Today was our first true day exploring skid row, 
which is 50 square blocks that is home to four to six thousand homeless people. One of my favorite parts was walking through the skid row streets themselves. The streets were dirty and covered in trash, tents, and sleeping and sitting people, but it w as sunny and you could see some subtle beauty and rhythm in it all (this is where you call me naïve). I thought about how no matter where, there s a natural flow to how people self organize, an unspoken structure. People claim territories and there are certain things you do and don’t do and all the locals understand it. And to people like us, floating through, this is invisible.
Of course the same thing happens in language, too – it takes one generation to form grammar rules and sentence structure in a makeshift language. During the boom of slavery in the States, slave 
owners would purposefully get slaves from different parts of Africa, so that they couldn’t converse and for together. The slaves suffered unimaginable isolation (among other things), and communicated as best they could in a language that was a mix of their own. But their children would form a fully coherent language out of that, complete with grammar. Some linguists say that this is because our brain is wired to hold grammar structure, which makes learning language when we’re young so easy. Thinking about the imperceptible rules and laws on skid row, I wonder if humans in general thrive off of invisible structure.
*The images are from a grafitti mural I liked a few blocks up from skid row
