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."