Blame, Or If You Prefer, Mike

The past few days have been rich. On Saturday I woke up at 4:30AM to drive to San Luis Obispo and watch Charissa graduate. She's my age, she's got her degree, and she'll soon be proposed to (and we're all sure of this). She also doesn't read my blog, which is a good thing, because it means she'll never know how boring her graduation was. I laughed while her brother made fun of the speaker's accent (battlecuruuzer operrrational), and then fell asleep.

That night I passed out around 8PM, only to wake up at 2AM. Gabe was asleep out on the couch. I got around to finishing Hamlet, then caught the sunrise for the second day in a row (not bad!). Gabe chipped in with his loud, angry sleep-talk, to my further enjoyment.



That morning I fought myself a little, like I always do (and like Hamlet did), then got down to Venice to look for homeless people. Actually, I went and wandered until someone asked me for a cigarette, but to be fair, everyone so far has been homeless.

"My name is Mike, but people call me Blame."
"Blame? Why Blame?"
"Because it's always my fault, and not anyone else's."
"That kinda sucks"
"Well, it's easier to blame myself than to blame other people."

There's a lot of philosophy that gets tossed around at Venice. The guy I met was a real-life Hamlet, sort of. He was "really confused spiritually" at the time, and he might've killed himself if he hadn't been scared of what was waiting for him on the other side. And I had just read that.

I learned that homeless people come to Venice because it's a convenient place to live. The cops back in Jersey will throw you in jail for sleeping on the streets, but not here. "Here you got alarm clocks with guns," he tells me. It all seems so easy. Even if you come come with nothing, like so many people do, you don't need to be slick; but odds are you won't leave with anything either.

All your dreams, everything you want is right here in front of you, but you can't have it. "That's why people go crazy," he says. "That's why you see people walking around talking to themselves."

The system makes it easy (in comparison) for the homeless at Venice, but it also makes it easier to control them. Even in Santa Monica, enforcement is stricter. It's like containment. You'd rather keep more people in one place.

This particular guy was sitting on his sleeping bag in front of a vision store. Upscale. He had passed out the night before and someone had stolen his glasses. Now he can't see very far, and unless his friend had picked them up, he's not going anywhere either.



...Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of?

-Shakespeare, Hamlet III.1.76-82