"My car exploded in a fire."

A man on the Reseda Bus tells everybody that his car exploded in a fire. This happens occasionally on the bus. You find some people who just love to talk to strangers. Thats what riding the bus is all about isn't it? The opportunity to commune with anonymous others?

He wonders if people saw it on the news.

"I had all of my possessions, everything I owned in that car. So I had to go downtown, to one of the missions. It's CRAZY down there. If you've been down there--MAN--some of those people are really crazy!"

Of course, many of the bus riders would say this about him, but I know what he means, because yes I have been down there. It's a homeless ghetto. Thousands of people live on the streets. They live in tents patched with garbage bags. They wander the streets drinking coffee and eating stale donuts dumped outside a Winchells. Some mumble, some scream and a few are so strung out they tear at their clothes as if in a straight jacket.

There is a popular myth that deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill is a major cause of homelessness, but most patients of mental hospitals had left before 1975, ten years before the boom in homelessness. You do not have to read Foucault to realize that the category "mentally ill" is an easy way to devalue the homeless and create a blinder to their experience. Imagine the psychological strain on the most "sane" of individuals after living on the street for a week. I know people who start acting weird if they miss even one night of sleep.

Los Angeles has 90,000 homeless. That's more than the entire population Santa Barbara. Many live in their car, until it explodes, and then they lose everything.