Memories of a trip with my parents.

Right before I moved in the fall, I met my parents in a college town in the state where I'm from, since it was halfway between us and we could get hotel rooms with separate airspaces and do stuff with masks like campus museums and still go around and eat outside and keep everyone safe, what with the pandemic and all still going on and them being part of the vulnerable elderly population.

Once, when we were walking around, we passed by this sub shop, where for some reason a window had been smashed and there was this plywood going up.

"Someone must have been hungry," my dad was like.

Overall, my parents were very disturbed by the homelessness they saw, like when we walked by a doorway and my dad almost tripped over the legs of a couple who were sitting there holding each other under a blanket with their legs sticking out into the sidewalk, or when we passed by someone laying out, howling, or he was standing outside having a smoke and someone really disturbed passed by.

The first night we were in town, too, we had lunch at a tavern outside, and our (young) (white) (gay-ish) waiter, besides saying "No way!" when I described to him some of the crime that had developed and the things I'd been seeing in the city that I was then living in, he was saying that some crime was up in the (yuppie) downtown there in that college town, but it was mostly homeless-on-homeless panhandling turf battles.

Like, the previous weekend on a Friday afternoon, a lady had gotten stabbed at a nearby corner out in the street, just right there in the middle of this (yuppie) college town.

"In [town name]?!", my one professor friend who studies (modern) (Czech) literature was like, when I told her that story.

She was really in disbelief, as were we!

I think basically that homelessness was up there, since it drew off of surrounding urban areas.

During that trip, too, we were standing outside and admiring some murals, and a guy unloading his truck nearby happened to be a city council member, and we chatted with him for a bit and he said that his friend was a mental health doctor at a nearby hospital system, and though there were always waitlists, there was nothing like they waitlists they had since the pandemic really got going, that they were massive and people just really needed help.