As I do normally, I took Cooper out around the block this evening. We got half way through our normal block walk. There was a guy in front of us, about 30 yards. He was walking slower than us, (we do walk swiftly) so Cooper and I stopped for about 20 seconds to give him some lead time.
It didn't matter. He stopped. He carefully put his small bag down on the ground and he carefully put his drink on the ground as well. Then he stood up rather straight and started yelling very loudly and very aggressively. Cooper and I were about 15 yards behind him at that point and so we simply made an abrupt U-turn and walked back the way we came.
The number of people living on the street in Santa Rosa seems to increase ten-fold every week, and that's just the ones I see. The number of people who talk to themselves, who cry and moan, who ramble around and shuffle, who sleep in the parks where kids play during the day, their numbers are all increasing. I now see used needles in bank parking lots, something I didn't see a year ago. The amount of trash and toilet paper and tossed garbage is probably about 75% more than it was a year ago.
But the biggest problem I see is that the number of truly psychotic people on the street has increased dramatically. Schizophrenia seems to be the norm, people seeing and experiencing alternative realities. They scream out loud to their personal demons, they cry and curse their lives, their reality, all their many different realities. It is frightening to encounter, frightening to hear and scary to know that there is no answer to their fucked up lives.
I have no answers, just the observation.
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