There is a timeless myth synonymous with Trickster. Trickster goes by many names. The native peoples of America sometimes called him Raven or Coyote. Coyote was a wily drifter, a keen imitator. He was sometimes referred to as "the one without a way." There are many stories about his aimless wandering and the trouble it often landed him in. But a being without the confines of instinct is free to adapt, a mimic with an endless repertoire. He can present the world with the will to learn, to desire.

One such story finds Coyote wandering through the forest, where he comes across a plant that informs him - in much cruder terms than these - that it is, indeed, a "natural diarrhetic." Coyote, innate with stupidity at times, consumes the plant and immediately begins to defecate. In fact, he produces such a pile of feces he is forced to climb a tree. Uneasy up so high, he falls into the pile and is blinded by his own excrement. He then stumbles blindly from tree to tree, asking directions until he reaches the river and washes himself clean.

It's a story I often think about these days as I pass piles of dog shit, vomit stains, cigarette butts, rubbers, and used tampons on Downtown Olympia's sidewalks. Today's a particularly good day. On my morning walk, all six blocks of it, I see three trails of shit-smeared footsteps.

Last week Matt Driscoll, a fine and worthy editor who sometimes finds himself wandering aimlessly through the empty evening streets of Tacoma with his head stuck in a honeypot like some kind of comic Dadaist Pooh bear, somehow got it mixed up that I was an insider in downtown Olympia.

"You can get the inside scoop on what's going on down there. You're right in the heart of the city!" he exclaimed. "And who cares anyway? Powerball's going to be here January 31! I'll hit that first big ticket, and then it's zip zam boom! Adios, Suckers!"

At this point I realize the pressure of being a big city editor in a news-hungry Mecca such as ours has gotten to Driscoll. He's finally cracked, and I quietly slip out the door, leaving Matt to wring his hands with white-knuckled lust.

"Walk me through a typical day!" he shrieks in the distance, a momentary lapse of sanity breaking through.

An average day

Your day begins. You desire nothing but a hot shower and coffee. Completing the first, you head toward downtown for the second, and the dread of the office looms heavy.

You're surrounded by Olympia, or "Hoquiam 3000" as the locals may or may not have taken to calling it. Like many capital cities, Olympia is a tourist destination. With Legislature coming into season, it's especially pertinent right now. It's a short session year in a busted economy, and that means less time for locals to hustle revenue out of the pockets of the temporary government influx. It can be a make or break time for many businesses that rely on those dollars to stay open the rest of the year.

You're looking for coffee, and you choose something like Ghostface Killah's "Mighty Healthy" as a theme song for the walk. By the time you've gotten down to the coffee shop you've passed enough rotten and filthy things stewing on the sidewalk to nearly lose all hope - along with your appetite.

If you smoke cigarettes, you could've bummed half a pack in those six blocks, and given away $10 in pocket change.

You do this all with your headphones on. Music is your lone, sweet respite to the tired and gruesome ritual of trying to run a business in Olympia.

You pop into Vita, wait in line, glance at the flyers, and then - if you're like me - you head over to your cold little concrete workspace in the back of a bookstore on Fourth Avenue, clutching your fancy French-press coffee. You look at the stacks of records, wires, papers, old flyers, new flyers, books, zines, gizmos, and gadgets - a swirling mad workspace for some kind of troubled wizard - and you realize: This is my life.

You've become accustomed to life in the alley behind where you work, where you spend your days. The tireless parade of winos and scumbags. The rocks to windows. The feral yells. Sweeping cat litter into puddles of urine that have seeped into your workspace.

You deal with the nervous, pacing, bug-eyed zombies throwing up Pepto-Bismol in the gutter behind the recently re-painted decorative "art" bench - right before they hit the pipe in broad daylight, a mocking and sad tribute to the absolute failure of something, whether it's vision, society, or self-esteem. You come out and tell them to knock it off, pack it up and take it somewhere else, carefully avoiding a hundred puddles of spit and ripped open cigarette butts. They don't like your attitude, of course. Threats fly. Somebody gets shoved to the ground. Someone else calls the cops, but by the time they get there everything has dissipated. The fiend has disappeared, along with the cops' willingness to do anything about it. You rant about the sidewalk ordinance, and the cops shrug, telling you their hands are tied.

This, my friend, is the arena of Coyote, of Raven. Where there is a lack, a necessity, there is Coyote. It is desire, inspiration, adaptability. Was it not Raven who went into heaven to steal fire to bring light to mankind?

There is versatility in Coyote's independence from a "way." It provides limitless possibility, kind of like Downtown Olympia. It just requires a little creative thinking.

Thankfully, this is Olympia, where we seem to be pretty good at that sort of thing. Or at least talking like we are.

Up or down

There are only two directions. Up or down. Maintaining any notion of the status quo right now is a death sentence for our fair city. Failed agenda after greedy, control freak-like failed agenda is costing the city dearly. It has definitely cost some Council members their jobs.

We have a homeless population on the rise, compounded with dwindling services for them. We have an unemployed populace on the increase, no matter what the numbers say in The Olympian. There's an increasing meth problem creeping into our city from outlying rural counties where it's easy to cook.

None of that is hard to see. Just come downtown and hang out for a while.

Don't get me wrong, I like seeing dirtballs hanging around. In Oly we know many of the downtrodden by name. There's still a heavy prevailing sentiment at the loss of Francisco "Cisco" Roche last month. He may have been an ex-boxer, a punch-drunk water head Cuban exile who was no angel by any stretch of the imagination, but he was ours, dammit.

The problem, however, is becoming more than the community can bear. It's time for the utopian ideological dry-humping to stop and time for some action to be taken. It may sound heartless to some, but this is something many of us in Olympia think about day in and day out - because we choose to live down here, to work down here. We are forced to confront it on a daily basis just by going to work.

If we like to tout ourselves as a progressive, DIY-ethos inhabiting front-runner, then Olympia should be able to provide something better than a few Honey Buckets behind the shelter for the homeless to piss in while a good chunk of them get drunk in the streets and survive off the thankless efforts of EGYHOP (Emma Goldman Youth Homeless Outreach Project), shouldn't we? And if we can't do better, maybe we should petition City Council to pass the full sidewalk ordinance so cops can start busting some chops with their shiny nightsticks.

Something? Anyone?

After all, how else can we possibly attract enough business downtown to fund the mythical "Green Machine," the Olympia Parking and Business Improvement Area's magical, thirty-something thousand dollar, street-cleaning Zamboni - specifically made to cruise the sidewalks sucking up fresh piles of dog shit, used condoms, drug paraphernalia, and everything else that's come to litter our downtown existence. These days the Green Machine, a top priority just a few years ago, sits idle in storage while the dog shit festers - not enough money in the city budget to pay the guy who drives it.

Coyote is everywhere, challenging us, playing games and making mischief. And it may not be a bad thing as long as we can be inspired to do the right thing.

Otherwise, we just keep stepping in shit.