Do you ever think you are awash in stories in the newspaper, on television and on the Internet about the plans of government and quasi-government to make Seattle and the Puget Sound region better and ready for the expected deluge of new residents over the next five, ten, fifty years?

Do news stories about the woes of the Alaskan Way Viaduct and the 520 floating bridge give you heartburn because each of them seems to come with a higher and higher billions of dollars price tag. Or how about media accounts of drilling under the city for light rail and more accounts that it will be extended across our Lake Washington floating bridges to encompass Redmond, Bellevue, Kirkland and who knows where else - although probably never to Ballard?

Then there are more stories about the continuing degradation of the water quality of Puget Sound, coupled with the lessening of the stocks of salmon and steelhead. Save the Sound banners are beginning to fly around here as once those to save Lake Washington did five decades ago.

Have you experienced discomfort at vague plans to force you to recycle and reuse everything? Or experienced occasional guilt that washes over you when you drop discarded envelopes from bills into the garbage instead of putting them in the proper recycling bin?

Did you try one of those supposed wondrous twisted light bulbs of the future only to decide going back to candles was better because of their harsh glare? All of us enjoy fleeting guilt, but deep satisfaction when we stay too long in a too hot shower or actually wash the clothes in hot water or even (horror upon horror) wash the car in the driveway.

The list is endless of the things government around here wants to force us to do in the spirit of environmentalism or because our world is filling more and more each day with too many people and cars, plus not enough buses that still stall in traffic.

This region desperately needs universal planning, instead of this government agency or that; this politician or that one; this agency or another each making a plan - usually costing billion and billions of dollars only for the first stage, "but we will be back for more money when the project is half done (or is it half baked?).

We need to re-empower our government to organize together and come up with a plan to do all that must be done and scrap the rest. Then we need a price tag that will not send us all to the poor house or force us to get one of those cardboard signs that says "Homeless, I am desperate, please help. God Bless."

OK, folks, sorry but this writer is going on vacation and wanted to purge his mind of all the wild and crazy ideas for a better Seattle. Now my mind is empty. My assignment to you is to get answers for all this stuff by the time I get back in a fortnight, eh?

- Jack Mayne