invisible demons

San Diego, the dog walking capitol of the world. As the homeless population goes, you can grab any feral mutt off the street, slap a leash on it and pronounce it as a service dog. San Diego skid row, a sea of con artists and shameless fakers. Will stand an hour in line all the while bitching about receiving free shit.

Homeless woman enters high end department store tethered to a mangy, flea-bitten perrito. A sales clerk approaches, scowls from the encroaching smell. “I am sorry, ma’am. You are not allowed in here with that…animal.”

“Fuck that shit! This my service dawg! Who you to tell me where I can’t go with my dawg! Fuck you, mutherfucker!”

Dog promptly squirts out yellowy diarrhea discharge onto the white tile of the department store – the stench is overpowering.

And the junkies! I can't describe the outright condescension of these addicts. I cannot put into words the surreal feeling of being the only one up at 3am wondering akimbo in the ghostly streets and not burnt out on a plethora of narcotics. Every day, hell every hour is an entertaining freak show. Depressing to say the least, but entertaining.

Grizzled white man perhaps early twenties sits in own filth. Bare feet black, long toes shiny over the dirt. Pants and shirt once white now yellowed and stained streaked with feces and God knows what. Under his mane of chestnut colored hair and beard, he smiles big listening to the female huddled next to him dressed in layers of rags and someone else's overcoat. Her skin a mass of scars and open sores from a myriad of addictions. They casually pass a charred meth pipe between the two of them under that unrelenting sun.

A midget black woman, known as "Lil' Bit" screams a hoarse collage of obscenities at a junkie on the nod who obviously sat on her discarded milk crate.

Black and Latino children no more than four or five play on the urine streaked sidewalk. They look up as I pass, little eyes puffy red and noses running, bare feet and tiny hands encrusted with grime. "Hi, mister!"

Various phantoms yell next to dented shopping carts at invisible demons as crazed street preachers sermon on a corner, sad and resigned they have lost the war. God packed up his gear and left a long time ago.

And always the cry for cigarettes. Either to give or to take. "Cigarettes! Four dollars a pack! Singles four a quarter!"
If I only had even a quarter...