Southfield Michigan is very hot in July

You know those movies and TV shows with survivors struggling in a dystopiac futre a toxic lifeless landscape with all the resources pillaged out of it? It's not the future. That's where homeless mentally ill folk live today.

Earlier this month, I spent a couple hours near Detroit in hundred-degree heat with a wreatched delusional guy. At first I was scared of him because he was raging and yelling and throwing his backpacks around. But then he apologized to me because he saw that I was worried. He explained his situation in terms he could understand. I don't think his explanations matched what I would call reality, but I think they matched his feelings. He was telling me he felt like someone whose wife had been in a car accident and similar intense events.

To summarize this sad situation briefly, temporarily-mentally-stable people kept arguing with him that his perceptions didn't make sense. In particular, bus drivers rejected the damp, rumpled piece of paper the man held out which represented a bus ticket. It might have been an expired bus ticket, or maybe it was something else entirely. Not only was the man thought-disordered, but I suspect he couldn't read. I didn't think the drivers should necessarily give him a ride without a ticket and invite trouble onto their buses, but his guy really needed help. 

I think he was dehydrated and exhausted and I would guess out of anti-psychotic medication. Other people were being mean to him but his delusions were worse for him than for the rest of us, I'm sure. If only there was a bus that just drove around and picked up wretched mentally ill people (the driver could be in a safely-screened-off area and took them to a cooling shelter and a nurse could draw blood and see what medicine they're supposed to be on and give them relief from the scrambled neightmare perceptions. I understand their life problems are huge and nearly-impossible to fix. But there's no reason for humans to suffer in this rich nation.

When I left the Southfield Greyhound station, the poor guy had calmed down (I think it helped that I gave him cautious sympathy from a distance) and he was resting in semi-shade in the grass under a tree. He'd asked to use my cell phone and I'd had to refuse because I feared he might throw it in frustration if someone hung up on him or something like that. I was traveling by myself and couldn't risk not having my phone. But I did give him my supply of Doritos and pretzels. He said "God bless you," and I said "God bless you."

Only in Maine

Maine has pine trees, marriage equality, medical marijuana, a lot of hiking trails, people who work outside, moose, and many, many skunks. I have only lived here five years and I have had to bathe a dog who got squirted in the face, AND had a skunk spray so close to two different houses that the whole place smelled (for two or three days) exactly as though we'd piled a bushel of rotten heads of garlic inside an old truck tire on the kitchen floor and set fire to the whole thing.

So one gets a whiff a skunk in enclosed places sometimes. Skunks freak out if they get stuck in a garage, under a back deck, if you encounter them while hunting moose or hiking a trail or going out to your pickup truck in the parking lot at the kerosene delivery place. We all try to wash the scent off an expensive or useful coat or pair of boots, and sometimes it didn't quite work. The oily odor permeates everything, so even if the skunk did its thing in your garage, it's likely your flannel shirts in the bedroom closet smell like they were sprayed with Eau de Pepe LePew.

So I got on the bus today and got whammed with a strong skunky aroma and tried not to look around to see who the offender was. It's been me in the past; I know how it is when you go inside somewhere and people sniff and wrinkle their noses.

Then I realized what I was smelling was skunk. . .weed. The bus to my house is also the bus to the community college.