I should let this go.

I can't let this go.

I put a social worker through grad school. Ever done a homeless count? Me neither. Nor her. Because it's literally a bunch of volunteers going out in the middle of the night and counting people sleeping without a roof over their heads and it struck her as goulish and depressing. She graduated Magna cum Laude from the best (at the time) social work program in the United States and as a 3rd year undergrad engineering intern I made more money than she did at her first job.

Her dad was a Freudian psychoanalyst. He billed out at $350 an hour. 80% of his time was spent counseling the homeless for $35 an hour. He missed the birth of his son because he was six hours away, being the only staff psychiatrist at DSHS in Grays Harbor County one day a week.

Her sister dated a guy I ended up being friends with. His family was a scholarship/grant crew because his dad used his Ph. D. to counsel homeless veterans. Their finances were a patchwork of VA, City and Catholic grants.

Even now my kid is friends with a couple hard-luck adoptees. Their mom is a social worker and foster mom. Both of them have some fetal alcohol syndrome symptoms. Both of them break my heart. She's got three adopted kids, no partner, lives on a social worker's salary and sends her kids to private school.

All these people have more heart than me. All these people have more education than me. All these people care for the homeless more than me. And The Guardian wants you and me to second-guess their wisdom and their motivations.

There's a homeless guy I roll by twice a day down in LA. The "river thug." Far as I can tell, he's been profiled as living on this one island on the LA River since 1989. He's not exactly "homeless"; he's had one home for 28 years. But it has no address, it has no basic services, and in the two years I've seen him he's burned his island down twice. If I need to find the river punk, I go to a section of the river. It's not like I can get him on his phone.

There's a homeless guy I jog past. I saw him a couple hours ago. His face is a little messed up; it'd be a lot messed up if I hadn't called 911 on the three thugs I saw beating the shit out of him in October. I'm sure I'm not the only guy who knows him. He probably interacts with a lot of social services. But I also know that he's probably safer without anybody knowing where to get ahold of him.

You're talking about a population with no permanent address, indigent to the point of starvation, being sent cross-country (or cross-ocean) in an attempt to improve their lot and The Guardian has given you the idea that really, to justify this sort of thing we ought to "follow up." Follow up how? I mean, the Guardian tried; they got a facebook message from a guy who claimed to be doing well. And then the hurricane hit and now they have no idea. My girlfriend's dad had any number of patients where what he knew was where they usually slept. That's it. They weren't exactly on SnapChat.

Here's what I know. There's a bottomless fucking pit of suck associated with the homeless and the people who choose to forego any sort of financial stability to work with them? I'ma give them the benefit of the doubt.

I didn't know Alesando. For all I know he was the guy shooting up under the street light while sitting in a beach chair. Maybe he was the guy I yell at for blitzing by me on a 2-stroke moped at 5 in the morning. Either way, if Alesando had the wherewithal to find social services, demonstrate that he had a hope in hell of doing better somewhere else and talk himself into a bus ticket out, Alesando would have been a national merit semifinalist compared to a lot of the homeless I see.

Homelessness is shitty. Homelessness is a cascading failure. Homelessness is being out of options.

If a bus ticket has even a slight chance of making things better for someone, give 'em a goddamn bus ticket. People often move from places of low opportunity to places of perceived higher opportunity only to discover they're worse off. Then they're stuck because they no longer have the resources to move back. Moving my family of 3 from Los Angeles to Seattle, with two cars and a household of shit, cost a shade under 9 grand. It woulda been hella less if we were living on the street but then, if we were living on the street I couldn't drop half of it on a Visa and whistle merrily away.

The Guardian wants you to second-guess the wisdom and motivations of people who can only be described as over-educated and selfless. They want you to be mad at a collection of individuals that are literally trying to save lives. It makes me mad at The Guardian.

Prior to this article I have wondered whether or not busing is an "easy way out" situation. I honestly don't know, but I can say that it'll probably be something that I wonder about for a while.

You and I both know there's nothing "easy" when dealing with the homeless. Same on The Guardian for making you wonder otherwise.