Fightinville Journal

 Back at the club a day later, the Constitutional man from the day before was in the street, distraught, and gesturing at another man lying facedown against the doors of the club in a small pool of his own blood. I've been seeing this a lot lately. Whatever the formulation of the latest batch of spice they're smoking is, it's making them lose consciousness almost immediately. I knelt and checked for a pulse, but then could see the man breathe. Right after I stood up, a medic police officer showed up. She began giving the man, whose name I had now learned was Denzel, a sternum rub. Eventually the ambulance arrived, and Denzel grew combative as the cop tried to keep Denzel still while the paramedics got a stretcher ready. During all this a crowd started growing, and among the crowd I recognized by their clothes and demeanor some young drug dealers. Several other cops were there, and I began to ask them why they couldn't do something about all the drug dealing going on. Th...

 My neighbor has been having trouble with people across the street from her house.  She lives on the corner next to both the club and the land the shelter is on.  She called me the other day because a homeless woman who was sharing a tent with a homeless guy got out completely naked in broad daylight and was just hanging out.  So I went and talked to the diner staff who said they'd been hearing complaints. A day later I walked down there again, to see what was going on. Three homeless guys were piled up under the club awning. One was slumped over on his stuff, high and passed out. Another was as glazed as was humanly possible, and a third was leaning against the wall seemingly not high at all.  I offered each of them a chocolate foil-wrapped coin from kids Christmas stockings, and told them quietly we would prefer they not smoke their drugs so close to our homes. The least high guy started to get Constitutional on me, and during the course of his insistence on h...

 My neighbor texted to say there were people pitching tents across from her house.  I went over, and unsurprisingly found a couple of longtime street people I've known for years. One is merely a drug user who gets in trouble, the other a man haunted by mental illness which is not greatly helped by his insistence on using drugs.  They had some tentmates also.  I indicated to them that we would prefer they not set up shop there. They replied that they wouldn't be staying. I left. An hour later, my neighbor texted again to say they had moved to the basketball court, farther into our block.  "What are you guys doing," I asked. "You know this is not acceptable, right?" "The policeman told us it was okay, until someone calls the cops," they replied. "The policeman and I are about to have a discussion," I said. Right then the policeman in question drove by, and I managed to flag him down.  "What are you telling these guys," I asked.  H...

There's an alley across the street from me, between a tall fence and the side of an old bar.  It's a popular spot for people who want to get high, or as I saw a couple of days ago, people who want to conduct a little prostitution. When I see people go into the alley or hear them talking, I go over and tell them they're on private property. The property piece I really don't care about so much as I care about defining the boundaries of what I will and won't put up with on my block. The alley is a little offset from my front door, so I have to cross the street at an angle to get to it. This time, I rounded the corner to be confronted by a large white ass attached to a mid-thirties woman, with a tall guy standing behind it.  "You have to go," I said. Normally I try to be calmer and just let people know they don't own the property and they leave. This time I was a little more incensed because, hey: you're right by my front door and there are families wi...

 I've learned that when I see a homeless person without shoes, it means they got so high they lost track of them. I think they take them off because they get overheated, and by the time they come down, they're too far from where they left them to remember. Yesterday while out walking our dog, we turned a corner and walked through the middle of a scene. My wife doesn't interact with or make eye contact with the homeless if at all possible, so she missed it.  I also tend to follow that rule, but being a guy am more subject to interactions wanted or not. In this case, one guy was being pursued at a walk by another, younger guy, who seemed to be preparing to beat him up. The victim had been around for some months, and was a muttering, laughing, muscular young man who appeared to be coping with some intellectual disability and drug use. I walked up to the pair, and the victim looked over at me and then groggily, hesitantly, began to move in short arcs as though to enter orbit ar...

I saw an old friend at a coffee shop.  We started talking about the neighborhood, and he said Housing First was a failure.  Housing First is the dominant idea behind current thinking in homelessness. Get a roof over someone's head first, then connect them with services.  The saying is there's nothing about being mentally ill or addicted to drugs that is going to be improved by living on the street.  I left the cafe and saw police cars down the road. By the time I got to the scene the police were gone and a lone man stood on the corner talking to nobody.  Did you see what the cops were here for, I asked.  "They were here because I bought the jail and they won't let me run it," he said.  He had no shoes.  You bought the jail, I asked "I paid four billion dollars for it, and they won't let me run it. It's just racism," he said.