What Sowell Bay Knows
A review of Remarkably Bright Creatures — young adult homelessness and a non-professional approach to resolving crises.
On Cameron, an octopus, and the room to become an acting being
Cameron Cassmore is, when we first meet him, a hungover thirty-year-old in the Central Valley of California, sleeping on his friend Brad’s couch, fired from another job. In any American city now, he would be one more young adult drifting through a service system that does not know what to do with him.
Shelby Van Pelt’s novel — and the new Netflix film — is the story of what one of them might find if he found the right town. It is also a story about who actually does the work for him: not case managers or therapists, but the aquarium that needed someone to mop floors, the paddle-shop owner who talked with him because he wandered in, the older man behind a counter who lived a kind life, and the giant Pacific octopus who saw the connection before anyone else did.
The picnic is not what the story was about. The picnic is what the story was for. Sowell Bay was Cameron’s housing program and his behavioral health program and his vocational training and his clinical intervention.
There Aren’t Enough Speed Bumps
If you have lived in Seattle long enough, you have felt it: the slow attrition of adult responsibility, overwhelmed by what I have come to call Managed Care.
On the Constellation That Replaced Judgment
What happens when reasonable rules, applied one at a time, quietly dismantle the everyday trust that lets a person on the spot do the right thing
The speed bump is the perfect physical form of the constellation. It does not ask you to slow down; it makes you slow down. It does not trust you; it replaces you. And once a road has enough of them, drivers find another road---at which point the speed bump crews fire up their blacktop machines and get to work again.
Share your Reflections, your Story, in Your Voice
Write in your language. Share your voice with the community — in whatever language you think and feel most naturally in.
The Watershed and the Pipe
On the difference between community health and the industrialization of distress. What happens when we replace the village with a claims system.
Every government function that displaces a civil society function makes the civil society function harder to recover later.
The Formation Wage
What If We Paid Parents Instead of Paying to Replace Them?
I’ve been building furniture for a quarter century. When you work with wood long enough, you stop treating materials as obstacles and start listening to what they want to become. A piece of walnut with a twist in the grain isn’t defective—it’s an invitation to build something that only that particular board could have become.
I’ve also spent thirty years working with families—youth homelessness, foster care, refugee resettlement, behavioral health—and I’ve come to believe the same principle applies to people. The system sees deficits: a young parent without a diploma, a housing record, a work history. But I see a person in the first years of a generational role, doing the hardest cognitive and emotional work they’ll ever do, with no support structure that treats that work as work.
Here’s what I mean. A 22-year-old parent shows up at a family shelter with a toddler. Her own brain is still developing (neuroscience now tells us the prefrontal cortex doesn’t fully mature until the mid-20s). She is simultaneously learning to regulate her own nervous system and to co-regulate a child’s. She’s forming the attachment patterns that will echo through the next two generations. She is, by any honest accounting, doing more complex human work than most salaried professionals—and the system’s response is to treat her as a problem to be processed.
So here are these two open windows. And what does the system do? A resume workshop. Job placement. Childcare so she can earn. As though the answer to a generation-shaping period of formation is a faster conveyor belt into the economy. The Formation Wage says: pay her for what she is already doing. The most productive thing a young parent can do during the first 1,000 days is be present, attuned, and supported. Not hustling. Present.
Le Guin wrote that without the skills of imagination, our lives get made up for us by other people. We’ve let the system imagine for these families—and the system imagines job readiness, case compliance, and exit metrics. The Formation Wage re-imagines the first years of parenting as civic infrastructure: the foundation of everything else we say we want.
The Village Square
The square has four faces. A table sits at the center.
The Threshold (goodprotocols.org) — You’re standing here. The place of arrival, where every language has a seat and every person is received. Start here.
The Long Tack (goodprotocol.ai) — A formation environment for emerging adults, 18–30. Five benches in the workshop, a studio for small collaboration, a commons for shared threads, and a boatyard for building vessels. The long heading into the wind, where a life becomes what it was building toward.
The Boatyard (goodprotocols.ai) — Vessels for communities and organizations. Compound curves, unsquareable, built to hold weight. Consulting, frameworks, and build services.
The Free Edge (goodprotocols.ai) — AI-powered formation tools for multilingual families. Four doors — photograph a document, ask a question, prepare for a meeting, gather what matters — every response in the family’s first language.
The Slow Table — at the center of the square. A shared meal. Unhurried conversation. The gathering that can’t be franchised. (Coming soon.)
Every surface of the platform is designed to be entered through multiple doors — multimodal and multilingual from the ground up.
Start with the story behind Good Protocols. Explore The Square for shared frameworks and the formation wage. Or get in touch.