They are human-shaped.

 I was up all night and at least got 20 things listed on Ebay last night. 

I went to bed and had the most awful dream. I'd bought a car for some reason, an SUV-ish thing, and driven it to a strip mall in Sunnvale, parked it, and went into a place that sold pastries and donuts and such, as I was quite hungry. I picked out a thing that was a sort of pastry but with a hot dog in it, then found it was $20. It turned out everything was $20 there. 

I refused to spend that much and went out to find my car, but since I'd just bought the thing I was not that familiar with how it looked, and was going up and down the parking lot trying to find it, even at one point got someone to search on their smartphone for how the the car looks, and was searching and searching, getting hungrier and thirstier and more bonkers from that and the heat. At one point I'd torn my undershirt into tatters, then in a moment of clarity put the tatters on and my over shirt or jacket over it but I still looked nuts, and resumed looking for the car... 

That's as bad as my bad dreams get. Lost car dreams, or a combination of lost car plus being baffled by the complexity of a hotel or mall. I guess it could be worse. 

I woke up at around 4, relieved that it was just a stupid dream. 

I've been pondering one thing I talked with Tom about when I visited. I'd seen this thing on YouTube about schizophrenia, and they'd studied schizophrenics and normal people, and the long and short of it is, if you take a normal person who's interacting with another person, there are specialized parts of the brain that light up that don't light up when they're interacting with an inanimate object, like a car or a washing machine or something. But if you take a schizophrenic, if they're interacting with another person, those parts of the brain don't light up in either case. There's no empathy, no feeling of kinship, to them another person is just another thing to get something out of or use or disregard etc. 

The documentary also showed there's a spectrum of this, and that there are a lot of people who lack in this way who are not full-blown, obvious, schizophrenics who go around seeing things and yelling. They simply lack any feeling of kinship or empathy with others. This goes a far way to explain how homeless people are, how kindness is seen as weakness to be exploited, how unreliable they are, how unfeeling and predatory. They are human-shaped but arguably they are really not human. 

I am reminded of a scene in the beginning of the series "The Walking Dead" where that one guy and his kid are safe but his wife has become a zombie and the guy doesn't have the heart to shoot her because ... it's the same body and appearance as his beloved wife. The protagonist in the series tried to convince the guy that it's no longer his wife, that it's a zombie and needs to be put down, but the guy just can't bring himself to do it. 

This is a 1:1 parallel with the situation between the scumsuckers vs. normal people. You see someone like Renee or Crazy Chrissie or any of the characters around here and they can talk to you, seem to be of at least average intelligence, and thus they can get you to give them money and things and try to help them. But they only see you as a thing to be exploited. They only use conversation and sob stories to get close enough to steal, assault, in some cases, kill. It doesn't matter to them. 

Therefore my conclusion that they are like zombies or the replicants in Blade Runner, although that movie was made for an audience of normal people, of course, and the plot was basically that replicants would eventually develop empathy. In reality zombies rot, replicants don't exist, and scumsuckers keep drinking, drugging, and bashing each other over the head so they just get worse. 

Therefore my conclusion that it is morally OK to "retire" street zombies just as it is OK to "retire" a rabid dog, a rogue replicant, or any un-human danger to actual humans and human society. It's not legal, and I hope to be out of here before things come to that, but this is my conclusion. 

Traditional societies have safeguards against those who become non-human. Traditional societies didn't have drugs, and it was vanishingly rare to have enough alcohol around to damage oneself significantly that way. But there was still schizophrenia and traumatic brain injury. So Western folklore had beliefs in werewolves and vampires and those taken over by "familiar" evil spirits, and Japanese folklore has all sorts of wonderful ghosts and goblins and even in my branch of Buddhism we talk about "hungry ghosts". 

In all cases, these bad people were not allowed around decent society, but were exiled or even killed and of course exile shortened their lives considerably. Society's immune system did its job. 

This is why I advocate camps being set up where street zombies can be sent, outside of town. Let them have all the drugs they want, all the junk food they want, 24 hour trash TV, etc. Have a place they can be sent instead of letting them live right in our cities and neighborhoods where they're less happy and quite dangerous. 

I also told Tom about a friend of mine from my student days who's on the Big Island now, and last night I found him and answered a discussion he had on Quora, and he answered that last night. So I just sent another and told him (as I'd done a bunch of searching) I'm going to write him a letter as computers are so unreliable, Silicon Valley internet only allowing about 1 character per second (it's often that slow) etc. so now I'll need to type up a letter. 

I have no intent to move to the Big Island, but I think I might convince Tom Price to. I think he'd like it there, a lot. So I'm trying to put a bug in his ear to, after his father passes which will be soon, to sell up and buy a spread on the Big Island because one can't have too many friends where one's returning to, even if Tom will be an island-hopper flight away. Hell I might visit this old friend of mine too. 

I told Tom I *still* know far more people back in Hawaii then I do here. That's just how it is there.