Food bombing

 Someone, or someones, have been doing what I call "food bombing" here for a while. Every day or two it seems, they're dropping off boxes of canned goods, bags of rice and beans, even a bag of wheat berries and one of tortilla flour and packages of spaghetti noodles in this last batch. 

I'd taken to looking the stuff over and taking it out of the cardboard boxes and setting up a sort of "display" so that anyone even driving through can see that there's free food. I'd been kind of hoping the guys next door might take at least most of it, as they've got families. But they're probably making decent money and have a bit of pride. 

So it happens that once I got into my practice before bed, I heard some noises and a zombie was picking over the cans and packages. Except this is a really crazy, erratic, drugged-to-the-gills seeming zombie. It took forever for the thing to decide what to take (all of it) and now the damned thing is loaded up with at least 20 pounds of canned and bagged goods, and thus not inclined to travel far. 

Instead the disgusting thing is wandering around the parking lot, doing strange little dances, and at one point even settled down right outside the shop here so I had to stop practicing and be quiet. It's just wandering around, doing stupid little dances, around in the parking lot. I was able to get a bit more practice in while it settled down against the fence but it doesn't seem capable of settling down for long. 

The solution is pretty obvious. When I got back from my post office and FedEx run, I emptied the bike trailer and then loaded up a tube TV Ken had left here, and put it out by Bayshore because I didn't want to keep looking at the thing and out on the main road there's a much greater chance it will get picked up. It would have been pretty trivial for me to come back, load up the food, and put it out by Bayshore too. I will have to start doing this. As soon as I see a food dump, take the stuff and put it out by Bayshore where hopefully someone with a job, a family, and a car can scoop it up. If zombies get the stuff at least they won't get in the habit of coming into the complex here. 

I'd been planning to get up early enough to ride over to Central Computers in Santa Clara to buy some canned air to give my printer a really good cleaning, but that zombie, as the sun came up and it warmed up a bit, started acting even crazier, tearing off its jacket and dancing and staggering around. Finally the guys next door showed up and they'd not have any more compunctions about whacking a zombie than I would, and they have their cars and work vans to look out for so I felt OK about going to sleep. 

I woke up around 2 but felt I should get more sleep and nix my Saturday plans, and sent back to sleep until 5. It's sunny outside but cold and windy and wintry still. But Sunday is even more relaxed, traffic-wise, than Saturday, and the places I want to go are open on Sundays also. And the zombie was gone. 

It's nice having the guys next door around. Right now as I type they've cooked some ribs or something and are in their place, eating and drinking beer and having a good time. The main social division in this area is, You're a worker, or you're a bum. Workers are good and bums are, needless to say, bad. 

The thing with bums is, they are nothing but societal black holes. Kindnesses are never returned, but the bum you are foolish enough to do any favor for, responds by calculating you're "weak" and more can be taken from. 

This is probably why you see bums who have been on the street for years and decades, it never having occurred to them to find something to actually *do* like wash windows or cars, play music or make some kind of handicraft, or in some way become a being at a higher level than a rat or a raccoon. 

You'd think it would be boring, not teaching oneself to *do* something. But rats and raccoons are easily amused, I guess, and sitting on one's rump and being handed things - interspersed with occasional stealing missions - is entertainment and life-purpose enough, it seems. 

A more scientific basic division of society here might be those who would pass or not pass a Voight-Kampff test. We actually have a real-life one now, it's the functional MRI. 

Why is a worker a worker? Because they have empathy and thus are bound by the social contract. They work because they were raised to work, to cooperate with others. They were raised by a caring family and know they will go on, if possible, to raise a family in turn. They show up at work for the money, of course, but also to not let their co-workers down. They feel their place in society in the same way I felt, as a child, the comfort of my family members around me, and later, in Army barracks and rooming houses and college classrooms and work-places, the comforting presence of others around me. A single, atomized human has no more meaning than a single ant. 

But you have those kids who don't have this, are thieves and con-artists from a young age, they become the petty thieves and fire-starters that are a disproportionate problem in high schools, and are never able to fit in in a job and if they get one, don't last long. The empathy part of the brain isn't there or isn't working. Other causes can be traumatic brain injury, or drug use. People who are marginal in the first place tend to burn out the empathic part of their brains due to these causes more than more normal, well-adjusted people. 

I told Ken once, some years ago, "You grew up nice and normal and middle-class, and you assume everyone grew up nice and normal and middle-class!" in my exasperation at his interacting with the various bums who inhabited the parking lot here when we moved in. His pandering to the scumbags cost him a lot of money as it delayed our move in by at least a month or two and we had to pay extra rent to Tom who owns the old building. 

It's difficult for well-adjusted, financially comfortable people to understand feral bums. So they set up all these charities for "the homeless" and the hardcore, empathy-circuits-burned-out, scumbags make a living out of this. The majority of "the homeless" are people who run into a hard place, couch-surf or live in their car or bunk up in their office or something, and get back on their feet. They don't suddenly stop showering or shaving, start taking hard drugs, cove themselves with poke-and-stick tattoos, and start stealing everything that isn't nailed down. 

So these Good Samaritans set up soup kitchens and day centers and "tiny home" villages and things, and the bums trash the places, burn stuff down, deal hard drugs, kill each other, etc. It's all good fun to those operating on the level of a rat. 

Those who are still at the human level who run into a hard patch and try using services like homeless shelters have a very hard time because of this. They're suddenly expected to co-exist with the lowest of the low and that's an impossibility. This is why ideally there would be a ranking system where the just-ran-into-a-hard-patch homeless would be able to be housed decently while they get back on their feet, and the scumbags would go to what I call "Happy Fun Camps" where it's free junk food and all the drugs they want. Said Camps would have housing made of cement with stainless-steel combined sink-toilet things like in jails, and in general the housing very durable so the inmates would not be able to burn it down. 

There are a few structures in place for the decent homeless. Gyms are cheap these days, storage units not bad, living in a car or a van is engaged in by enough people that there's tons of advice online. Rooming houses like I lived in in Hawaii in the early-mid 80s are another way for decent people to stay off of the street. I suppose one of my old rooms might be $400 or $500 a month now, given they were $150-$175 back then. There were rules like no smoking/drinking/drugs, no overnight visitors, it was generally lights out at 10, and you had to mop the common floor and clean the kitchen one day a week. Druggies and party animals and scummy people avoid these places like the plague. They're great for normal people who need a safe, stable, clean place to live though. 

When I lived in them, people there were getting by on maybe $500 a month, or even less. At first I was taking home something like $350 a month. $150 rent meant $200 a month for everything else. Of course no one had a car. Once I started making $5 an hour, I could save $200 a month if I was careful. The thing is, this is how decent people live if they don't make a lot of money. They're not out stealing bikes and living in the park and drinking 40's for breakfast. 

Due to Hawaii being a largely Asian place, you could be very poor and still be a decent person. Mainland culture seems to expect someone who's financially poor to be an utter scumbag.