I'm a bastard ...
I must admit, the mini-research project of reading about homelessness and "tent cities", in and around the Seattle area, is triggering a morbid, wrenching, lusty schadenfreude not unlike the desire of a 14 year old boy to watch "Women in Cages" (the movie). This demon of vicarious imagination has me in its sway, my mind drifting to the worst shores of human action.
Yes - one should not trivialize the pain and suffering of others, and I'm not here to do that. But, yes - the lascivious stories of "down on your luck" violence intrigue me. Maybe I'm projecting my own fears, anxieties, into this weird Rorschach Test of the homeless miasma, I guess time will tell.
The thing about total depredation and human misery is that it has a kind of aesthetic to it - even though it represents a kind of "rock bottom". It's not the "clean exit" of a suicide, where the person simply checks out. No, the descent of men and women into the world of homelessness is like a reverse-birth; they die in the world of the normal and are reborn into the hell, the Hobbesian cataclysm of human beings at their limits, their breaking points.
Drugs, alcoholism, needles strewn everywhere, with a general aspect of human feces and rats covering the ground ... this is the world of despair and breakdown that awaits me. I want to pretend that's not true, but I think that's just the self-convincing, the delusion, you allow yourself. It's like the Kübler-Ross stages of grieving - I'm in denial some place, bouncing around, hoping that I land a job and figure out a way ... an escape ... from the economic and social quicksand I find myself stuck in.
So yeah: I'm deriving some pleasure, grotesque as it is, from researching these various "realms" - usually called "The Jungle" in whichever city you might inhabit.
On that last day of normalcy, perhaps I'll just tell the UBER driver "take me to the Jungle baby" ...
(all the way to Hell)
