Last Days

MONDAY, JANUARY 26 This week of presidential tongue-lashings,
would-be sacrificial killings, and the glorious intersection of
celebrity look-alikes and public urination kicks off with the type of
bad financial news that drives sane men to leap to their deaths
from office windows and not-so-sane men to massacre their families
before killing themselves. Specifically, today brought word of the
layoffs of more than 60,000 U.S. workers, including 8,000 from
Sprint Nextel, 20,000 from Pfizer, 7,000 from Home
Depot, and 20,000 from construction-equipment manufacturer
Caterpillar. The slaughter will continue tomorrow, with the
announcement of another 11,500 job cuts, including 3,500 from glass and
ceramics maker Corning Inc. and 1,500 from Target. The
Pacific Northwest will be particularly hard-hit, with the week bringing
the layoffs of an additional 5,500 people at Boeing and 6,700
people at Starbucks. “In the meantime,” ABC reports, “a growing
number of Americans are collecting unemployment and desperately
searching for new jobs…. Beyond that, fear of layoffs is taking its
own toll on the economy. Some workers who still draw a weekly paycheck
are cutting back on their spending for fear of losing their job down
the road. While they might be saving for that rainy day, their lack of
spending is driving the country deeper into a recession and putting
their own jobs in jeopardy.” In other news, deep breaths help,
as does the prospect of a president who can address the current crisis
in complete sentences. “As with the millions of jobs lost in 2008,
these are working men and women whose families have been disrupted and
whose dreams have been put on hold,” said Barack Obama today. “We owe
it to each of them and to every single American to act with a sense of
urgency and common purpose.” The means of such action: a stimulus plan
the president says “will put millions of Americans to work.”

TUESDAY, JANUARY 27 In much better news: The week continues with
some grade-A politicking in Washington State, where today in Olympia,
Senator Ed Murray and Representative Jamie Pedersen introduced a measure that would secure “everything but [the word]
marriage” for the state’s same-sex couples. As the Associated Press
reports, the new measure would “offer same-sex couples all the
rights and benefits given to heterosexual married couples,” making
changes to all remaining areas of state law where currently only
married couples are addressed, and adding same-sex domestic partners to
state statutes ranging from labor and employment to pensions and other
public-employee benefits. “Although we view this as an improvement that
provides real and concrete protections to same-sex partners, it’s an
inadequate substitute for marriage,” said Pedersen. “Our hope is
that the continuing success of this legislation helps people understand
what marriage is, and that it gets them more comfortable with treating
all families with equality, dignity, and respect.” Props to Pedersen
and Murray for waging the messy and realistic battles needed to Fight
the Good Fight, as well as for accompanying today’s “everything but
marriage” measure with Murray’s
to-be-filed-until-it-passes-whenever-that-may-be measure for full-on
same-sex marriage rights. (It never hurts to ask.) Onward.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 28 Today brings a tabloid-worthy saga from the
wilds of the Pacific Northwest, where a 31-year-old Seattle man stands
accused of attempting to ritually sacrifice his girlfriend.
Details come from the Associated Press, which identifies the would-be
sacrificer as Oumar Lam, who prosecutors say attacked his
26-year-old live-in girlfriend in front of a candlelit altar, allegedly
attempting to suffocate her with a pillowcase before cutting her
throat, chest, and back with a knife while “yelling in an unidentified
language.” Thankfully, the woman was able to call 911, telling police
she feared her boyfriend “was trying to kill her as part of a
sacrifice.” The woman underwent emergency surgery at Harborview and is
expected to survive, while Lam was today charged with first-degree
assault.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 29 The week continues with the president’s
dramatic tongue-lashing of Wall Street, as Obama publicly blasted
the financial sector for rewarding itself with more than $18 billion in
bonuses while successfully begging taxpayers for a bailout. “There will
be time for them to make profits, and there will be time for them to
get bonuses,” said the prez, vowing to make government support for the
industry subject to strict conditions on pay and other perks. “Now’s
not that time.”

••Speaking of former Illinois politicians: Today also
brought the long-awaited impeachment of Rod Blagojevich, with the Illinois State Senate voting unanimously to oust the governor
from office over his abuses of power and barring him from holding any
office in the state in the future.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 30 Nothing happened today, unless you count
Hot Tipper Louis‘s report of walking this evening toward the
intersection of Bellevue Avenue and Olive Way on Seattle’s Capitol
Hill, where he was confronted by the sight of a woman who looked
exactly like Whitney Houston urinating in the street. Dear Hot
Tipper Louis: Thank you for noticing and sharing. Dear Whitney Houston:
Stop urinating in our streets.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 31 The week continues with a thorough dissing of
the GOP by Sarah Palin, who turned down an invitation to this
weekend’s annual winter retreat of Republican members of
Congress (where she’d been invited to give “a morale-building
speech”) by claiming “pressing state business” required her to stay in
Alaska. Lucky for all, the maverick Palin whinnied and kicked through
all that state business in time to make tonight’s Alfalfa Dinner in
Washington, D.C., described by Reuters as a high-society,
“closed-door roast of the city’s political and business elite,” which
also held in its audience President Barack Obama. Bravo to Sarah Palin,
whom Charles Mudede rightly christened “The American Insect Woman” on
Slog, The Stranger‘s blog: “Pretty Palin wants to be where the
lights are bright and the champagne is flowing, not where the lights
are out and a bunch of sore losers are licking their wounds in the
dark.”

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 1 The week ends with the final night of the
Twilight Exit, the sweet and scraggly Central District
bar-with-food that tonight hosted its last hurrah at its long-standing
blue-painted home at Madison Street and 22nd Avenue. And while
tonight’s death will be followed by a near-immediate resurrection of
the Twilight at Cherry Street and 25th Avenue, Last Days would
nevertheless like to commemorate a funky couple of rooms that housed an
unusually rich collection of moments in our godforsaken life, including
countless boozy gatherings before the wall-sized mural of a Southern
California sunset, numerous karaoke performances of Bobby Goldsboro’s
cancer ballad “Honey” (sorry), some drunken
post-Brokeback-Mountain-at-Central-Cinema sobbing (there is
nothing sadder than a gay man’s wife), and one unforgettable afternoon
when, originally scheduled to meet three friends, we instead got to
tell two friends that the third friend had died. (RIP, Sean Ryan, and
best of luck, new Twilight.)

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