INLANDER 9

dining · shopping · culture Businesses are working hard to serve customers and stay safe: Support them and you support our region’s recovery.

North Spokane

South Hill

Prohibition Gastropub The Flying Goat Bigfoot Pub and Eatery 5 North Brewing Co. Jackson St. Bar and Grill Happy Trails to Brews Twigs Bistro and Martini Bar (Wandermere) Lost Boys Garage Cascadia Public House Hop Mountain Taproom and Grill

South Perry Pizza Luna Press Perry Street Brewing Remedy Kitchen and Tavern Rock City Grill Manito Tap House Twigs Bistro and Martini Bar (South Regal)

BLAKE BRALEY

Bundle Up And Chow Down 2020 was enacted back in mid-November to slow the spread of COVID-19, dozens of local restaurants scrambled to move their tables back outdoors, where guests from the same household can still gather to enjoy a meal. Now that the statewide ban has been extended through Jan. 11, many area restaurants are relying on this temporary option to attract customers and sustain business into the new year.

While most venues are opting to add tent structures to their patios or parking lots, others have simply added radiant heaters and cozy fire pits to existing outdoor spaces, like what

you’ll find at No-Li Brewhouse.

“It’s been well received, and it’s a really nice environment on the river,” says No-Li’s John Bryant. “If you bundle up with a stocking cap and coat, you’re good to go. It’s fun — it gives you a kind of tailgating feel. Like everyone else in town, we’re trying to limit the losses but want to be accessible to customers and the community, and create as many jobs as we can.”

The list of sheltered, outdoor dining options continues to grow, with spaces debuting in the last month at O’Doherty’s Irish Grille downtown and Brick West Brewing. Here’s a partial roundup of heated, outdoor dining options:

True Legends Grill Millwood Brewing Co. Charlie P’s Stormin’ Norman’s Shipfaced Saloon The Rock Bar and Lounge Twigs Bistro and Martini Bar (Spokane Valley Mall) Bardic Brewing and Cider

Downtown

BRICK WEST BREWING CO.

When Washington state's second indoor dining ban of

Spokane Valley & Liberty Lake

NO-LI'S JOHN BRYANT East Spokane Checkerboard Taproom Red Wheel No-Li Brewhouse

Osprey Restaurant Globe Bar and Kitchen Borracho Taco and Tequileria Brick West Brewing Browne’s Bistro Pacific Ave Pizza Davenport Grand Bark, A Rescue Pub Saranac Public House Nectar Wine and Beer Veraci Pizza Iron Goat Brewing Co. O’Doherty’s Irish Grille

Cheney Wild Bill’s Longbar

to learn more about back to business, or find local businesses to support, visit btb.inlander.com

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“SQUASHING COVID IN SHELTERS,” CONTINUED...

Now, most low-barrier shelters are having nearly everyone rapid-tested on a weekly or twice-a-week basis, with the health district providing on-call rapid testing seven days a week if someone has symptoms and needs testing.

At the Cannon Street warming center, Shaw says his staff members — many of whom became familiar with testing at the Spokane Arena temporary shelter space this summer — have been able to isolate people in a trailer on site as needed until they can be tested.

“If someone has a 103 fever, we can put that person into isolation,” Shaw says. “Just this last week, I was pretty seriously symptomatic on New Year’s Day and the health department came and tested me and the people who had contact with me.”

Thankfully, his results were negative, but he was encouraged to get tested again this week.

Cannon has had a total of 31 people test positive during its outbreak, which started just 10 days after the warming shelter opened on Nov. 19, Shaw says. The 72-bed shelter saw about 22 cases in the initial spike that first week, he says, which rapidly dwindled to just one or two cases here or there since.

As of Jan. 4, there have also been five cases at the Union Gospel Mission Men’s Shelter, and two at the Catholic Charities Family Warming Shelter, Kingsbury says.

Meanwhile, at The Way Out Shelter on Mission Avenue, operated by the Salvation Army, an outbreak was discovered among asymptomatic guests when they started doing mass rapid testing on Dec. 14, according to Salvation Army staff. With several asymptomatic positives discovered that first day, people were moved to isolation, and with continued testing, the outbreak has affected a total of 59 people at the shelter, which has beds for 102 adults (both men and women). As of Jan. 4, 17 people were isolated as part of that outbreak.

“Staff have received additional training regarding the proper use of face coverings, cleaning procedures, and enforcement up to and including removing guests who refuse to properly wear a face covering,” writes Salvation Army Spokane spokesman Brian Pickering.

The House of Charity has been housing 140 people between its main shelter (men only during the pandemic) and overflow isolation space for women (about 35) in some apartments owned by Catholic Charities; it has seen 47 cases since its outbreak started in mid-November.

Thankfully, when those who are positive go to isolation and come back, they have some level of immunity and can be used as sort of a buffer inside the facility between longer-term guests and newer guests who haven’t been tested as many times, House of Charity Director Carr says.

Testing isn’t mandatory, so no one is being forced to take a test, but interestingly, most community members experiencing homelessness are participating when asked, Kingsbury says, in part because of the trust built up with the health district team LETTERS not just over the summer, but Send comments to during their efforts to address editor@inlander.com. the hepatitis outbreak during 2019. Carr echoes that.

“It was really a pretty easy transition to go from working together with the health district to mitigate hepatitis A to working collectively as a team to address the need that COVID presented,” Carr says. “Our patron population is slow to trust people. …

That health department team, really, they are pros at engaging in a respectful and dignified way with folks, so that has gone a long way I think in them gaining traction.”

Kingsbury hopes the next step in tackling COVID will be helped by the work the health district already did in getting hepatitis vaccinations distributed through the shelters as well, with that work ending in early 2020.

“We’re really excited for when [COVID vaccination] comes, and a lot of community members in the shelters are already asking about it, which I think is awesome,” Kingsbury says. “That was lucky timing because the immunization team did a lot of outreach and building rapport and trust in vaccines.” n

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JANUARY 7, 2021 INLANDER 11

NOW

WHAT?

IN THE WANING DAYS OF 2020, we asked some of our

favorite local writers, novelists and poets to provide a little inspiration, a little hope, a little fun or fantasy as we close the book on what’s been a truly craptastic year. Writers, as is their hallmark, took that challenge to mean different things, and the results are beautiful, dark, funny and, as always, a joy to read. We hope you agree.

— JACOB H. FRIES

Advice: Give Up Let’s make 2021 the year of giving up

BY TARA ROBERTS

O

nce I burned a fried egg so badly I threw the whole thing, pan and all, into the snow on my back porch.

It stayed there for weeks. At first it was a symbol of failure: coal-colored, crispy-edged evidence of my inability to do a simple thing. Soon it took on a whiff of legend. My kids would sideeye it, nestled in its puddle of slush, as they went out to play. I imagined their thoughts: Did you see how she just chucked it out and shut the door? Unpredictable, dude.

You never know what she’s going to do.

By the time I moved the pan from the porch to the trash, it was an affirmation. The pan was irredeemably scratched, lumpy and rusting, even before I cemented an egg to it and tossed it into the elements. I’d hung onto it out of guilt or habit, I guess. My dramatic move confirmed what I should have known before I tried to fry the egg at all: I needed to give up that pan a long time ago.

Now, the easy metaphor here would be to make 2020 our cruddy frying pan, ready to be shown the door forever. But I’m not willing to say the year was irredeemable. It was weird and exhausting and often terrible, but I managed to fry a few decent eggs in it.

What I’m going for with the pan is one of those figurative eggs, a lovely nutritious lesson cooked to perfection by 2020: Sometimes it’s good to give up.

Like all humans, I’m a big fan of good intentions and

12 INLANDER JANUARY 7, 2021

comforting illusions. The year that we all just survived forced me to give up so, so many of them.

Here’s a small one: As a child of the 1980s and ’90s, I swore my family would eat dinner at the kitchen table, not in front of the TV. It was one of the last perfect-parenting items I clung to, long after letting go of “no video games on weeknights” and “my children will fold their own laundry.” (Haha no. Ever seen a 9-year-old try to fold a T-shirt?) After 2020, the TV trays are falling apart from overuse. One Sunday my kids ate lunch, dinner and an unholy number of snacks parked on the couch to binge a season of Survivor. We had a blast. I gave up, and everyone’s fine.

A bigger one: I always liked to think of myself as adaptable and resilient. But up to this point, the curveballs life threw at me were pretty straightforward and common. I said I had learned everything is fragile, everything is uncertain. I don’t think I really understood the extent of what that could mean until 2020.

I watched the pandemic dismantle every aspect of my children’s lives outside of our home. I am privileged to still have a job, but it looks wildly different than it used to. I haven’t seen my extended family for months. Little wonderful things I never thought would go away, like going to the movies or singing in church or having a beer in a friend’s kitchen, stopped overnight. Other people have lost all this and much more.

The pandemic changed massive spans of life, all at once, for an unknown time, for everybody (even the people who like to pretend it didn’t). Every time I thought the finish line was in sight, it crept farther away, until it was so fuzzy and distant it was hard to believe it existed.

The truth is, I need to give up the finish line and a whole array of other benchmarks, demands and expectations.

I need to give up, for real and not just in principle, the illusion of control.

I asked my friends what they’re happy they gave up in 2020. Their answers were funny, honest and true. Fast food. Facebook. Reading the comments on Facebook.

Shaking hands. Shame. Feeling obligated to justify saying “no.” Silence in the face of racism. People-pleasing.

Choosing to be miserable. Underwire bras. Toxic friendships. Debt. Pants. And — from a friend who lost her job at six months pregnant in the middle of a pandemic and understands this way better than I do — an echo of my own thoughts on control.

So I’m declaring 2021 the year of giving up even more. Find your illusions, your expectations, the cruddy frying pans you’re still hanging onto out of guilt or habit.

Chuck them out the door and don’t look back. Grin as people watch in awe. Unpredictable, dude. You bet — after all, everything is. n Tara Roberts is a writer and college journalism adviser who lives in Moscow with her husband, sons and poodle. Her work has appeared in Moss, Hippocampus and a variety of regional publications. Follow her on Twitter @tarabethidaho.

In 2021, Let’s Try Again A New Year’s resolution

BY JOHN T. REUTER

I

’ve thought about 2020 for a long time. No, not just what feels like a long time during the last seemingly endless year, but actually for decades.

It’s a year that was tied to so much hope while drafting strategic plans and dreaming of our future. For a long time, it was far enough away to believe that by now we would resolve our struggles, make real progress and end up in perhaps not a utopia but at least a better world.

Spoiler: It didn’t work out that way.

In fact, 2020 was a year designed to surprise even pessimists with the depths of its disappointments. A pandemic, an economic collapse for small businesses (if not for Wall Street), right-wing terrorists plotting the kidnapping of a governor, cruel reminders of our continued failures to reform the police, attempts to dissolve our democracy, fires that made the air unbreathable for weeks, and having people we love die without being able to be at their sides or even mourn together.

There are more optimistic ways to consider our recent past. The heroics of essential workers and health professionals who kept our society functioning even in these dark days. The first defeat of a sitting president in nearly 30 years, serving as a strong rebuke of his desperate and dismal approach to politics. Progress, as local leaders and voters successfully pushed reforms and policies that would have been unthinkable a decade ago — dramatically increased minimum wages, bold clean energy policies, and shifts in how we approach and fund public safety.

But it certainly didn’t turn out nearly as well as I’d hoped. A fifth of the way into this century and our prog-

ress report suggests we’re not doing very well. It looks like we may end up being sent back to repeat the history we should have been learning from.

All of this is why I look to this New Year and the rest of the century ahead with a bit of trepidation. Will things ever truly get better? The pace of progress and its imperfection even when achieved have always made this question feel relevant, I suspect. In our best moments, we’re on a journey to a better time, never quite fully arriving there.

Right now, it can be hard to believe that we’ll ever even get back to moving forward, however slowly, and not just be stuck treading metaphorical water forever and hoping not to drown.

I take comfort in the fact that we’ve never been very good at predicting the future — because it gives me hope that we could still be living in the century I’ve dreamed about for decades.

I think why so many predictions fail to materialize and the distant future usually proceeds on a radically different track than many predicted — for better or worse — is because we actually get to decide where we end up.

The future isn’t something that just happens in some linear or cyclical pattern, but a result of choices — our choices.

The first choice I’m going to make in this New Year is to try again. 2020 was definitely the year we fell off the

bike after running it into a tree and then being hit by a car. (OK, so that metaphor is a bit convoluted, but so was this whole year!)

My point is it’s time to get back on the bike. It’s time to set aside cynicism and believe in bold dreams. It’s time to try again.

Now, I suspect, some of you might be thinking or grumbling at your newspaper: “But I’ve been trying!

Haven’t you seen us in the streets, at city hall meetings, virtually lobbying our members of Congress, and casting our votes in record numbers? Where do you think all this progress you briefly mentioned came from?”

I hear you. I see you. And there’s more work to do as we head to the half-time of this century — because the game clock is ticking down and, if we want to keep playing, we’re going to have to make some fairly major progress by 2050 to address climate change and its many interconnected challenges. (See? I’m still trying with the tortured metaphors even if they didn’t do as much as I’d hoped previously.)

We have to keep trying not because it will work, but because it might. The future is uncertain in so many ways. Let’s make one thing certain: our determination to build a better one. n

“IT’S TIME TO SET ASIDE CYNICISM AND BELIEVE IN BOLD DREAMS.”

John T. Reuter, a former Sandpoint City Councilman, studied at the College of Idaho and currently resides in Seattle. He has been active in protecting the environment, expanding LGBT rights and Idaho’s Republican Party politics.

A Prize Fighter

BY INGA N. LAURENT

The sun fights for you.

Its beams travel millions of miles to reach you.

Piercing through windowpanes to land with a ferocity so gently upon your face — golden and warm — filling you with a sense of knowing That everything that ever was, is a product of its love.

Yes, my darling. Exactly. You’re right, those very same rays.

The ones shattering through glass just to reach you.

Inga N. Laurent is a local legal educator and a Fulbright scholar.

She is deeply curious about the world and its constructs and delights in uncovering common points of connection that unite our shared but unique human experiences.

JANUARY 7, 2021 INLANDER 13

NOW WHAT?

This is Our Birth Announcement 2020 tried to drown us with fear and rage and resentment; it also produced this perfect new person

BY KATE LEBO

I

n mid-March, two days before what had seemed like an overreaction to a novel flu became, overnight, a necessary global freakout, I discovered I was pregnant. A week later, Gov. Jay Inslee shut down the state. I was visiting my parents in Vancouver at the time. We knew quarantine was serious; we didn’t know this was the first day of a full year when we would not touch or share a meal with anyone outside the family. We ate ham sandwiches, watched an owl flap from a skeletal maple into a thicket of cedar, and I announced I was pregnant. My mother’s first reaction was to hug me, but already her embrace had a hiccup, a quick pause where she remembered and tried to follow new social distancing rules, then said to hell with it and squeezed me tight. Her second reaction? To ask if the pregnancy was an accident.

They say there’s no good time to have a baby.

The year 2020 wasn’t a good time for anything except Black Lives Matter protests, baking bread, Zoom bombings, and being a dick about wearing a mask.

Sam and I decided not to say anything about the pregnancy on social media and to tell our friends in person as much as possible. We wanted privacy; thanks to quarantine, we got more privacy than we wanted.

Some faraway friends probably still don’t know about our baby (if that’s you — hi! Surprise!!). Those whom we did tell often reacted the way one does when a friend says she’s divorcing a spouse nobody liked, offering cautiously supportive words like, “being pregnant right now must be stressful,” until Sam and I confirmed that yes, we did this on purpose, and yes, we’re happy about it. “What a leap of faith,” they then said. “What an act of hope.”

It’s mid-December as I write this. Not counting hospital staff, our son Cy has met about 15 people and been held by only five. His whole world was my body; now it’s our house, the Centennial Trail and our neighborhood sidewalks — the only places we feel safe taking him while COVID infections skyrocket. He hasn’t met half his grandparents or any of his aunts, uncles and cousins. He hasn’t met his eldest sibling.

Cy’s world right now is narrow, but also deep. We study his face to see who he resembles and find his siblings, his father, my father, me. We see people we can’t see in person — his uncle who lives in London, his grandfather who lives in Chicago, his great-grandfather (and namesake) who is dead. When my stepkids’ mother holds Cy, she searches his face, goes back in time, finds her grown-up babies in my baby. Outside: the election, racism, depression, the virus. Inside: time

14 INLANDER JANUARY 7, 2021

folds. It’s 1998, 1963, 1937, 1985.

Throughout my relationship with Sam, fragments of the secret language he shares with his older children have floated through his conversations with me. Sometimes I miss those years when the kids were little — years that aren’t mine to miss. Now, Sam recites Mother Goose as he used to with Paul and Adri, time folds, and I see their baby faces focused on their father, enthralled just like Cy. Right after I gave birth, I thought I could remember how my mother felt when I was born, how my father felt when the OBGYN held up my mother’s uterus and said “Look! It’s heart-shaped!” before sewing it back inside her. What I feel for Cy, I imagine, is how my parents feel for me — a love rush that has, among other things, relieved me of being the center of my own world. Time folds and folds again. It’s 1982, it’s 1954, it’s 1907, it’s 2020. Soon it will be 2021.

By the time you read this, Cy will be about 10 weeks old and I will be thoroughly certain of what all parents already know — the clichés are true! He is a miracle, like every baby. He is sublime and sacred and special, like every baby. 2020 tried to drown us with fear and rage and resentment; it also produced this perfect new person.

There’s a verse from the Book of Hebrews that I loved as a child and still carry with me. It says, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” Winter is always dark in Spokane. This winter, as it cuts us off from each other with cold and snow and sickness, will be especially dark. If having Cy was an act of faith, what did we hope for? My short-term hope, at least, is sayable: that the light will get longer, that people will take the COVID vaccine and wear masks, that one spring or summer or fall day in 2021 — when Cy can hold his own head up and flash that smile he’s working on right now, the one that knocks us over — quarantine will end, and we’ll finally be able to introduce this kid to the wide world of people we have missed so much. n Kate Lebo is the author of the cookbook Pie School and the poetry chapbook Seven Prayers to Cathy McMorris Rodgers. Her first collection of nonfiction, The Book of Difficult Fruit, is forthcoming from FSG in April 2021. In 2012, Lebo and her husband, Sam Ligon, started Pie & Whiskey — raucous literary events featuring pie, whiskey and readings about those eponymous things. Together they edited a 2017 anthology called Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter & Booze.

The Gambler

BY LAURA READ

I called my mother because I was alone in the park because everyone was inside because it was quarantine in the time of coronavirus and they must have walked their dogs earlier but I prefer sunset for the designs the pine needles make in the melting sky.

I said, I hope you’re not going out and she said, Well, I do still go to the clubhouse, but my allergies are bad so I can’t even walk there and back without crying.

Oh, her ordinary allergies!

I can see her eyes streaming and feel her irritation emanating from the sink where she washes the dinner dishes regardless.

I say, You can’t believe how eerie it is to live in this town without you, especially now.

I don’t say this.

Instead, I ask about Kenny Rogers and how she’s taking his death.

She says, and of course she knows this, Well, he’s had dementia for years.

And then, proud of her own cleverness, she tells me she told my dad at breakfast that Kenny really knew when to fold them.

So I tell her my own Gambler story, how after I read the news, I called my son, even though he was just upstairs, and sang, On a warm summer’s evening, and he joined in, On a train bound for nowhere.

I hadn’t thought how far we would get, but the song is so good, so The Gambler and Matthew and I took turns a-starin’ out the window at the darkness.

I like it when The Gambler says, Son, I’ve made a life out of readin’ people’s faces because then Matthew is the son and I am The Gambler, and I have made a life out of this, as you have, Mom. I think that’s how far we got when Matthew said, Wait, why are we doing this? and I said, Oh, because Kenny Rogers died, which I had in fact forgotten, and Matthew gasped, Mom, how could you do that?

You made me so happy and then so sad.

Laura Read is the author of Dresses from the Old Country, Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral and The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You. She served as poet laureate for Spokane from 2015-17 and teaches at Spokane Falls Community College.

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JANUARY 7, 2021 INLANDER 15

NOW WHAT?

No Silver Linings

Yet even amid unbearable bleakness, small wonders and commonplaces give life its sparkle

BY EMILY ALEXANDER

O

kay. Hello. Is this thing on? Just kidding; it’s just us here, and Albert, the dog, who is right now standing across the room just staring at me, waiting for something.

Anyway, I’m writing this from December to you in the new year just beyond here. I always love New Year’s Eve, when anything seems possible no matter how many times you’ve been disappointed to find yourself just hungover but otherwise the same on New Year’s Day. Even knowing that, there’s the lingering notion that it could feel different, that though of course you cannot be less yourself, maybe you could be more, a definable shape.

Here are some lines from a poem I love by Hera Lindsay Bird: I love to feel this bad because it reminds me of being human I love this life too Every day something new happens and I think so this is the way things are now I was telling Jade about it last year in the nascent hours of the new year, which turned into this terrible one.

We were sitting in an inflatable hot tub in the backyard of my childhood home, and all night I’d been radiant and tipsy — sitting at the bar eating french fries, dancing with my sister, following Halle through the crowd to the bathroom — and how could I not keep my little palmful of hope that this rightness might tip into the next day and beyond? My gold top left sparkles on all my friends’ arms.

I’m supposed to be looking forward here, not back, I know, I’m sorry. My mom has been telling me to stay positive — what delights you? she asked the other day.

There are things, of course. Maybe you also drink coffee every morning and underline words in books and have one or two friends you can text about tax evasion and HPV and how hard and sad it is sometimes to just do all

16 INLANDER JANUARY 7, 2021

the regular things life requires of you.

It’s been a terrible year, and I am certainly looking forward to seeing it go, though it feels precarious — now that we’ve witnessed such astonishing levels of cruelty, I fear it may be bottomless.

Back in March, I thought the government couldn’t possibly just stand by while millions of people lost their jobs and health care and homes, and then it happened and it’s still happening. It can’t get much worse than this! I said at the end of bad years past, but now I know it can in previously unimaginable and irreparable ways, so I’m not saying that

anymore.

I’m sorry, I meant to tell you something good. Here’s something: Albert is asleep now, and he’s sprawled across the living room floor. Every once in a while, deep in some irretrievable dream, his tiny little paws start twitching and he lets out a few halfhearted sleep barks. I wish you could see it. I’ve never had a dog before, and I’ve been surprised by how fully and overwhelmingly and embarrassingly I love this dumb creature who always has gunk in the corners of his eyes.

Kim Addonizio’s poem “New Year’s Day” is also good. Near the end, after she’s meditated for several lines about where the girls she went to school with might be now, she backtracks on all those careful imaginings, and claims, …………… I don’t care where those girls are now.

Whatever they’ve made of it they can have. Today I want to resolve nothing.

Both Addonizio and Bird share a vaguely defiant, humorous tone, each seemingly dedicated to a halfironic pessimism — Bird’s speaker is resigned to the day’s

ordinary and obnoxious temerity; Addonizio’s doesn’t care. Theirs is a feigned nihilism, though, as mine is: I’ve repeated Bird’s line to myself throughout the last year often, increasingly desperate to convince myself it was true, but I do love this life. I loved it on the first day of the year, buying three Gatorades at WinCo with last night’s mascara still smudged on my face, and I love it now in the silent apartment in the city I hate, where I’m convinced I’ll live forever, typing my miserable little numbers into my miserable little spreadsheets or serving bad lasagna to strangers at the corny Italian restaurant.

Are you still there? I’ll try to wrap this up: It’s all hopeless and awful and absolutely terrifying.

That’s not the end, but it could be. It’s hopeless and awful and absolutely terrifying in more dire ways than I can even imagine here on my tiny throne sturdily constructed by my various configurations of privilege. I’ve hardly left my house this whole year, and it’s too late for me to be an Olympic gymnast or the world’s youngest billionaire, so we can delete those from the Things To Look Forward To list. All the future tense could be taken away at a moment’s notice, and anyway it’s not appealing to me, this manufactured replica of a vague imagined joy when I can say f--- you! and get a version — albeit miniature, albeit fleeting, but when is it ever not? — of the real thing just by saying it. “Sometimes we have to be tricked, not pressured, into happiness,” writes Charlotte Shane in a recent issue of Bookforum.

Don’t you hate it when people say, “If you’re not mad, you’re not paying attention!”? I do, even though I actually believe it; still, I don’t want anyone telling me the kind of response I should have to the vast and varied worlds to which I might devote my attention. I don’t want anyone telling me what I should or shouldn’t do, unless they’re going to tell me exactly how to do it, exactly how to live, such that I never have to wonder if I’m doing it right again.

It’s just that, if you’re paying any attention at all to some of the things I’m paying attention to, in addition to being mad, I don’t see how you could feel any semblance

The Map X marks the spot

BY NANCE VAN WINCKEL

P of hope for the future, at least not large-scale hope for a large-scale future. But for me there is a lightness just in saying it — then you get to make a little joke or something, ha ha, or you just get to keep living your dumb little life, walking blindly into that hopelessness alongside trees and public bathrooms and gas fireplaces you ignite with the flip of a switch.

Addonizio’s poem ends: I only want to walk a little longer in the cold blessing of the rain, and lift my face to it.

In Heather Christle’s poem “Advent,” the speaker right away gives in to despair but moves and then just keeps going: “It’s hopeless, the stars, the books / about stars, they can’t help themselves / and how could you not love them for it…” The futility of it all is dizzying in such a way that it blurs together with the overwhelm of everything else — hopelessness punctuated by the daily hope or near-hope of the normal world (“this mess, this season, all that / is lost and tickets and strangers”) pressing warily on. That nothing is good is accepted here as undeniable fact, except for, of course, everything that is and the “holy tumult” of it all breathlessly tumbling over itself.

The future is bleak, folks! I’m so sad and mad and scared all the time, and I wish everyone was kinder and more taken care of and less, just, bereft. And yet. “I want this world / to remain with me,” Christle writes. I don’t always know why I do, exactly, though sometimes it’s obvious: “you, friends, spectacular driveways, / an orange.”

Potato chips, rabbits, a few words in the right order, a stranger arranging a giant inflatable penguin in his snowless yard. Just more things, you know? That’s what I’m looking forward to: more reasons to say, “so this is the way things are now,” and saying it. n Emily Alexander is a writer and poet from Idaho, currently in Boise. Her work has been published in Hobart Pulp, Pouch Magazine and New Ohio Review.

eople without an app need a map, and I just gave away my last map.

Its legend shows a for a restaurant and a for a hotel. The map was in my glove box where I’d never in my life kept a glove.

I’d gone to Home Depot, intent on buying what apparently was our town’s last outdoor chaise lounge. I’d called around.

The last one in stock, the last month of summer in what was probably the last year of my mother’s life. The chaise was for her. To “lounge” outside watching the birds was, at 92, her favorite pastime.

And there it was, as promised to me on the phone, the green-cushioned chaise in the patio section. It looked perfect. Except for one thing.

The man sleeping on it. Soundly sleeping.

Sleep of the dead, I was thinking, staring at the End-of-Summer sale tag hanging eerily near his foot like a toe tag.

We can give him the boot, someone said suddenly.

I turned to see an orange-vested woman tip her head towards the sleeper. Are you the one who called? Her badge read Shirl.

I nodded. Those stains on the man’s jeans looked like blood.

Someone else will grab it if you don’t, Shirl said.

I believed this. It’s for my mother, I told Shirl, buying us time since there was still the problem of the sleeping person. In my mind he’d acquired something like squatter rights to the chaise.

Then out from the Home Depot ether sphere came the store’s deus ex machina.

Aboard a shiny silver wheelchair. She was an elderly woman who, with her tiny tight gray curls, resembled the elderly woman for whom I was buying the chaise.

Is he real? she asked. Just as my mother would have. The obvious question. The one I hadn’t even thought of.

Shirl and I shook our heads in that way that probably looked like no but meant yes.

The elderly woman pushed a button, and her chair buzzed ahead, all shimmery. Then

she stopped, leaned down, and tugged gently on the man’s shirtsleeve. Time to wake up and smell the roses, she said.

Taking his time, inching his back over little by little, finally he was eye to eye with the wheelchair woman. Roses, he repeated softly.

Then he saw the other two of us a little ways off. Roses, he said once more as he sat up. By the time he’d gotten to his feet, Shirl had nabbed the sale tag and handed it to me.

I paid for the chaise and, as instructed, drove my car to the pickup door. I had just opened my trunk when the sleeping man, now brightly awake, appeared.

Hi, he said, recognizing me, but we were both savvy enough to say nothing about the chaise. I wonder if you could tell me which way the river is. I’m all turned around today.

Sure, I said. In fact, why don’t you take my map.

Hold on a sec. It’s in my glove box.

He watched me walk around my car and dig it out. Glancing up, I saw he was forming words with his mouth but no sound came out.

I spread open the map. The river weaving through our town zigged and zagged in bold blue. We stared at it. I mentioned how it had jumped its bed a hundred times way back when.

If that story had been in the map’s legend, we’d be seeing here a river, there a river, everywhere all at once a river.

The map was not a fair trade for the chaise, of course, but Here is where we are, I told him, and marked an X for us and There’s the river.

And it’s still right there? he asked, poor guy, puzzled or possibly still thinking of those roses.

I put my finger into the river next to his. Still here, I said. Still right here. n Nance Van Winckel’s ninth book of poems will be out this summer. She’s also the author of five books of fiction. Recently retired from EWU’s Creative Writing Program, she continues to teach in Vermont College of Fine Arts’ low-residency MFA in Writing Program.

JANUARY 7, 2021 INLANDER 17

NOW WHAT?

The 2020 Pantry Awards

When, Like Garden Spiders from Space Orbit, We Return

BY ALEXANDRA TEAGUE

The things that kept us alive

Two garden spiders named Arabella and Anita were used to study how orbiting earth would impact spiders’ ability to spin webs. Arabella spun a fairly symmetric web even though the thread thickness varied — something that earthbound spiders don’t experience.

—Elizabeth Dohrer, “Laika the Dog & the First Animals in Space”

BY CHELSEA MARTIN

2

020 was such an exciting year for the home pantry.

Between the stayat-home orders, the lack of indoor dining options, reduced occupancy at grocery stores, random food shortages and constant chatter about the threat of civil war, many of us found it favorable to keep our pantries stocked with the basics along with a few delicious things to take our minds off the state of the cold, cruel world. This all added up to a highly competitive environment for pantry foods. What pantry foods stood out? What pantry foods added value to our increasingly sad lives? What pantry foods stood up to the challenge of the year 2020?

LEADERSHIP AWARD: Canned vegetables

While canned vegetable sales were absolutely through the roof this year, very few cans were actually opened, and even fewer were eaten. We guess people just didn’t feel like succumbing to the depressing notion of eating soggy canned green beans. Not on top of everything else we had to go through this year. We decided to give Canned Vegetables the Leadership Award, because like so many of our elected leaders in this astonishing country, they are committed to taking up space and pretending to be good for you while accomplishing literally f---ing nothing.

INNOVATION AWARD: Instant Coffee

In the dark days of early quarantine, we needed something new and fun and easy and made using things we didn’t need to go to the store for, and also not so new as to challenge us at all. Something with the same flavors we were used to experiencing on a daily basis, but maybe with a slightly different texture and/or color. Enter Dalgona coffee, something food bloggers universally agreed was world-altering, and then promptly forgot about after they wrote about it in their blog.

MOST VERSATILE: Cheese Crackers

This classic yet youthful pantry item offered a shred of fun and a glimmer of hope and crunch amidst bland rows of sauces and flours and unmarked cans, whose labels came off in the sink from trying to wash the COVID off. This year, we ate cheese crackers as a snack as well as full meals. We ate them in the car, the bath and on the kitchen floor. We ate them with our toddlers, our dogs, and for Thanksgiving Dinner alone in our apartments.

18 INLANDER JANUARY 7, 2021

IMPACT AWARD: Sugar

This year, we put sugar in everything. Coffee. Muffins. Bread. Pasta sauce.

Chili. Quesadillas. French fries. Pad Thai. Minestrone.

Whatever. Whenever. However much you want. Restaurants do it all the time.

Ever wonder why restaurant salad is so much better than homemade salad? It’s got f--ing sugar in it. This was the year we collectively dropped the pretenses and poured sugar into our sandwiches.

Voila! Sandwiches with sugar in them. Consider this your night on the town.

BEST NEW PANTRY ITEM: Homemade fermented stuff

Suddenly everyone is an expert on fermentation. Oh, so you planted a victory garden but have no idea what to do with all your radishes, cucumbers and carrots?

Well, pickle them, put the jars in the furthest corner of your pantry, and don’t think about them anymore!

We will weave a web the size of the rose bush all over the rose bush the way people throw their arms around relatives in airports, as if they are trying to attach a thousand thin silk threads—of love plus gravity plus where-have-youbeen-so-long?—to their feet and shuffly suitcases and knit-capped heads; we will spin knit caps with tassels for everyone out of space dust and our own exhausted bodies; we will not talk about what it felt like to spin up there when we were also spinning. We will not say eight eyes full of darkness, or that long unanchored pulling, like trying to unwrap moonlight from its tightwrapped spool of moon, so it’s no wonder it wavered from us like arcane geometry—thinning and thickening like we were seeing it from dimensions different than we’d ever thought of.

We will say cucumber leaf! pumpkin with its unwinding, tethered coils; we will launch from them, dirtily, earthily. We will not ask what the point was. We will return like a radio transmission out of the desert, when the song reattaches its filaments of breathy voice to music, and the rasping of the wind is over; the rasping of space blanking past us. We will crawl back to what we love, as if it is earth-mist ordinary, as if we are not dizzy still, lank-legged. We will offer what we have always offered: out of everything, most days, fairly symmetric. We will look down down into the leafy wet of spring, or whatever this new season is.

Alexandra Teague is the author of three poetry collections — Or What We’ll Call Desire (Persea 2019), The Wise and Foolish Builders, and Mortal Geography — and the novel The Principles Behind Flotation, and co-editor of Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. She is a professor at the University of Idaho.

INDIE FAVORITE: Canned fish

Few like it, fewer love it, and absolutely no one agrees on what to do with it. But that didn’t stop canned fish from developing a cult following this year. Food writers around the country put canned fish on their must-have quarantine pantry item lists, insisting we try putting it on toast or stirring it into pasta or sprinkling it over salad. If these sound like good ideas, we’re happy for you! We just don’t necessarily get it.

COMFORT FAVORITE: Alcohol

With bars largely closed, 2020 was the year of the casual bartender. It was so exciting at first — we had gimlets at 3 pm and manhattans in our coffee mugs and blended margaritas over Zoom parties with our friends! And while that excitement didn’t last, nor did our jobs, nor did our interest in Zoom, nor did our ability to maintain friendships, the sweet release of using alcohol as a crutch to get through literally every single day of this bitchass year did not subside.

Half a glass of rum and fill the rest up with room temp water? That’s a Tuesday. Two shots of gin, a few drops of tonic water from a bottle you pulled out of the recycling bin, and a sprinkle of whole wheat

flour? That’s a Wednesday. And so on.

HALL OF FAME: Spaghetti

Good ol’ spaghetti. A classic pantry item, and winner of one of our prestigious pantry awards year after year for good reason. Spaghetti didn’t falter this year, but it also didn’t offer anything new or surprising, so we honor it for its legacy and lasting power, and hope it has many more years ahead.

PANTRY STAPLE OF THE YEAR: Flour

Our biggest Pantry Award goes to flour! Flour is a pantry favorite every year, but it truly outdid itself in 2020. It seemed like everyone was making their own bread, trying their hand at homemade croissants, making pizza dough, sprinkling it into cocktails, and adding a little to raw eggs before scrambling, just to see what would happen. And what happened was this: Flour proved itself to be the most versatile, compelling, and dare we say hopeful pantry item of 2020. n Chelsea Martin is the Spokane-based author of five books, including Caca Dolce: Essays from a Lowbrow Life. Her website is jerkethics.com.

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JANUARY 7, 2021 INLANDER 19

NOW WHAT?

Nobody’s Favorite Man FICTION BY SAM FOLEY

T

he robin nesting in the crux of the porch beam was on her own, now.

Her partner had been missing for a week, and the way robins worked, Quincy was certain, it took two of them going full time to keep everyone safe and fed. But the chicks were hatched and peeping already, and Quincy didn’t know if she would make it alone.

Earlier that week, a replacement suitor had appeared in the branches of the beech tree. Quincy had scrutinized that development with great hope. But the pair had interacted only briefly.

She’d seemed unimpressed, and by day’s end, he too was gone.

The intense drama of her daily existence had become a growing object of his focus in recent weeks. He’d mourned the loss of her partner, but there was little time for that. It was about the chicks now, and he’d become overwhelmed by her resolve, her dedication, her lack of self-pity. She’d become a sort of hero to Quincy. He lingered a moment in the doorway admiring her fragile, robust beauty before stepping out onto the porch and fishing from the front pouch of his red and black Baja hoodie the half a joint he’d left there the previous evening.

This was all after the first terrible spring of the pandemic, after the initial quarantine, the closing down, the mass unemployment, but before wild, blazing-blue banners erected in truck beds cruised the main streets of western towns, before the fires, before the suffocating smoke settled into the lungs and held there and didn’t let go. This was the time of the protests, the riots, but before the counterprotests, before the counter-counterprotests, before the elections. The country’s financial institutions appeared to be holding, but the flaws in the fabric of its being had been revealed, could no longer be ignored, yet were being ignored. It couldn’t go on, yet it showed no signs of stopping. People were coming unglued.

Quincy was in a state of disrepair. His face and neck were unshaved, and the hair on the side of his head had grown shaggy, accentuating the baldness. He’d been drinking too much and gained weight, and the sharper edges of his consciousness had grown less so. The left temple of his glasses had broken months ago, and now they slipped whenever he looked down. Often they fell off completely, and he just cursed them and put them back on.

He dragged an Adirondack chair out from the corner into the sunlight and sat down and lit the joint. Three months ago this would have been odd morning behavior for Quincy, but he’d been laid off since March, and his wife and their two girls were gone till tomorrow, and the world outside had become a Dada art installment, and it maybe didn’t matter anymore. He took a nice, long, slow drag and settled back against the wood.

An old black dog followed him out of the house and

20 INLANDER JANUARY 7, 2021

limped past him toward the yard. The dog was bent and blind and mostly deaf, and a large tumor bulged from his abdomen, but he was still happy, and he wagged his tail as he shuffled across the cracked and sunken patio.

It was almost a year now since the stroke that had nearly ended the dog, had left him paralyzed, incontinent, and miserable. For weeks following, Quincy’s wife had babied the dog, slept on the floor with him; they’d carried him inside and out hoping to nurse him back. But weeks passed with no improvement, and they’d finally reached the sad conclusion — it was the end of the road for the old boy.

But then, the night before the vet was scheduled to put him down, something wonderful had happened. The entire family became violently, inexplicably ill. For a full day and night, they were all laid out, gutted, and they missed the appointment. The morning they all recovered Quincy woke to the sound of his wife’s cry from the hallway. He and the two girls each emerged cautiously from their separate rooms, dazed and weakened, but alive!

And they joined her in the hallway to see the old dog standing there on the rug, a slight wag in his tail, tongue out just so, ears perked in that certain way that said, hey there, glad to see you, happy to be here.

Quincy smiled now at the dog. Miracles do occur, he reminded himself. It was important to remind himself of that. It was hard to remember. He took a drag and held his breath and then released a great, meditative plume of smoke.

Yes, Quincy was unemployed and there was little hope of that changing. There were many others like him in the surrounding enclosed yards.

Quincy could hear them milling around in their isolated outdoor spaces at a time they would normally be at work. Some tinkered uncertainly with power tools. All wondered nervously if their pandemic unemployment checks would keep coming or if they’d suddenly stop or if the state would accuse them of fraud and make them pay it all back. There’d be no way to know since you could no longer call and speak to someone. There were so many unemployed that the phones had stopped working.

One nice thing about unemployment was Quincy could focus full time on being a failed writer. Being a failed writer took almost everything he had. In the early days of the pandemic he wrote prolifically. But as the thing dragged on, as the distortion of the world outside became more and more grotesque, language became increasingly confounding. No longer able to find suitable language to add to things, Quincy found himself cutting

unsuitable language from existing things. One story of 4,000 words, he’d managed to cut in half, then half again, and again, till a single paragraph remained. Then days later, drink in his left hand, he’d slowly deleted, letter by letter, the final remaining sentence. Annihilation was the only thing left that made sense. Quincy knew he wasn’t alone. Failed artists everywhere were experiencing the same thing.

He took another drag, but the joint was dead. He looked down in disgust and re-lit the thing and took another lazy drag and closed his eyes. That was probably one too many marijuanas for this early in the morning, he thought, though only too late. The old dog, who’d joined him by his side, grunted and rolled over. Quincy closed his eyes.

His family had been gone for a week. They hadn’t seen Gramma since February, and they couldn’t wait any longer. “Damn the consequences,” Gramma had said.

Quincy stayed behind for a lot of reasons. Mostly they’d just needed a break from each other and felt lucky to get it.

Alone, he’d been thinking too much about things like the distance between the private mind and social construct. He’d gotten all the way down there and had it down to no private mind, even. There was no private mind, he determined.

Last night he’d woken promptly at three and seen clearly, profoundly that the garden of Eden was the present moment, that breath was prayer, was a gift given as such, and that God was waiting in the present for us, that the present was something much different and wonderful than anything he’d imagined. A tingling sensation had run up and down the length of his body. He’d turned to the open window in time to watch the crescent moon disappear behind the rooftops across the street. He’d felt he was breathing moonlight.

When he awoke at noon the feeling was gone.

He’d picked up his phone and reassimilated his ironic, cynical mind and scrolled the news and soon was consumed by dread.

The robin looked down at him having just alighted her nest, a giant insect protruding from her beak. “You are the best mama,” Quincy cooed. “You bring the juiciest grubs.” He looked at his phone. He was hopelessly drawn to it. It was answering a question, he thought. It must be. Otherwise, why the appeal? He rarely enjoyed his time in there. But what questions? Why would he be so drawn to something that caused him such strife? The robin, having finished feeding her young, flitted off into a dangerous world. Quincy closed his eyes and waited for an answer.

“What is it that’s coming for me?” He blurted, looking around for the bird. She was present less now that the chicks were born. He wiggled his toes, turning the phrase

“WHAT IS IT THAT’S COMING FOR ME?” HE BLURTED.

in his head. “Who am I, and what is coming for me.” He looked at his phone. “Are these the questions?” he muttered. His phone would answer these questions over and over. It would never stop answering these questions. The answers would be whatever he most feared they would be. Maybe the problem is that there is no God in these phones, he thought. God is elsewhere. It was no longer fashionable to think such things, but it didn’t matter.

“This is not the present moment,” he whispered to his phone.

Quincy pulled the dog against his torso and the dog looked up at him and waved a paw in front of Quincy’s face. “You’ve lived your whole life, and you’ll die, and you’ll have never spoken a word,” he said. The dog looked back at him and patted his tail against the dirt.

Then Quincy sauntered inside and fixed a whiskey sidecar, then another, and he kept at it till he slept. This behavior could not continue, he told himself.

The next day his family returned from Gramma’s, and Quincy tossed out the weed. The girls raced up the stairs and filled the house with cartwheels and joy and inane grievances and everything he’d missed. He helped them unload the car, and he told the kids about the baby robins. He told his wife she should go lie down, but of course she wouldn’t. She was tireless.

Two days later the chicks burst from the nest. Quincy spotted them from the window and brought the girls outside to see. The chicks were walking and chirping and stumbling. And there with them was mama bird, peeping and beautiful. The girls exclaimed. The old dog danced a crippled, little dance.

Then Quincy noticed that across from her was the male robin watching one of the chicks in the yard. So, he hadn’t been murdered. But where had he been? How could he just show up now? This was the last thing Quincy expected. It made no sense. He was furious. “This makes a terrible story,” muttered Quincy. He watched Mama for signs of resentment, and he watched the male for signs of shame or remorse, but he saw none of it, and he searched both birds for answers, but of course he found none. “He just shows back up?” He said to the girls, who were doing a gymnastics routine. Quincy scoffed. “Who’s going to believe that, huh?”

They watched all morning as the robins herded their chicks around the yard. They watched the chicks attempt flight over and over and fail and try again. Quincy asked himself the question, who are we, and what is coming for us? He asked it over and over again. He looked down at his girls. He thought about the long road back to sobriety that lay ahead. Then, one by one the chicks took meager flight to the low branches of the apple tree at the edge of the yard, and from there the parents gathered them and led them hopping tree by tree across the neighbor’s yard and out of Quincy’s life forever. n Sam Foley holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University and has fiction forthcoming in the South Dakota Review.

Spokane Print & Publishing Center.

The Work to be Done

YOUNG KWAK PHOTO

What I’m looking forward to

BY THOM CARAWAY

I

’m in the press room at Spokane Print & Publishing Center this chilly afternoon, working on a 2021 card. I’m making two versions. One says 2021: It can’t get any worse! The other says: 2021: Shhhh, don’t make it angry.

There’s some chronological snobbery at play, for sure, but it is safe to say we’ve just made it through a YEAR. And a year unlike many others. I don’t need to recap. We’re tired. Not even tired. Weary. Worn out. Fatigued.

Much though certainly not all of that can be attributed to COVID: closures, lockdowns, debates, deaths. No words will ever do the entire disaster justice or convey the scale of it all. And right now, they don’t need to. We know. But against many different kinds of odds, a vaccine has begun distribution. An election has finally been settled. The beginnings of changes to the circumstances have arrived, but that still leaves a weary populace with a lot of work to do. But for the first time in a long time, I at least feel like the work CAN be done.

So that’s what I look forward to: work that matters. Staying hunkered down for the last months of the pandemic, doing our part to maintain the public health (I don’t say this with blinders on, but I’m also weary of all the reasons we say we CAN’T do something so we don’t even

try. I just want to do my part, and have it matter). COVID has caused many problems in our society, but it also laid bare the systemic ones: racism, nationalism, wealth inequalities, political tribalism. That’s where the work is, or at least that’s where I feel like my work is.

I look forward to waking up one day and wondering where do I want to go, and being able to go there. I look forward to people coming to the print shop again, just to hang out and make art. I look forward to my daughter being able to dance with her team, and being able to sit around the table with my wife and some friends who just dropped by. I look forward to dropping by.

I look forward to community forums and hard truths about who we are and what we value, and how we value it. I look forward to my first drive down Whistalks Way. Back to printing my cards, which I know are wrong. 2021 CAN be worse, but for the first time in a long time, I’m optimistic that it won’t be. n Thom Caraway is a poet, letterpress printer, and professor. He’s the editor of Rock & Sling and a founder of the Spokane Print & Publishing Center. He lives in the West Central neighborhood with his wife and kids.

JANUARY 7, 2021 INLANDER 21

NOW WHAT?

The One-Eyed Snowman of 2020 Putting the year behind us

BY JAY DEARIEN

I

wonder if my father-in-law will color in the daruma’s eye this year. A newly bought daruma, the traditional round, red, white and black Japanese good luck doll, comes with both eyes blank.

One New Year’s tradition is that when you take the new daruma out of the box, you draw a black pupil in one of the eyes. At the end of the year, if the year was lucky, you color in the second pupil. My Japanese then-wife told me that in the spirit of gratitude, her father always colored in the second eye, no matter what.

The Japanese word for snowman is yuki-daruma, or “snow daruma.” During the two decades I lived in Tokyo, it never snowed enough to make a yuki-daruma, or to have a yuki-dama-senso (snowball fight) for that matter, so I’ve never seen a Japanese snowman in the wild. However, I imagine one might look like another traditional mainstay of the Japanese New Year, the kagami-mochi, which means, inexplicably, the “mirror rice cake.” A kagami-mochi minimally consists of a hard white loaf of pounded rice cake, a bit larger than a double-decker hamburger, with another smaller one on top, surmounted by a Mandarin orange. Pounding rice cakes is such an established tradition in Japan that the image Japanese people see in the face of the moon is a rabbit pounding rice cake with the traditional long wooden hammer. If you or your pet rabbit are disinclined to make your own, never fear, in the weeks leading up to New Year’s, supermarkets and convenience stores prominently display kagami-mochi for purchase, usually coated with a layer of plastic to keep them from drying out while displayed in your gen-kan, or the entrance to your home where guests take off their shoes.

I feel a certain reverence for the kagami-mochi, which is traditionally eaten on New Year’s morning in an otherwise workaday miso soup. It is no ordinary miso soup, however, as failing to eat the kagamimochi is unlucky, and if my own experience is to be believed, very unlucky indeed.

A coworker, a fellow gai-jin (foreigner), recounted a harrowing tale of how he had chucked his own kagami-mochi into the rubbish, only to be immediately beset by an onslaught of plagues the likes of which only Pharaoh has seen. Sudden illness, broken pipes, accidents, broken dishes and other accidental damage, car trouble, computer trouble, and so the list went on. Desperate, he and his Japanese wife went dumpster-diving to retrieve the sacred ceremonial foodstuff. His advice to me was, “Even if it’s gotten hard as a rock, even if it’s rotting, eat the thing!”

22 INLANDER JANUARY 7, 2021

Word to the wise, I think.

J

apanese New Year is a combination of spring cleaning, Thanksgiving, Christmas and Japan’s Got Talent. Instead of drinking without regard for personal safety and kissing each other at midnight to the explosions of fireworks, Japanese clean the house and go to bed early. All TV stations carry singing of traditional enka songs. If the new year is to be rung in, one goes to a Shinto shrine to wait until midnight, but getting up early and going to a shrine is also a practice. Despite the ungodly hour and the cold, there are large crowds.

One can always buy o-mamori, or good luck charm amulets. These are great to hang off your rearview mirror, by the way, especially if it’s an “avoid death in car accidents” o-mamori. Just this time of year, decorative wooden arrows with no tips, or hamaya, are available at the shrines. Watch out, demons!

The big event is the New Year’s morning meal, opened with a communion-like drinking of ume-shu, or plumb wine (plum), from tiny, flat red-enameled sake bowls. Traditionally one eats only o-sechi-ryori. The dishes are elaborate, decorative, come in dozens of different types, and are typically ordered from special shops. The kicker is that they are all cold, the idea being that the women who might otherwise be cooking are not obliged to prepare anything, since it’s already done and in the fridge, ready to serve. My mother-in-law would nevertheless prepare a lot of hot food in addition to the o-sechi-ryori, including deep-fried shrimp. We also had sushi, which was delicious, and cold, but not necessarily on the traditional menu. During the feast, children are given little red envelopes with coins inside, o-toshi-dama, five dollars being considered a good haul.

After eating, we lay around on the tatami or lounged at the table, eating large quantities of Mandarine oranges (Mandarin). For some reason, all TV channels are filled with coverage of foot racing events all around the country. The coverage is of a thoroughness only Japan can muster. To take one example, it was on Japanese TV one New Year’s morning that I learned about Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to run the Boston Marathon.

N

ot to give the impression that New Year’s is an entirely teetotaling affair, o-sake is often served at shrines, rather like communion wine.

On the first day of returning to work, it’s traditional for companies to roll out a wooden barrel of sake and break it open with a traditional wooden hammer, whereupon the assembled workers proceed to drink every drop.

Another boisterous company tradition is the bonen-kai, or “forget the year party,” in the weeks leading up to New Year’s, and the less prevalent shin-nenkai, or “coming year party,” in the weeks following.

Bars and clubs vie for bookings by companies who send their entire staff for a whole night of drinking, eating and entertainment. Filling up on bo-nen-kai reservations is a make-or-break for Tokyo watering holes.

Even though it’s been hard and rotten, I have to eat the kagami-mochi for 2020, or risk even more bad luck. I’ve faced employment and health care uncertainty, and quarantine from family and friends, but do I color in the other eye on 2020’s daruma, in case there was anything to be thankful for? There haven’t been any holiday parties, either with turkey or o-sechi-ryori, but whether to grieve it, or celebrate that we survived it, maybe it’s time to have a big, online bo-nen-kai to put 2020 behind us. n Jay Dearien is a permanent resident of Japan and lived there from the 1990s through the 2000s.

Now a reformed Tokyoite, he’s lived for the past 15 years in Moscow, Idaho. He’s been a stand-up comedian, drawn comics, invented educational board games, and serves as the local Municipal Liaison for National Novel Writing Month.

o make us

BY SHANN RAY

o make us aware of our infinite and atomic obligation to each other she and i face to face with you remind us to kiss you with the kisses of our mouth she asks me to be more devoted to her than to myself more devoted to us than to her and more devoted to you than us police shootings chokings deaths from a white on high make me aware of the worlds circling the blood of the sow who has eaten her young and the cities we live in american male white male dark white break us God kiss us until we breathe with atomic breath the substantial air of atonement our beautiful lips not ours but yours their beautiful face your face American Book Award winner Shann Ray is the author of Atomic Theory 7, Sweetclover, American Copper, Blood Fire Vapor Smoke, American Masculine, Balefire, Forgiveness and Power in the Age of Atrocity, and The Souls of Others. He lives with his wife and daughters in Spokane and teaches at Gonzaga University.

PHOTOGRAPHY

QUESTIONING

GAZE Spokane artist Grace June found inspiration for her latest photo collection in the George Floyd tragedy

BY DAN NAILEN

G

Bethany Montgomery as the Statue of Liberty. GRACE JUNE PHOTO

race June remembers exactly the first time she met Bethany Montgomery, the Power 2 The Poetry co-founder who is one of the featured models in June’s powerful new racial justice photo collection, We Hear You. “I heard Bethany perform for the first time and talk about Black Lives Matter,” June says. “At Richmond Art Collective, she just started in the middle of a crowd, saying this poem. And I was like, ‘Oh!’ I think I went up immediately and hugged her. I was really moved.

“It just made me start asking questions, and I feel like the best thing art can do is help people ask questions.”

With We Hear You, June combines models posing as iconic figures like the Statue of Liberty or Lady Justice with strategically placed police tape, a concept she came up with in the wake of the George Floyd murder.

“I wanted to use easily recognizable imagery to kind of get the point across that there is a connection between the way our country was founded and these symbols of justice and liberty, and by combining with the police tape, trying to query whether that is an equitable system,” June says. “I chose those figures because they were immediately recognizable to a viewer. They wouldn’t have to ask a lot of questions [about them], but they would have to go deeper and be like, ‘Why in God’s name did you wrap them in police tape?’”

The 33-year-old June started her career in photography as a teenager in Alaska, where she ran what she calls “one of those old-time photo parlors.” Later in college she took a photojournalism class, and while she says her grade wasn’t great due to her unfamiliarity with digital cameras, the teacher made a point of encouraging her to “keep shooting, keep practicing.” Since 2011, she’s done photography for commercial clients as well as in artistic pursuits in Spokane. ...continued on next page

JANUARY 7, 2021 INLANDER 23

CULTURE | PHOTOGRAPHY “QUESTIONING GAZE,” CONTINUED...

For We Hear You, June created images of five characters: the Statue of Liberty (modeled by Bethany Montgomery), the Lincoln Memorial (Afaria Duke), the Madonna (Michelle Michael), Lady Justice (Ginger Ewing) and Saint Sebastian (Cylas Palacios). June picked her favorite five images (shared on this page), but also let the models choose several they liked, and those additional images can be seen at gracejuneimagery.com/ Grace June wehearyou.

“I didn’t make these photos arbitrarily,” June says. “I didn’t make them to generate anything but questions that we can ask of ourselves and each other. I absolutely don’t mean to attack anyone, but I do have extreme disrespect for a system that protects the corrupt … It’s not about a hate for anything. It’s about wondering how we got here, and I’m using art to try to make sense of what I’m observing in the world.” n See the We Hear You portraits online at inlander.com, or see the complete set of photos at gracejuneimagery.com/wehearyou.

LET’S BE CLEAR

W

hen contacted to talk about her role in Grace June’s We Hear You photo essay, Power 2 The Poetry’s Bethany Montgomery responded with a short essay we’re printing with her permission: 1619. Over 400 years ago. The beginning of slavery in America.

Interestingly, we do not talk about this part of our American history more often. I assume because it’s embarrassing. It is sad. It is an ugly truth. And from what I have observed in my 25 years “we” like to sweep harsh realities under the rug. Which is what we have done when it comes to the plight of African Americans living in the “United” States.

We can’t sit here and act like slavery never happened. It plays a pivotal role in how Black people are viewed and treated in our country. Can we all just stop and think about it?

Africans were brought to America and sold into chattel slavery where they had to survive the most inhumane conditions. Beaten, raped, overworked, malnourished, belittled, and degraded. Literally not even viewed as human beings. This is sick and what’s more disturbing is many Americans do not understand the connection between this chattel slavery and systemic racism. Descendants of slaves require more than equality. We must strive for equity (please look up the definition).

Yes, we understand all lives matter. But let’s be clear why we must focus on the BLACK LIVES MATTER movement. Our country will only heal and truly become great when our ancestors are properly acknowledged for their role in building America; and current and future generations of African Americans are treated fairly with dignity and respect.

Also, we must acknowledge the crimes perpetrated against the original inhabitants of this land. We demand more media coverage of all missing and murdered Indigenous women. They deserve protection and justice.

Do you hear us?

Love & Lyte to you and yours, Bethany ‘B.Lyte’ Montgomery

24 INLANDER JANUARY 7, 2021

Clockwise from top: Ginger Ewing, Michelle Michael, Cylas Palacios and Afaria Duke all took part in the We Hear You photo project. GRACE JUNE PHOTOS

CULTURE | DIGEST

PROBLEM SOLVER The podcast Heavyweight exists somewhere between This American Life and Reply All, a show in which host Jonathan Goldstein resolves the conflicts of regular people, reuniting them with long-lost friends or answering minor mysteries that have bugged them for years. The show just debuted a new season, and Goldstein’s new cases include a woman searching for the man who took care of her uncle as he died of AIDS, a brother and sister uncovering the dark ulterior motives of their late psychiatrist father, and a musician haunted by his performance in a terrible fast food commercial. It’s one of my favorite podcasts, one that takes a fleeting encounter or minor injustice and weaves it into a story that’s narratively involving and emotionally satisfying. (NATHAN WEINBENDER)

Wait a Minute, Netflix

I

BY WILSON CRISCIONE

magine what the world would be like if Netflix were in charge. Imagine what it would be like if every time something ended, you were immediately given more of it.

Your friend tells a good joke, then breathlessly starts with another, and another, until they run out.

Your pet dies, and immediately a new one appears in your arms. You take the last sip of wine, and the glass is refilled instantly.

When do you get a chance to laugh? When do you get a chance to cry? When do you get a chance to pause for a moment and enjoy being wine drunk before you’re

THE BUZZ BIN

THIS WEEK’S PLAYLIST There’s noteworthy new music arriving in stores and online this week. To wit: STEVE EARLE AND THE DUKES, J.T. The Americana legend takes on 10 songs from his recently deceased son Justin Townes Earle’s catalog, and adds an original, too.

BARRY GIBB, Greenfields: The Gibb Brothers Songbook Vol. 1. The surviving Bee Gee collaborates with excellent Nashville talent on some of his best tunes.

SAMMY HAGAR & THE CIRCLE, Lockdown 2020. Hagar tackles covers including songs by Bob Marley and David Bowie. Something tells me the songs probably should have stayed on lockdown. (DAN NAILEN)

passed out on the couch and someone is tapping your shoulder, asking, “Are you still drinking this?”

This is what it feels like sometimes when I watch Netflix, or any other streaming service that automatically plays the next episode or recommended movie as soon as the credits appear. Sure, there’s a way to turn this feature off — though it’s not always possible in the medium you’re watching with. But I would argue this feature should never be the default in the first place.

I started rewatching Mad Men when it was still on Netflix. Each episode is packed with symbolism, character development and subtleties that you may only pick up on a second or third viewing. When the credits start rolling, I’m often still in a daze, reaching a new understanding of what I just watched. But before I could finish, the next episode was playing.

When Mad Men left Netflix, I bought the series from Apple. It was refreshing to finish an episode and watch the credits without the hassle of reaching for the remote and telling Netflix I wasn’t ready to move on yet.

This isn’t just a problem for prestige TV shows.

When the new season of Big Mouth came out, I binged the entire thing in one night, breezing through each halfhour episode and letting Netflix skip through the credits.

I enjoyed it in the same way I enjoy devouring a greasy hamburger — it was a little gross, it went down fast, and at the end I felt regret that I didn’t slow down a little.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Disney+ lets you watch the credits. The Mandalorian even has drawings depicting the best scenes during the credits. Plus, episodes are released once per week, which means that the show is on my mind longer than just the four hours it would take to binge an entire season.

What was ever wrong with that? n

HUNTED, HAUNTED HOME? Next time someone says horror films are formulaic, slap them with a remote and then put on His House, written and directed by Remi Weekes. Streaming on Netflix, the film follows a couple from South Sudan that’s granted very conditional asylum in an English town. Condition one? They must stay in the house provided for them, even if its other, invisible inhabitants are less than cordial. Masterful and terrifying, His House displays the complexity of diasporic experiences in England and the chilling effects of trauma on a marriage. (LAUREN GILMORE)

READ TOGETHER Expand your intellectual horizons and meet fellow readers in the community through the Spokane County Library District’s new online book club, launching in January.

First up is Michelle McNamara’s bestselling I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, which participants can read between January and March. The club is free to all SCLD library card holders, who’ll get immediate ebook access to the selected title after signing up. Chat about each title with fellow club members via an online forum, and vote for upcoming club books. Details at pbc.guru/scld. (CHEY SCOTT)

HERE SHE IS If it feels like Dolly Parton is everywhere these days, you’re not imagining things. Between a new Christmas album, a new book, a podcast dedicated to her life and more, the brilliant songwriter and country star is potentially the only living being on Earth who had a good 2020. Hell, her donation to Vanderbilt even helped develop one of the successful COVID-19 vaccines. If you haven’t quite had your fill of everything Dolly, fire up the documentary Dolly Parton: Here I Am on Netflix and settle in for a crash course in one of American music’s best stories, from her poor upbringing to global superstardom, all of it done with a smile by one of the most business-savvy musicians around. (DAN NAILEN)

JANUARY 7, 2021 INLANDER 25

Small Axe

STREAMING

TV, OR NOT TV? As streaming becomes our primary viewing method for new films, the line between TV and movies keeps blurring

BY NATHAN WEINBENDER

F

or so long, the demarcation between films and TV shows was the big screen itself. If a movie played in theaters at some point in its existence, then it was a capital-F Film.

It’s kind of a silly distinction, but it has existed as long as television has been an alternative medium for broadcasting feature-length stories. You could have two movies of the same length, produced on the same budget and with the same star wattage — but one premieres on cable, and it’s given the distinction of “TV movie.” That distinction has an inherent derisiveness about it, as if a TV movie will always be lesser than a big screen movie, even if it’s good.

But now that in-home streaming is the de facto viewing means for just about everybody, including for new films by some of the greatest living filmmakers, what does it mean to be a “TV movie,” anyway?

This age-old conundrum has been reconjured by the

26 INLANDER JANUARY 7, 2021

recent release of Small Axe, Steve McQueen’s five-film anthology that tells several stories about West Indian immigrants in 1960s and ’70s Britain, and which was released in weekly installments on Amazon Prime. It’s showing up on year-end best-of lists by both film and TV critics, and while some of them have broken the collection down into individual chapters, others have chosen to consider it as an epic whole.

Small Axe is the most explicit representation of the line-blurring that’s happening within and between visual mediums. McQueen himself has pushed back against the idea that it’s a TV miniseries. These are five distinct films under the same thematic umbrella, he says. But almost in defiance of the creator’s own designation, Amazon has categorized Small Axe as TV, and will be submitting Small Axe for consideration at the Emmys.

This happened earlier in the year with terrific black

comedy Bad Education, a 108-minute film starring Hugh Jackman as a corrupt high school principal that played the film festival circuit before being acquired by HBO. Because it premiered on a cable network, it was considered a television film and even won an Emmy. Had it premiered instead on Netflix, would it have earned the same designation and shown up on top 10 film lists?

HBO has long been espousing the cinematic possibilities of cable, spending Hollywood-level budgets on adult-themed feature films that just so happened to debut in folks’ living rooms. Their film output started gaining notoriety sometime in the late ’80s and early ’90s, with acclaimed small-screen productions like Barbarians at the Gate, And the Band Played On and If These Walls Could Talk, all of which would likely have garnered Oscars recognition had they opened in cinemas. ...continued on page 28

+

Now on Inlander.com: National and international stories from the New York Times to go with the fresh, local news we deliver every day JANUARY 7, 2021 INLANDER 27

FILM | STREAMING “TV, OR NOT TV?,” CONTINUED...

But the awkward dance between cinema and television began decades earlier, and it was arbitrary even then. Consider Steven Spielberg’s 1971 feature debut Duel, generally considered one of the greatest madefor-television movies ever. If you were to rent it now (and you should), there wouldn’t be much to signal that it first premiered on ABC. The movie was so well received, in fact, that Spielberg shot additional scenes

Duel (1971) to flesh out the running time so it could be released in theaters in most other parts of the world. In America, Duel was a TV movie, but in Europe, it was a proper cinematic experience. In both cases, it’s a gripping film.

That, of course, was back when TV was generally considered an inferior medium to film, despite the ’70s producing cinema-worthy appointment viewing with

Get Tickets Now 28 INLANDER JANUARY 7, 2021

Roots and Jesus of Nazareth. Decades later one could argue that contemporary TV’s most esteemed series have a tighter grasp on stylistic experimentation, narrative pacing and visual texture than most mainstream movies.

Maybe these distinctions between TV and film don’t matter anymore, especially when most of us are watching blockbusters like Soul and Wonder Woman 1984 from our living room couches. The barrier separating TV and film has slowly been dissolving, and in 2020, the wall fell. The pessimistic side of me wonders if this represents a slippery slope: Could the definition of “cinema” become so elastic that it’ll eventually include TikToks and YouTube videos? Will film critics be expected to brush up on TV alongside movies, and vice versa? Does any of it even matter?

Feature films are, by their very nature, self-contained entities, allowing us to experience other peoples’ lives and adventures in a matter of hours. (There are exceptions to this, of course, but go with me here.)

That sort of storytelling is, in some ways, a different artform than making a TV series, where you can explore a complex universe over the course of several years. The idea that a multi-season TV show is just “one long movie” seems preposterous to me.

And yet here we have Small Axe, which refuses to be boxed in by medium or genre. It’s compelling television and compelling cinema at the same time, and it could represent a significant turning point in the great film vs. TV wars: Either it’ll change the way we consider the restrictive parameters of what a movie is supposed to be, or we’ll just go on making the same specious argument. n

NWBachFest.com

OTHER NOTABLE TV PROJECTS THAT BLURRED THE LINES BETWEEN MEDIUMS

BRIAN’S SONG (1971) Alongside Spielberg’s Duel, 1971’s other TV movie classic is the tragic athlete bromance Brian’s Song. Premiering on ABC shortly after Thanksgiving, it broke ratings records, later got a limited theatrical release and is regularly named as one of the greatest sports movies.

BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ (1980) Originally broadcast on West German TV, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 15-hour epic about Berlin in the 1920s gained a cult following in the U.S. after it was screened in theaters in installments. It was given the box set treatment by the Criterion Collection.

DEKALOG (1989) A 10-part TV miniseries from Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski, with each episode representing a different biblical commandment, has since been recognized by many critics, including Roger Ebert, as one of the greatest films ever made.

O.J.: MADE IN AMERICA (2016) Ezra Edelman’s nearly eight-hour documentary about the rise and fall of O.J. Simpson had a limited theatrical release and ran in weekly installments on ESPN. It became one of the only films to ever win both Emmys and an Oscar, with the Academy later changing eligibility rules to prevent TV productions from competing.

TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN (2017) Is a season of television just one long movie? That was one of many conversations surrounding the 18-episode reboot of David Lynch’s series: Lynch himself pushed the narrative, and the entire season was named the best film of the year by European film magazines Sight & Sound and Cahiers du Cinema.

— NATHAN WEINBENDER

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TRIBUTE

Sad Songs Say So Much Steve Earle’s latest album, J.T., tackles songs from his son’s catalog just five months after Justin Townes Earle’s death

BY DAN NAILEN

J

ustin Townes Earle won the Song of the Year prize at the 2011 Americana Music Awards for “Harlem River Blues,” the title track of his excellent third full-length album and the most upbeat song about suicide you’ll ever hear. It’s all soaring choirs and pumping organs as the protagonist proclaims, “I know the difference between tempting and choosing my fate.”

When Earle played the song on David Letterman’s talk show (with future star Jason Isbell accompanying on guitar) 10 years ago this month, the rootsy performance elicited an unusually effusive reaction from the host, and seemed to mark a launch into a new stage of the 28-yearold Earle’s career.

That didn’t exactly happen.

While Earle continued making consistently strong albums, some truly excellent, the addictions that haunted him off and on since he was an adolescent eventually caught up with him. He died five months ago in Nashville, apparently via an overdose of cocaine laced with fentanyl.

He was 38, married, and father to a young daughter.

When the Grammys run their “In Memoriam” feature in a few weeks, dedicated to the musicians who died in 2020, I don’t expect Earle to be there alongside Neil Peart, John Prine, Little Richard and Helen Reddy.

He wasn’t exactly a household name. He didn’t have any massive hits on the radio, his headlining tours were mostly confined to smallish clubs, and his addictions consistently kept his career from taking off like many of us fans thought it should. Hell, he wasn’t even the most famous Earle: That would be his dad, Steve. ...continued on next page

Justin Townes Earle

JOSHUA BLACK WILKINS PHOTO

JANUARY 7, 2021 INLANDER 29

MUSIC | TRIBUTE “SAD SONGS SAY SO MUCH,” CONTINUED...

What Justin Townes Earle was, though, was a remarkable writer whose music kicked it at the intersections of blues, country, honky-tonk, ragtime and rock.

He showed that over eight full-length albums, an EP and hundreds upon hundreds of live shows. Whether playing with a full band (horns included), a fiddleand-bass combo or solo on acoustic guitar, Earle was a mesmerizing performer, one who liked to crack jokes and talk shit between songs. And no matter how sober (or not) he was, I never saw a bum gig over the course of seeing him maybe 15 times over more than a decade, including his last tour in support of his expansive 2019 release The Saint of Lost Causes.

In what is sure to be one of the more intense releases of 2021, Steve Earle released an album covering his son’s songs on Jan. 4, which would have been Justin Townes Earle’s 39th birthday. The album, simply titled J.T., also includes one Steve Earle original, a heartfelt farewell to his son, and all proceeds will go to Justin’s 3-year-old daughter Etta St. James Earle.

Listening to J.T. is a trip for anyone familiar with the younger Earle’s music, and the album is a fine showcase of how Justin Townes Earle’s skills grew over the dozen or so years from which the songs are drawn. Steve Earle is, of course, Americana royalty, a legendary rabble rouser whose albums are typically laced with topical politics.

His son, on the other hand, constantly looked inward on songs that veered from comical to self-lacerating. Only on The Saint of Lost Causes did the younger Earle start to look more outward, addressing issues ranging from pollution in Appalachia to the economic demise of Flint, Michigan,

Steve Earle and his son Justin Townes Earle.

5 SONGS TO GET TO KNOW JUSTIN TOWNES EARLE

Clarin Joy

COURTESY OF STEVE EARLE

 “Harlem River Blues”  “Champagne Corolla”  “They Killed John Henry”  “Am I That Lonely Tonight?”  “Lone Pine Hill”

to police violence — albeit doing it in a way that fit right in with his writing style, full of memorable character sketches and sly asides.

Steve Earle’s choices on J.T. lean hard on his son’s first album, The Good Life, and that’s not a bad decision; “Ain’t Glad I’m Leaving” and “Lone Pine Hill” in particular are two of Justin Townes Earle’s best songs. Steve Earle’s band the Dukes does fine work throughout, and Steve Earle’s versions of most of the songs are sparser than his son’s. Overall, J.T. is more of a straight “country” album than anything Justin Townes Earle ever released. The son seemed to be the more sonically adventurous of the two, for sure.

In Steve Earle’s liner notes for J.T., he recounts how his son bounced between his parents’ houses after they split, and how Nirvana’s unplugged cover of Leadbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” turned his son on to the old-time blues. Later, Justin followed his dad to Chicago, where Steve was teaching at the Old Town School of Folk Music, and within a few weeks Justin went from taking guitar classes to teaching them, so adept was he at fingerpicking an acoustic.

The father and son crossed paths often on the road; both are hardcore touring musicians of the highest order.

“Ironically,” Steve writes, “we both sat out the last summer of his life in Tennessee, grounded by the pandemic, unable to escape to the only place either one of us ever felt at home. The Highway.”

“For better or worse, right or wrong, I loved Justin Townes Earle more than anything else on this earth,” Steve Earle concludes his liner notes. “That being said, I made this record, like every other record I’ve ever made … for me. It was the only way I knew to say goodbye.” n

HIRE A LOCAL ARTISTS MAKE OUR COMMUNITY AND LIVES BETTER.

Grace June

30 INLANDER JANUARY 7, 2021

Ifong Chen

Visit spokanearts.org/artists to find a full roster of working musicians, designers, visual artists, photographers and more for all your special projects, virtual lessons and unique creative needs.

MORE THAN

DISCOVER MORE AT BECU.ORG

Federally insured by NCUA JANUARY 7, 2021 INLANDER 31

TRIVIA UM, DAVID!

Even though it took several seasons before becoming mustwatch TV, Schitt’s Creek managed to create its cult-like fan base in pretty short order. People obsess over every Moira wig, every Alexis story about her dates with Stavros, every instance of David rolling his eyes. Naturally, like Harry Potter and The Office before, Schitt’s Creek has now inspired trivia games for people to test their knowledge of the happy little Canadian town and its inhabitants, and the Spokane County Library System is getting in on it with an online game of all things related to the Rose family on Tuesday. So remind yourself who Patrick’s landlord was, and do some research into Twyla’s menu at Cafe Tropical before you play. Be sure to preregister as well.

— DAN NAILEN Online Trivia: Schitt’s Creek • Tue, Jan. 12 from 6:30-7:30 pm • Free • Register at scld.evanced.info/signup/calendar

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Submit events online at Inlander.com/getlisted or email relevant details to getlisted@inlander.com. We need the details one week prior to our publication date.

32 INLANDER JANUARY 7, 2021

MUSIC AUSPICIOUS OPENING

North Idaho is now home to the new Music Conservatory of Coeur d’Alene, which is great news for music lovers and students in the region, and they’re hosting an open house Thursday to help introduce themselves to the community. And what a house it is — the school is setting up shop at the historic Hamilton House, built in 1908 and full of large rooms that are perfect for music. Several jazz and classical musicians have lived, practiced or played at Hamilton House over the years, and now it will help connect the region’s music students with mentors, teachers and collaborators from its halls. Whether you’re considering classes for yourself or a loved one, or just interested in supporting the new organization, think about dropping by and meeting some of the teachers and, surely, hearing some lovely music as well.

— DAN NAILEN Music Conservatory of Coeur d’Alene Open House • Thu, Jan. 7 from 3-6 pm • Free • 627 N. Government Way, Coeur d’Alene • cdaconservatory.org

WORDS GIVING VOICE

In a year where pleasures were few and far between, Auntie’s and its roster of online author events has been a bastion for all us word nerds. This weekend offers a showcase for a trio of regional writers, including Seattle author Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, who’s continuing the virtual tour for her acclaimed new novel, The Freezer Door. It’s a metatextual work that explores the gentrification of her home city, as well as the shifting nature of queer identity and the uncertain future of the planet. Also reading is journalist and essayist Kristen Millares Young, whose debut novel, Subduction, follows a Latinx anthropologist who escapes to a Native American whaling village after her marriage falls apart. The online-only reading will also feature a special appearance from local poet and Inlander contributor Elissa Ball. The event is free, but online registration is required.

— NATHAN WEINBENDER Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Kristen Millares Young and Elissa Ball • Sat, Jan. 9 at 7 pm • Free • Register at auntiesbooks.com

ARTS ALL ABOUT PERSPECTIVE

Whether you’re a seasoned artist with a full portfolio or a hobbyist who wants your doodles to have a little more visual depth, perspective — that is, the size of and spatial relationship between objects or figures within your canvas — is one of the most important tools in your arsenal, and one that you can always get better at wielding. Local artist and muralist Tom Quinn, known for his dreamy and satirical style, will be hosting a series of online classes for Spokane Art School on Wednesdays throughout January and February that focus specifically on the importance of perspective. His lessons start with the basics and then increase in complexity. If you’re hoping to bring some expert depth of field to your paintings or drawings, look no further. Quinn is also offering classes in acrylic painting and art history this winter.

— NATHAN WEINBENDER Perspective Drawing with Tom Quinn • Jan. 13, 20 & 27 and Feb. 3, 10 & 17 at 10 am • $120 • spokaneartschool.net

OUTDOORS COCOA CRUISE

Sip on a steaming cup of decadent hot cocoa as you take in the peaceful winter sights and sounds of Lake Coeur d’Alene during this new seasonal excursion. Each Friday through March, families can take a midday, 90-minute jaunt (two boarding times are offered each week) around the lake while enjoying an all-ages hot cocoa bar that has spiked beverages for those of age and who wish to add a little oomph to the experience. Guests are encouraged to wear a face mask while on board, and capacity for each cruise is limited for social distancing; you’ll also get a temp check before boarding. Bundle up, hit the water and stay cozy from the inside out.

— CHEY SCOTT Hot Cocoa Cruises • Jan. 8-March 26; Fridays at 12:30 and 2:30 pm • All ages • $11.50-$16.50 • Coeur d’Alene Resort • 115 S. Second St. • cdacruises.com/hot-cocoa-cruise

JANUARY 7, 2021 INLANDER 33

girl at the pisshole? Trying to skip rocks.lol.i throw like a girl THE FLAG GIFTERS Thank you for the Italian flag that you left on my porch. I will fly it proudly! Each flag that I fly has a personal significance. I hope to tell you about it someday. I’m glad that I can bring you joy!

CHEERS

I SAW YOU THE LAST FIVE YEARS I saw you every day for the Last 5 Years. I saw you today all day and night I saw you crying in the shed all alone I saw you holding our babies in your arms I saw you the most beautiful woman in the world I saw you as genuine and amazing and true I saw you as perfect I saw you as my wife I I saw you with me for my whole entire life I saw you a healthy old woman holding my hand I saw you never leaving me not even chance but you did it really my life I don’t know how to fix it know if I could but I saw you one way and now I see you another but I still have this great love for you and so I’m confused I’m sad and I don’t know what to do sometimes I see you now and it brightens my day I still work through the things I feel that bring me down I see that you’re broken with the way things have gone I see you in a brightens my day so I can’t stay away so God help me God help me what’s the things I can change and I love you my wife nickname Kandy its Dave?

RE: MIRROR, MIRROR While quietly yearning for acknowledgement, boisterous fools receive attention. Disappointed with my reflection, I too, tend to wander. Hey self, if you see myself, tell her I’m looking for her.

I SAW YOU THROWINROCKS Sorry bout delayed response. But, after all these years... someone saw me?!? Let’s make sure. Was this

SOUND OFF

CHAN’S BISTRO MANAGER Overheard manager (maybe owner) have the most pleasant, encouraging and kind conversation with employee. Giving her the holiday weekend off after a tentative request. Will continue coming to all the places like this that treat workers with the gratitude we all deserve.

reality your type finds solace in.

BLESS YOU, FIRST RESPONDERS While I was writhing in excruciating pain (hip joint) on our living room floor Monday morning, December 14, my wife phoned 9-1-1. The Valley Fire Department EMTs arrived in quick time, soon followed by the ambulance company and their EMTs. I was

“

example: child rape in the 3rd degree, harassment with threat to kill, assault in the form of strangulation domestic violence) were the people who by the courts discretion were able to post bond and get released. By comparison, those who could not bond out were accused of crimes which did not involve other people getting hurt.

Now, call me crazy but is this not a little

I was blessed by the professional care I received... you people are my heroes.

STUCK Thank you so much to the young couple who helped push my car out of the middle of the intersection near San Sucha during the snow storm on Wednesday. Just minutes before, I received devastating news about my dad who has been in critical care in the ICU with covid. I cried and cried after you helped push me out; feeling so thankful for such human kindness at that moment.

Thank you. <3 <3 <3

taken to Sacred Heart emergency in an ambulance, the pain was treated, and I was able to return home the same day. I was blessed by the professional care I received from everyone involved in the whole episode. Didn’t get any of your names, but you people are my heroes. THANK YOU!

GNOME ON A ROCK To whomever painted the adorable gnome on a rock that I found in my neighborhood Little Free Library, you made my day. It’s just nice to know another human shares my affinity for gnome culture.

THANKS PARKS AND REC! Thanks Josh and Spokane Parks and Rec for fun virtual games of trivia and bingo! My family appreciates your creativity in providing low/nocost safe entertainment.

CLEAR YOUR SIDEWALKS Shame on the City of Spokane Valley for not enforcing their sidewalk clearing ordinance and shame on all the people who aren’t clearing it on their own. You have an obligation to clear your sidewalks! In some places it’s impossible to traverse. I was just watched a man in a wheelchair weaving through traffic, literally through the middle of the intersection because he couldn’t use the sidewalks. That’s a really good look for the city...

BUYER BEWARE A big thank you to all the businesses that advertise their support for Donald Trump, Cathy M-R, and Loren Culp!

You save me time from spending my money in your establishment. You may think that avoiding a business for political reasons is nonsense, but as most reasonable people know, the three aforementioned stooges are not just bad politicians, they’re terrible people. I hope your business flounders so that you may accept government aid to remain operational — you know, welfare. I know the conservatives despise that word, so call it what you will. Or, blame Jay Inslee...or retreat to whatever pseudo-

2020 WHINERS Contrary to popular sentiment, 2020 hasn’t been a bad year. Just the opposite! One of the many lessons taught is that the way we did some things was dumb.

For example, does it make sense to have 100,000 fans sitting on top of one another at a sporting event? It actually doesn’t make sense even without “the virus.” This flu and cold season, it’s been nice to not have people coughing, sneezing, and gagging on one another and partly because of that, our flu season is still looking mild.

One of the other lessons taught in the local area is that some costs are too high. Some restaurant owners have been whining that

JEERS

1. Visit Inlander.com/isawyou by 3 pm Monday. 2. Pick a category (I Saw You, You Saw Me, Cheers or Jeers). 3.

Provide basic info: your name and email (so we know you’re real). 4. To connect via I Saw You, provide a non-identifying email to be included with your submission — like “petals327@yahoo.com,” not “j.smith@comcast.net.”

34 INLANDER JANUARY 7, 2021

they can’t stay in business due to revenue loss. However, fast food and economical establishments are doing great! I wonder what lesson that might impart? Perhaps the value of the restaurant to the consumer was overrated to begin with. If you’re going to ignore the fact that people in the local area are struggling and can’t afford your food, perhaps you should look at your prices

because they aren’t going to “wander” in.

By the way, where are any good pasta/ spaghetti places? The ones I see in this city are those that charge $16.95 or more for plates of garbage. When economic times are down, it’s time to adjust. Now where is that pint of “local” draft ale for $6.50?

Never mind. I found it. It’s in a six-pack at the grocery store for $8.99. It actually isn’t “local,” but it’s from close by and tastes better anyhow.

CHASING THE DREAM Jeers to our new Spokane Valley representative who wants to turn eastern Washington into a new conservative paradise. You are in office to serve the people of Spokane Valley, not promote political ideals. Any funding of this idea of a new state should come from its supporters, not the citizens of Spokane Valley or anywhere else. I certainly do not oppose new ideas introduced into government but if that is going to be your focus, resign your position with the state you oppose and run your campaign for the new one.

There would not be a medical community the scale of what eastern Washington has today without our western influence. You should go visit one of our hospitals to influence the staff and patients that they really are making too much of all this covid stuff.

JAIL ROSTER As i was browsing through names on the jail inmate roster tonight i noticed that many names had a “no bail” status while only a few were bondable... yet of the accused the inmates who were charged with crimes against people (for

”

bit (or completely) backwards? If anyone should be refused bail, it is those that rape, kill, attempt to kill, and especially those who are accused of abusing and molesting children!!! The justice system is in place not only to provide justice to those who are accused! It needs to reflect our values and priorities: keeping the masses safe from harm. Punishing those who bend the rules of the road or those who steal (as long as it doesn’t involve violence) should be second to KEEPING US SAFE. If i were any dumber i might interpret this pattern (giving bail to those who present a higher risk of harm) as an act of terrorism (delivered by publicly appointed judges?) n

THIS WEEK'S ANSWERS P A R M A

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L M A C E A S A N A T R E W H E R A S E T P Z E V E S O C R K O B I T O R S H U N S N O N O T

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NOTE: I Saw You/Cheers & Jeers is for adults 18 or older. The Inlander reserves the right to edit or reject any posting at any time at its sole discretion and assumes no responsibility for the content.

CONSUMERS

Keep My Cannabis Green This year, I’ll be choosing pesticide-free products as much as possible

BY WILL MAUPIN

I Assume this: You are what you smoke.

t’s New Year’s resolution time, and I’ve decided on what I’ll be cutting out of my cannabis consumption in 2021.

Cannabis may come from the earth, but the way it’s grown for commercial use is far from natural. Temperature-controlled greenhouses with advanced lighting and irrigation systems help producers grow enough to meet demand and turn a profit. In many cases, they use pesticides to help with the process as well. ...continued on next page

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JANUARY 7, 2021 INLANDER 35

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“Look, 2020, I just think I should start seeing other years.”

“All the pesticides that the [Liquor and Cannabis Board] has approved are pesticides that are safe for agriculture.

They’re pesticides you can eat. But before cannabis, the only agriculture that was being smoked was tobacco.”

On the other hand, though, as of 2020, Washington was the only state with a legal cannabis market that does not require growers to test their products for pesticides. (Testing is required for medical marijuana, however, and the Liquor and Cannabis Board is considering expanding the requirement to include all cannabis.)

As of now, it’s up to individual producers to test their products. Some don’t, but many do, and any budtender can lead you to products that have been tested to be pesticide-free.

For many consumers, it’s important to know what they’re consuming. Especially with pesticides on cannabis, because we still don’t know much about how they impact our bodies.

“All the pesticides that the [Liquor and Cannabis Board] has approved are pesticides that are safe for agriculture. They’re pesticides you can eat. But before cannabis, the only agriculture that was being smoked was tobacco,” Justin Hutcherson from Cinder tells the Inlander.

Studies on what happens to pesticides when they undergo combustion are scarce. What happens to those chemicals when you spark a joint? As is the case with so much about cannabis, the scientific community is still in the process of figuring it out.

LETTERS A 2013 study published in Send comments to the Journal of Toxicology looked editor@inlander.com. at the likelihood of pesticide residue on cannabis making its way into the body of the cannabis user. It found that “chemical residues present on cannabis will directly transfer into the mainstream smoke and ultimately the end user.”

So, we know pesticide residues will follow the smoke into our lungs, but that’s about it for now. Which is why in 2021 I’m going to be purchasing pesticide-free whenever possible. n

36 INLANDER JANUARY 7, 2021

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NOTE TO READERS Be aware of the differences in the law between Idaho and Washington. It is illegal to possess, sell or transport cannabis in the State of Idaho.

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Be glad your friends are not in charge of airplane maintenance. It’s annoying when a nonstop flight makes an unscheduled stop — especially when it involves going down in flames in a cornfield.

We’re given training in how to read, write, and drive, and if you go on YouTube, somebody will teach you how to do magic tricks with your blender. Only in our romantic relationships are we expected to be untrained geniuses. Unfortunately, this expectation pairs poorly with therapist Albert Ellis’ realism on what it means to be a person (in language he suggested to a client): “I’m a human, fallible being who screwed up and may screw up in the future because (of) my fallibility.”

So, though there’s a tendency to see therapy (for individuals or couples) as something you do only when you’re broken, it shouldn’t be that way. It can be a tuneup to help a good relationship be even better. For example, when I do relationship mediations for couples, I help them see each other’s sometimes conflicting wants — he wants this/she wants that — not as threats but as mere facts to manage (with love and respect). You can find your partner’s request unreasonable or even crazy, but if it’s not a big deal for you to come through, maybe you do it simply because you love them and want them to feel good. (If it is a big deal, you can at least tell them lovingly why you wish you could but you can’t.)

A relationships researcher I respect, psychologist John Gottman, gives weekend workshops for couples that can be attended online (gottman.com). Couples on a budget could just get Gottman’s book, “The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work,” out of the library and read and discuss a section a week. Gottman’s workshop or book would also be a great wedding present. We find wedding vows romantic, but we tend not to consider that “till death do us part!” would have been a great T-shirt slogan for enemy soldiers trying to off each other in the Hundred Years’ War.

AMY ALKON

CUJO’S DINER

I live in California, where there’s outdoor dining. My husband and I disagree about bringing our dog to restaurants. Our pooch has to sit under the table, and I think it’s really dirty and unkind to put him there. My husband thinks we should bring him. What do you think? —Concerned Dogs long to please us, which is why they always give us such wonderful little presents: “Wow, Toto, headless dead bird? Oh, good, because a diamond tennis bracelet would be super boring.”

By human cleanliness standards, dogs are seriously disgusting. The “Merry Corpsemas!” gifts on the duvet and the love some breeds have for rolling around in the mud (immediately after you spend $75 at the groomer) aren’t the half of it.

Dogs live to sniff poo; they’ll snub their water bowl to drink out of the toilet; and they have the lovely habit of using your Persian rug for toilet paper — especially when you’ve got company over for a chi-chi cocktail party.

In other words, any minor foot dirt under a restaurant table is unlikely to be a problem for your dog. All that’s likely to be “really dirty” are the looks you might get from patrons with allergies or dog-in-dinery issues. From your dog’s perspective, it’ll be simply awesome to be at your feet.

Anthrozoologist John W.S. Bradshaw explains that dogs co-evolved with humans, starting between 15,000 to 25,000 years ago, per archeological estimates.

Over all those doggie-human generations ever since, dogs have been bred to find human contact extremely rewarding. Bradshaw and his colleagues discovered that some dogs — Labs and border collies, for example — suffer intense “separation distress” when they’re apart from their human. “They find it difficult to cope without us,” writes Bradshaw. “Since we humans have programmed this vulnerability, it’s our responsibility to ensure that our dogs do not suffer as a result.”

As I see it, we’re cruel to exclude dogs from so many areas of our lives. Take airline travel. Airlines require dogs over 20 pounds — no matter how well-behaved — to be put in a cage and stowed with the luggage in the hold of the plane. The airlines could easily adopt a more compassionate policy: Instead, give the cage space to that baby who’s sure to scream all the way from Dallas to St. Louis, trashing the mental health of everybody from 1A to 32E. n

©2021, Amy Alkon, all rights reserved. • Got a problem? Write Amy Alkon, 171 Pier Ave, #280, Santa Monica, CA 90405 or email AdviceAmy@aol.com (www.advicegoddess.com)

38 INLANDER JANUARY 7, 2021

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