It was early evening, a couple hours before sunset when the heat is fierce and the sun puts a little extra whoosh in the heat. The pavement was black and sucked the heat the Sun was blasting, storing it for later release ensuring the night could never accurately be described as cool. It would not be.

There was traffic as always. Cars, trucks, busses, and moto cycles all racing and sliding along in the rush to get home to the wife, the kids, the dog, the snake or the ubiquitous television. Home to familiarity and comfort. Safety too.

But the man, at least I’m pretty sure it was a man, he obviously had no home at all. No wife. No kids. No dog. No snake , no television and absolutely no safety. Familiarity he obviously had in abundance. He had been doing this a long time.

He was wearing at least one ski cap, maybe two, on top of at lease on baseball bype of hat and his short dark hair stuck out chopped at short angles as if someone had shoved straw under his headware in an imitation of regular hair. It looked brittle and stiff and dead.

I wouldn’t hazard a guess at the original colours of the shirts he was wearing. They were all, and I could plainly see evidence of at least four of them encasing his skinny body in a uniform worn down and bled dry of any actual colour to a dull greyish green that absorbed no light.

At least three pairs of pants were cinched about his waist and I’ll be jiggered if he didn’t have plastic bags stuffed, and I mean jam packed to the point plastic had mushroomed out the bottom of his pants plastiforming inot a modern day exoskeleton completely encasing his feet and shoes, hard and inflexible. I’m pretty sure the outer pair anyway, were Levi’s.

I don’t know why I noticed or remembered that.

He was a small man with small grimy hands. Five foot seven would be a generous estimate of his height.

The Plastic Man crossed the wide hot intersection slowly and it’s no wonder he did. This is what really ftruck me about this one out of the multitudes of homes people I see every day.

With one are, bent at the elbo and covered to his wrist by multiple sleeves, he pushed a shopping cart loaded to epic proportions. Weve all seen the bag ladies wit ha cart full of plastic bags and we’ve all seen the gleaners who collect and recycle bottles nad cans and we’ve all, rarely, seen the truly mentally disturbed. This man was a charter member of the mentally disturbed club.

The cart before him would put an overloaded caravan camel to shame. Stacked two full feet above his head, bulging out on the right and on the left, girded fore and aft, he could see neither before nor beside, only the few inches in front of his shuffling plastic-bound feet. It was the only place he looked.

The care he pulled behind was, if anything, even more heavily laden. Front, back, sides, the basket filled again high above his head. Plastic bags stuffed into plastic bags stuffed into plastic bags. There were doubtless thousands of plastic bags filling to cargo holds of his lost ships.

With his arm trailing behind him, his body contorted into what I can best describe as a convoluted half twist, he pulled the second heavier cart while pushing the first one before him..

This little plastic stuffed man, not one of those industrious aluminum can hunters or one of the recently made homeless still carting pieces of a dead life with them refusing to let go of the past because thy have no yet realized that those previous existences, relationships, jobs, friends, are no more. No, this man was one of those who as mentally misfiring. Hard.

He was not new to the street. Anyone who has lived in a city of any size at all sees the varying degrees of homelessness daily. He had been trapped between what he had piled in front of himself and so must always push and by what he had accumulated and piled behind himself and so he must forever pull. Pulling, pushing, never seeing more than the next six inches of ground before him.

Seeing all of that, the Sun going down, the heat on the street, all the cars wit hall the people and all their stories I thought, ‘Wow, is that me? Is that a metaphor for what I and many others, in an effort to fail, and I must admit I did not think myself the solo sufferer of Plastic Man Malady, do we create so many obstacles and imaginary boundaries, intentionally blinding myself, ourselves, piling so high and wide and deep the crap that a cart is needed to push them, house them as both fortress and battering ram against…what? What was his fight? What was mine?’ I paused to ponder.

The cart behind, the one even more heafily burdened, but still brought along, never out of sight, rarely out of physical contact, full of so much pain and :cens0r::cens0r::cens0r::cens0r:, but so familiar, so painfully comfortable, tearing him limb from limb, unable to see before or behind or to either side because of the barriers he’d, (I’d, and that’s an unpleasant thought) erected, the blinders he had put on, the great plastic bags walls he had built between himself and the cruel world he only saw six inches at a time as he slowly shuffled his time from one dreary day to the next dreay day, never seeing the sun of feeling the wind or having contact with other men. Walking alone and lonely through a world that didn’t see him now and would mark his passing not at all.

Was I dong that? Did I not do that? Have I done that? Anseres to those questions require honest introspection and much contemplation. They hit very close to home. I may be, to me, a million time better off, but how different are the Plastic Man and I really: Or he to you?