Feel good story..

[GenuineRisk]

Originally Posted by Danzig

as a vet, i feel he's entitled to the services that we can give him. too bad he turns many of them down.

He may be mentally ill. There was a piece on longform.org, originally in a CA newspaper about a formerly homeless man who, due to winning money in a discrimination suit he won against the city, was able to rent out a reasonably nice apartment. The piece detailed the lawsuit the building took up against him to evict him- some of the things they used against him is that he would never wear shoes in the building's common area and that he had a very strong odor. As a reader, I was thinking, 'For the love of Pete; just put on some damn shoes and take a bath so they'll leave you alone!" but mental illness is a tough thing, especially because it can also be so hard to diagnose and can manifest in so many ways, including things that seem so ridiculous, like not wearing shoes.

When I was in college, there was a guy who set up a fort made of books right outside my apartment building (back when the East Village was still called Alphabet City). He slept in a cardboard box and had hundreds of books piled around him. Very nice guy to talk to; talked about his own college days, and yet there he was, homeless and living in a box with his books.

I'll put up the link to the longform article if I can ever track it down again. It was an interesting read, because I wasn't really sure whose side I was on.