The great paradox of humanity, if I may comment on such a thing, is that the greatest feature we have, curiosity, drives us and it may wipe us all out. OR.... it may lead us safely into the realm of the stars as we all enjoy scientific endeavors that reach deep into humanity and its horrid effects on the world we inhabit then repair all that shit and repair the world,and bring the light to all. First, it must enable us to check all that out and live to the tune of truth and empathy
Maybe a missle to Saturn, maybe one to DC. It could go either way.
Sometimes still, mistakenly, and sadly, my mind thinks it knows something and while identifying that it is fucking me over again, how far it gets into the current delusion depends on how long I need in order to identify how entertaining the dilemma in the process may be. To me, it may seem like it's very important, smart, deserving some attention, and might be a trustworthy focal point for my disdain or love, depending on what's in between. I can leave shit alone too, which is almost always better for me and my little dog, Peanut.
What I actually do know is impossible to describe, it just lives there, under my fucking hat buzzing and clapping, as stuck on me as is the earthly environmental guilt I inherited as a member of the ruling ground-bound tribe. But, Aha, what is rule number two?
Reality and Batman Kills Superman are each as relevant as the other.
I can't locate an absolutely provable absolute. Is that my fault? How the fuck would I find out? If nothing can be proved then there is nothing to prove so I'm going to quit wasting energy looking. No, I won't.
Everything in time is gone. Past. There is no time for the future, it's all been used already. All that's left is whatever we documented and what we remember. But, for all our trials and heavy lifting, while knowing what we are doing we are still working this planet over and taking fools' gold for payment.
So, I wonder, using my mind, about shit, mostly injustice and inhumane perceptions of my own like, say-
The slums we call homeless camps outside of and inside of town. In India and all over Asia actually, you can visit them, the same ones as the other ones, same levels of life in the street in Outer Mumbai as in Outer Bangkok. They are here now as well, worse though, sprouting and growing all over the land of the free. People learn to live with it because they have to in third-world situations, where the government doesn't even pretend to care. The situation here seems to still be new enough that maybe these people are expecting the garbage and recycling guys to come every Tuesday.
The slums are permanent in third-world countries. That's one of the reasons we don't call them slums here. We are, of course, better than that.
A chain of misery is stretched from Brownsville Texas to Tierra Del Fuego, and on up into Maine...places ruled by humans who have decided that the reason to get into politics is to steal from and rule by the gun millions of regular people just like me that somehow fall under their blind gaze.
Favelas in Brazil, Dharavi in Mumbai, Kibera in Nairobi
Downtown Los Angeles and from Texas to the polluted wild creekside slum homeless village that was/is being "cleaned up" down the street from where I work. The amount of garbage that was drug up out of this place would fill boxcars. I heard there were buckets of shit, yes shit by the bucket, some with lids, some without. They, the local newspaper, estimate about sixty people lived in there and under the highway bridge that goes over the creek. Hundreds of hijacked grocery carts. The city seems to have ended their clean-up now, left a bunch of shit, garbage and trash and junk, out by the road for a month or so now....
I work at a gas station/ convenience store a half mile up the road from the bridge, on the same road it's part of. I have spoken to many folks about the place since they started dragging it all up where it can be seen by all. The folks I talk to, local working folks, don't like it.
Here too, only the big blind ones in charge of all that these people need to rise or re-arise, won't and don't call them slums and do not have the whatever they need to help them climb back up into dignified living arrangements..
The officials call them homeless camps. The inhabitants of these camps are problems, not people. They may be infectious, maybe have bugs and shit in their pants. They don't have a bathroom or a giant television. They sure as shit ain't voting constituents of anybody. They are vagrants, trespassers, drugged up and down, dangerous and ungrateful, haunted by specters all their own...you wouldn't recognize the kinds of demons they harbor, they are beyond the polite demons that run with fashion and will kick all their asses if they catch them.
You don't have to do very much about the homeless here, officially. It seems to me, and I have made inquiries, most of the working people around here think these guys got themselves into it, they should get themselves out of it, there is no citizen-driven movement to help these people, no one wants to pay.
They care, but not much.
Clean-up time is over I guess. I bet they were using county jail inmates for laborers while the clean-up was underway, but I don't know...
Unmolested basically, for six years, this camp was. It was perfect, there are two-I think one inhabited and one empty- houses that can feel them, the denizens I mean.
Across the road and down a little way is a strip mall with a liquor store and a big chain grocery store. It is where town begins or ends depending on which way you're going. There is a nice big clean clean park off a sidestreet that runs behind the mall that is bordered by mostly wooded land that stretches for quite a ways, maybe connects downstream with a wildlife sanctuary wetland swamp that starts just outside the city limits.
On both sides of the road, it is floodplain terrain that gets to be like a lake in the wet season, I think a lot of it is railroad property, no maintenance at all, the rest would probably be county and state land. I think along one side of the bridge some of it is city land, probably agricultural zoned.. The way it's set up, purposely I bet, you can't see any ugly shit from the road at all. There's a graveyard in front of some of the part that isn't under the bridge or way out in the bushes and forest.
I walked out there once, through the park, because I heard there was a giant old trestle built with first-growth timber and stretching about a third of a mile or so. I was pretty new to the area, I didn't know anything about shit village out there yet. Once I walked out off the lawn and into the woods, off the main path I was on that takes you out to the creek and trestle were ,like, feeder paths leading back to whatever, I didn't explore any of them, It felt they led to someone's camp, there was garbage here and there once you left the manicured parklands, discarded clothing and crap, alongside the main trail.
I saw the awesome trestle and I would like to go see it some more but you can't. The fun, the mechanics' interest in exploring this huge wooden beam man hand-made wonder is blocked by the worry of riling up a psychotic inhabitant and then dealing with all that. In the last two months the area, the neighborhood I am describing has had two homicides, both stabbings, by wild ass denizens of the area which I believe were both domestic knife squabbles. Someone got shot in a crappy motel a couple of weeks ago, too.
Anyways
So now, since the creek floods every year, the fields that adjoin it on the other side from the settlement started being flooded with water containing waste high in human-generated toxicity, so that instead of leaving fat topsoil for the pasture, the area is being flooded with the toxic detritus of the neighbors.. The farmers bitched to the county and found out the "clean-up" has to be co-ordinated through twenty different agencies. Too bad about your horses, bub.
This part of the local citizenry, these street corner parking lot panhandling, shopping cart wielding can recycle guys got nothing to say, no representative will touch them or ever visit their neighborhood to see what they need unless to come in with the "authorities" to bust them for whatever, shoplifting and trespassing are the big charges for this population. Some whacked out of their skulls and warbling in alien tongues some that just won't move. Meth Heads, alcoholics, parolees, ought to be mental patients in a hospital, lost, broke, hungry, mostly uncared for or about. They use shit because they have to, it holds back the worst of the misery they live with for a while.
I see a lot of them where I work. The town I work in is located at the end of a pretty damn good light rail/ bus transportation system and a lot of folks come here from Portland to, well to get to somewhere else, I guess. Sometimes they are nuts and a pain in the ass, but usually not. Mostly they just pass by walking on the sidewalk dragging sleeping bags and baby carriages with everything they have to have rolling along, sometimes on a bicycle with a shopping cart trailer conversion. Occasionally they come in for gas for their rolling condos.. Some buy cheap wine or malt liquor and try to rummage around in the trash cans and the ashtray. We do what we can for the ones we are used to, give them free food when it's been in the warmer too long or often a cup of tap water or old coffee to drink.
And then they go where you go when you have no place to go.
When I liked to travel around on the cheap, hitchhiking, whatever, I had a place to go home to when I was ready.
These guys don't have that anymore. I asked one guy, he comes in the store, about his trip once. He said he cleaned up once, pitched a tent in an available backyard, got a job, kept it, and saved up and got a place. Rejoined his family. What the fuck are you wandering around out here for, then? I of course asked him. He didn't know. Conversation over. I gave him a cup of coffee and that was that.
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