271st day sober. I practiced last night but didn't practice that much as I didn't really feel like it. I did long tones on high notes which is good though.
I'd packed that pesky power supply yesterday, and packed some more things today and took them to the post office and FedEx. I'd had raw walnuts, my vitamins, coffee, and a couple packets of "Sky Flakes" for breakfast and I had a stomach ache for some reason. So after the deliveries were done and I'd checked the usual places I went over to Pho Bel Air for some Pho. It seemed to help a bit.
I thought more, while out riding, about a key feature of schizophrenia being that the "social" circuits in the brain aren't working. If what differentiates a human from an animal is a human's social sense, then this goes some distance in why people treat the homeless like some kind of feral animals. The truth may be that they are.
A raccoon, given a piece of bacon by someone, is going to hang around and demand more bacon until they can't physically eat any more or are driven off. The family dog is not going to go hungry so you can eat. Normal humans will appreciate the gift of a bacon sandwich and be happy if they get what they need, and express thanks. They'll probably try to do some favor in return. This is how normal human societies are built. Normal parents or friends will go hungry so their child or a friend who's injured etc can eat. It's only among humans on the "schizophrenia spectrum" that you find parents eating well while their children starve. This is what you find in homeless "parenting" which is why there are not very many children, at least not so far, in the camps. They get taken away.
An important thing is, these days we have functional MRI so we can actually observe what parts of the brain are operating when the patient does certain tasks. We can actually test if the social parts of the brain are disabled. We can finally say, This person is not going to "just snap out of it", they are socially disabled in the same way we have diagnoses for those who are intellectually disabled.
Behaviorally, it's always been pretty easy to tell - it's just a lack of any idea of empathy or social contract. But now we can test for it and we can also stop wasting time and resources on those who are not fixable. Just set up safe, humane, camps for them to go to, have their McDonald's and Jerry Springer Show, so they don't have to live under bridges and we don't have to look at them or worry about getting mugged by them.
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