current conditions: lower lows and scattered highs

The dog and I were coming around a favorite city corner late Tuesday when we noticed an obvious hard luck case on the other side of the street we were just about to cross. You know the type, no shirt, filthy jeans, the mandatory satchel, long dirty yellow hair, I never saw his face, but already knew he'd have vacant glassy eyes and grey, lifeless features.   Simultaneously, a large, noisy immigrant family group was coming toward us from the opposite corner, many kids on bikes and Moms, Dads with strollers, perhaps twenty people in all.  If I wanted to avoid them, with my dog who adores children, I would have to cross over to the hard luck case, now weaving into collapse and so chose to keep walking on the other side as the family drew near.  Bernie, my dog, is in training for city walking and very young children are not only a thrilling distraction, but such a crowd can be unknown possibilities for dangerous encounters, especially where bicycle wheels are involved. It wasn't too long before the group caught up with us and Bernie and I were able to keep to the fringes.  Meanwhile, across the street, the hardlucker was exhibiting some extreme behavior, none of the group, I mean no one at all looked his way.  I was growing more alarmed as it appeared that he was having a breakdown of some sort.  I kept having to look over the heads of the crowd while reigning Bernie in closer to my body.  I saw this guy reach high up the chainlink fence and grab on, then stretch sideways so his head went all the way down fully disappearing into the satchel sitting on the sidewalk. The chainlink, by the way, happens to wrap all the way around a huge, fairly new elementary school.  After about ten minutes, the group was mostly ahead of us, but there had been no change in the hardlucker's pose, head still in satchel, arm achingly twisted above and behind him holding on in a death grip.  It wasn't making sense.  His arm was beautiful, tanned and strong.  I guess I was waiting for the fall which never came because by the time we reached the farthest corner twenty minutes away, his position had not changed.  It was as if he was somehow sculpted in place.  I could not imagine what he was doing.  The entire time he was in my vision, I felt I had to help him.  It was an awful feeling realizing there was nothing I could do but keep moving with this crowd of rollicking strangers . The questions and suppositions we make at such times are telling and alarming, was he armed, perhaps a knife, perhaps diseased and contagious, maybe a killer, rapist, a homeless zombie?  No, I am positive he was none of these absurd suggestions implanted into our suggestive psyche by the paranoiac news media.  But he was a person in trouble, trouble to himself, not to others. A sufferer in need of assistance.  He has remained in the forefront of my mind all night and I bear great guilt for not having helped him.  And while it was taking place, I knew very well the help I could have provided would have been worse than the situation he was already experiencing.


We have now come to the place where any helper agency cannot possibly do the very jobs they were created and funded to do.  What GOOD would it have done to have called 911?  To have the swat team arrive instantly surrounding the block at 7 pm with twenty squad cars in full color blinkies and screaming sirens and their particularly tidy way of grounding the so-called perps... it was, after all an elementary school where this guy absent mindedly chose to fade, help of that sort would have arrived in seconds and done exactly what we hear they do.  Can you imagine being as hopelessly lost and ill as this man appeared and being forced to his knees and shoveled off in plastic cuffs to the strip search, or at the very least dumped at the city shelter only to be told they are already full for the night and he'd better go somewhere else.  Like where? Or maybe a stretcher in the ER for an hour or two and then?  I spent a lot of time today searching for shelters of which there are a small few, but they cater primarily to foreclosure families with children, focusing largely on religious affiliation.  And if he's a vet, well, drug him up and let him go.  This was not the first time and certainly won't be the last time such a sorry scene bursts into our consciousness and therefore I sought sincere alternatives where I could, in good conscience, refer a damaged soul for authentic comfort, follow through and repair.   And yet, nothing I found can be held as bearing authentic aid because the system that has created homelessness is a system that has proven itself entirely ineffective in addressing the ugly side effects it spawns.  And these side effects are glaring, brutal and escalating the demise of innocents everywhere in a million new backwards, self-serving distortions every time you look upon it.


This is why the immigrant family that overtook Bernie and me continued staring straight ahead and laughing as if the singular misery of a sufferer in breakdown was nothing they had not experienced immeasurable times themselves as an unavoidable part of life, that the journeys undertaken to arrive and survive in the promised land where the streets are paved with gold were so incredibly noxious in savagery, shock and horror that they were drained of compassion in the process, compassion for anyone other than the bearers of their own DNA, never to look sideways again.


 I would like you to play at least four of the extraordinary videos at full volume shared on Bho's blog now, Throw down your heart and Oumou Sangare.  While you are there, be sure to spend some time with the magnificent and free at last Oliver, the Bear, as well.  Afterwards, I invite you to come back and tell me, please, what we ARE doing here? Are we just marking time or unwittingly locked into an eternity of simply passing through?


I'm cutting this post short today because visiting revelers with a multitude of large dogs are arriving shortly and time to think on why it really is that we are here will be delayed while I am there and here although comments of course will be allowed my full attention since I am not much of a reveler, notorious for hiding out with the dogs out back or running off in the rockbuggy to find whatever peace of mind is available.