Work From Home, Help the Homeless


Sofa by Kardiel

They live in trash camps beside the freeways, under bridges, or along the train tracks. You know they are around when fire trucks speed down the street to put out their fires. Perhaps you’ve seen their gardening, the charred acres of blackened trees in Woodley Park?

But you are happy because you work from home, perhaps in your condo in Studio City, or in a rented house in the Hollywood Hills, earning $85,000 a year to assist a non-profit in expediting relief programs for unhoused individuals.

Flush with money from Mayor Garbageciti, (now in his seventh year of misadministration) blessed by the kind intentions of Washington, applauded by those who imagine that a city and state that allows vagrancy of 100,000 people, is somehow going to end the blight and destruction of the Golden City; this is the shining hour when, at last, the absolute desecration of urban life by filth, trash, feces, squalor, crime and disorder ends. 

For the erection of storage sheds behind high fences on freeway offramps will persuade those who have fallen into drug and alcohol abuse to move their dozens of trash filled carts and begin reform!  

To perpetuate the madness of a declining civilization, there are now many executive positions in a new industry that will keep you; college educated, highly skilled, they/them/he/she; comfortably employed with benefits for years to come.

The homeless crisis is now a permanent industry, as real as the movie studios and oil wells once were. It is the new future of California. And it fits in perfectly with performance virtue signaling, to pretend to be doing socially beneficial acts while skimming public money into private pockets. 

Common sense would have once required all homeless persons to register with the police. Then they would have been monitored. The sick ones would be sent to mental hospitals or treatment centers. The bad ones would be sent to jail. The single ones would be sent back to Kansas. The ones who refused help would be arrested.  

And nobody would sleep on the sidewalk. 

But to maintain law and order, a special type of government worker, with a blue uniform, badge and gun is required. And they, my friend, are not welcome.

For now, the word police itself is toxic, a derogatory word to describe beasts. Let us, try then, to live in a nation without any law enforcement, to erect a new country where 400 million people are self-policing.

The experiment in lite, invisible policing is well underway in Los Angeles, and we lucky ones who live here in 2021 are now under strict rules as to how we may express ourselves, and what words we may not use. But those who wreck, defile, and implode in their own life are invited to perform in public to bring down the rest of us to live inside their mental and physical hell. 

In this modern era, private words are punishable but public acts that endanger life, health and security are permissible. It’s enough to make housed people want to set their own houses afire. 

But don’t fret about it. There are high paying executive jobs, working from home, snuggled up on your couch, in the air-conditioning, attending Zoom meetings and sending out memos to government entities who are earnestly working to end the very thing that keeps them employed. 

As they say on Instagram, it’s so amazing!

Positivism.


We went yesterday, Sunday, to visit C & J at their new home near the Pacific.

They moved here, retired and prosperous, in good health and of their own free will, to be nearer their children and family.

Tall, well educated, erudite, self-confident, witty, they both exude a mastery of life.  She runs her own design business and is a great cook. He was a financial whiz and worked in that industry and retired young.

Now he can joke about his busy life: playing tennis, bridge, and reading novels on Kindle.

They moved to a privileged slice of California, one that is available for only a chosen few, a place where the temperature is always 30 degrees cooler than the baking interior, and the lovely fog settles over the land every night, bathing the abundant roses in moisture, insuring that youth and spring are eternal.

The host drove us around the neighborhood in a BMW convertible. His impressions of the Golden State were effusive. We descended towards the Pacific, and he spoke, “The state is bankrupt, but look at the marvelous parks and recreational facilities they provide.”  He marveled at those drivers who let him into their lanes, and who stop at four way intersections. His California was benevolent, courteous, lush and unhurried.

He characterized his life as “blessed”. The kids were doing well. One worked in executive compensation and made a “shitload”.  He recalled his own fortunate work life, and told of leaving one company, and then semi-retiring, waking up one day and realizing he needed money again and then earning it, copiously.

Back inside the home, we walked past a fountain and into freshly painted white rooms scented with baked butter and ocean air.

C showed us her enormous kitchen with countless driftwood stained cabinets, acres of countertop, and floor-to-ceiling pantry painted in an exact shade of medium green that matched a leather purse purchased in Italy.  We drank mimosas and ate Cobb salad. The windows and doors were left open. No flies were present and the temperature never deviated from 68 degrees.

We went back into the convertible and drove down the coast and stopped by a new red-tiled resort.  We took a golf cart tour of the property and saw the golf course, the swimming pool, the casalitas, the cabanas wired with wi-fi, the restaurants, and the requisite environmental park, a piece of do-goodiness meant to offset the rapacious materialism and overt gaudiness of the overreaching resort.

In the car, I had a deja vu experience.

30 years earlier, my Uncle B, eminent cardiologist from Glencoe, Illinois, had divorced my Aunt M and absconded to Hawaii with his girlfriend. He then came back to practice in Newport Beach. We went to visit him, and he lustily and happily showed us his new life in Southern California with his stucco covered, cathedral-ceiling home and gleaming white medical office tower overlooking the lushly landscaped luxury shopping mall.

I was young then, but saw coastal California for what it claimed not to be.  Even then knew it was a mere slice,  a dessert topping, a chimera, a dream, a fabrication, a tangible and mythical construction of lies, temporarily seductive, but ultimately unreal, sustainable only by the sheer force of a mind that can block out the state’s vast interior with its suffocating, smoggy heat, and ignoble, sprawling insipidness.

Today, I am back in Van Nuys and the temperature will be close to 100. I will search for a job, and hope I can find a way to make a living, and I will think about that certain Sunday along the ocean.