Vero Beach

Man there are some interesting people down here in Florida. That is to say, there are interesting people everywhere but in Florida they seem to swarm, like somebody's taken a stick and swirled it around in the crazy people hive. Maybe it's the heat that does it, I don't know. More than anything, I guess, it's just that there are a lot of homeless, and most of them are eager to claim me as one of their own. One man had just gotten his weekly allowance from the Salvation Army and was eager to buy me a sandwich. "You's gotta eats whatcha can, brother," he said with a big grin, laying it down at my feet as I read a book by headlamp in the muggy evening. I ate it, yes, though I'm pretty sure he needed it more than me, because it seemed to make him happy to help me out. When everyday is a struggle to fend for yourself, I guess, sometimes it feels good to feel that you can still lend somebody else a hand, too, as if you're not quite at the bottom of the rung. Hospitality is hit and miss with the sun burnt men who carry around plastic bags filled with their clothes, but mostly lately I've been looked upon with pity.
How I view myself is hit and miss, as well, anymore. I still understand where it is that I come from, still remember home and my comfortable life clearly, but every day that I'm shunned more and more by rich white women in Bentleys and embraced more and more by the haphazard and the toothless I question where I really fit in. Homeless, perhaps, is a state of mind as much as it is anything else.
On a different note, the sprinklers, my old nemesi, have caught up with me. Saturday night, spread out on the grass in front of a library, I awoke abruptly to the terrifying sound, and within seconds was drenched with cold water. I dragged my sleeping bag and my pack to the sidewalk and angrily set up again where I thought it was safe, only to be reminded, half an hour later, that sometimes sidewalks are sprinkled more heavily than the grass. Now I know for sure that the trip is fully underway.
Sorry if I seem a little downtrodden. My spirits are good, I swear, it's just that I'm still struggling to acclimate to this new course of direction. But I'm still waving at cars, still singing my marching songs loudly as I go down the road. No regrets that I'm here, none at all.