I have a close friend who works with people who have serious addictions. They for the most part have no homes, no families, few friends if any, and a complete incapacity to care for themselves. The shelter, if you want to call it that, happens to be the last refuge these people have to living on the streets, and there are a lot of people where I live who live on the streets. Ireland by the way is a pretty rainy country, cold, wet, miserable and grey. I have other pals getting out of here because they can’t face another awful winter here. These are active highly qualified productive types with jobs and marriages and a complex social web. So here, where I am, you need shelter. You lose shelter, its turtles all the way down. So awful is the predicament of these people, the shelter people, the wretched, that some of them have been ejected from mental institutions for various reasons. So if they lose their place where they are, basically they got nothing. They aren’t able to care for themselves. No bedrock of social connections. Just dead friends. You can imagine what happens next. Ireland, as it becomes increasingly rich as opposed to wealthy (how many of our homegrown industries appear on the stock exchange? You got Ryanair, but what else?) is experiencing a catastrophic dearth in housing generally. Not only that buts its really hard to buy a house unless you have either a government job, a profession or some really good connections. I have other friends with advanced degrees who can’t get mortgages because they go from one short term contract to the next. A huge row erupted in the Dáil (that’s the Irish Parliament) recently where it was repeatedly claimed as one minister yelled at another, that we have ‘an eviction rate equivalent to the rates during the Irish Famine’. Dramatic stuff. So it’s bad. Some of the people you meet who sleep on the streets are rather delightful too. Witty, intelligent, thoughtful and so on. I spent an hour or so chatting with a younger man with a huge scar on his handsome chiseled face yesterday about eight thirty pm as I walked the dogs. We talked about the various characters we meet in the streets and how society hides behind an absurd mask of sanity, and how the normalization of our culture has been the death of creativity. Beckett wrote about people like my scarred friend. He could be a Murphy. Or an Estragon. He too had to have had family. As I pass him each morning and as he sips his tea and we greet each other I think of Dostoyevsky’s words about how we treat the most vulnerable represents most keenly who we really are. Smart guy. And that is all, I think.