WCS 68: A rainy-day drink, away from LA

w/: Trader Joe’s food deserts + Tacoma murders mystery

A brief fire message before beverage service begins

Weird time to be away, but LA sure stays on my brain.

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When she wouldn’t let me guzzle booze like the alcoholic I sometimes resemble is when I got my first inkling about the Nebraska woman.

Stephanie Valencia, 33, is originally from Colorado. To me, she’s always going to be that woman from Nebraska; so much of what brought her to this Powellhurst moment—re-making an 11:30 am whiskey and coffee on a gray, shitty football Sunday—played out in The Cornhusker State.

“I know how to make an Irish coffee.” Stephanie said, pouring out the distasteful concoction I’d insisted upon. “I watched a video.”

Maybe it was the autodidact thing that made me see her with quick clarity. It certainly wasn’t Stephanie’s politics, which within minutes I learned leaned Libertarian.

A law-and-order Libertarian, tending bar halfway to Gresham. Travel broadens the mind, for real.

New York has almost two-and-a-half times Washington’s population, but had 5,638 “rough sleepers”—folks crashing out in the weather, in parks and doorways and by the sides of roads—compared to Washington’s 16,222 rough sleepers on a 2024 night.

Back when the Nebraska woman was just a girl from Greater Denver, her mother left the family’s addicted father and moved Stephanie and her sister to rural Nebraska. There she lost control of her own substance abuse habit. Stephanie and her sister were absorbed into the state childcare system. Bad things predictably happened, but great stuff happened in The Cornhusker State, too.

In the middle of nowhere Stephanie became a mother, for example.

While she’s revising your Irish coffee and putting lime in your Pacificos, Stephanie gives kindness and savvy. She carries her pain in her narrow shoulders. And the Nebraska woman’s enormous eyes give rivers of sadness, until the topic turns to writing. Those major orbs then go electric, and slight, big-sister Stephanie does not need to verbalize how writing has saved her.

Just add words and she blossoms.

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Moving around Nebraska was the family’s only constant. Young Stephanie’s way with words helped make friends at new schools and heal her hurt at home. In writing she could put pen to paper and contemplate another fragment of herself—to paraphrase the Nebraska woman’s writing—that was shattering into a million pieces.

When she starts talking about the written word she’s not the weekend bartender in a grungy Southeast Portland dive. The way Stephanie’s eyes light up when her tongue’s untied? You can see full-on the child who survived. She will make a literary salon of the dive, if left to her own devices.

Now, for the 10 West Coast neighborhood narratives that grabbed me most this week:

10 Trader Joe’s crucial role in LA food deserts