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The Homeless and the Heat

Dirt Bike on the Road

Spencer Bokat-Lindell, New York Times: Thank you for your illuminating piece on homelessness.

I am a communist. The worst is around 3pm. Keep hydrated. Last summer, found me eating out of dumpers. You had to be fast for all the Other Divers, and by 7am, the heat would turn the slop into stinking bacteria. Eat quickly. They won’t tell you that in finishing school. I did not go to finishing school. In high school, I carried a hunting knife on my leg. I wasn’t going to tastefully get beat up again and raped. I would gut anyone who tried. They knew. They kept ten spaces behind me. Have you ever slept the night in a shelter with your kid. In sweat. In agony. The homeless hate these places. You should try it. Drunks vomiting at night was the worst. The schizophrenics just screamed. I don’t write about it anymore. Who wants to hear about or see naked little kids trying to make it in the shower with feces spread around the walls. And survive. We are ButTheLeast of us has been spinned to Don’tLookAtThem. The death of species will include us, too. Famine’s slog. You, the readership. You, the reader. It all means, you, too. This is a problem staring us in the face with immediacy — it’s here — where invested landowners cannot escape the searing, heat either. Look around you at what you have done. Our outdated air conditioners are burning up the town with our Turned-On-High default. This paradigm is strangely catching up to gasoline in terms of how much energy you can squeeze from fossil fuel including its acquisition. If I believed in the idea of revenge, I might feel kinda pulled to the argument of is the world a system of something alive, that live on the planet like bloodsucking parasites. I so believe in revenge. We have destroyed ourselves. Political Instability becomes the status quo. The air conditioning impact renders health care part of the price of contemporary life, which will make today’s homelessness painfully apparent, too, as seven-year-olds with their sweaty bodies faint on the schoolhouse floor. I’m too dramatic. Is that what you think. When was the last time you were in a room of seven-year-olds. Domestic violence will swell like a spider’s bite. Who would choose to teach in a Head Start Classroom Anywhere in Mississippi. The kind of spiders that bite with venom, are marching north. You can have mine in the spider tree outside in the back of the cabin I escape to. Capitalists scream they create wealth. For who. No one who is poor writes about it — we are not allowed, and those of us from RedNeckLand truly believe we are looked down upon in some weird take on poverty and homelessness as The Cultural Others. Below decks. Passage. We turn away. We try harder. Only those in the room with all of their statuary are allowed in the room with even more statuary. Admit it, we’re slaves and peasants who move our slow lengths along the county line, there is no hope. Not even for a place to live.