8:00 a.m. I woke up my girlfriend. We spend some time together and get ready for the day.
10:00 a.m. I drove over to the library in Salem. I spend some time working on Uploading videos in the car on the phones.
11:30 I walk over to the meal at Lifebridge. After lunch I head back to the library to work on things.
3:00 p.m. I get bored and decide to walk around Salem. I get some food from Steve’s market and say hi to some homeless friends hanging out in the center of town. I walked over to check on the tent city. I walked down the shopping center and stopped and gave Cryin Mike five bucks. I talk to Mike. While I’m talking to Mike, my friend Joey and his friend Steve who is homeless walk up with their guitars. They’ve been busking in the street. I get a recording of one of their songs. I hang out with these guys for a while and then I go back over to Lifebridge to get dinner.
6:00 p.m. I go back to the library. I get a call back from Cryin Mike. Mike tells me that I can stay at his camp tonight. I walk from the library and I meet Mike outside Mandy’s Pizza. Mike and I walk a short distance to his camp which is in a wooded area up a hill near the Salem Hospital. Mike and I hang around an unlit fire. Mike gives me an audio interview. It’s super cold so we go in the tents. I stay in an almost collapsed tent with a bunch of sleeping bags and pillows in it. From my tent I can hear Mike playing “in the arms of angels” on his cell phone. I found out that my new friend Sean was given some bad dope and overdosed and is now in the intensive care unit. I believe it is Sean’s tent that I’m staying in.
HINDSIGHT: 10/14/2025
Remembering back on this day, there’s a lot I left out. I got one of the best pictures of the whole project this day, when a woman gave Cryin Mike a few 20 dollar bills. Mike broke down crying and hugged this woman, and I got the shot right at that moment. Cryin Mike and I had been talking about me staying at his camp with him. I felt bad that he was all alone, and sad all the time. It broke my heart the state that Cryin Mike was in, but I couldn’t fix his problems. Cryin Mike was bound to Salem, because the woman he loved, and had a child with lived in the shelter. They had both received housing together, then lost their housing and lost their son according to Mike. The love of Mike’s life was now shacked up with another man in the shelter, that was known to sell drugs, and commit other kinds of petty crimes to come up in the street. Mike told me he was banned from the shelter for fighting with the man that stole his woman away. It was an all together sad story. Mike could leave Salem and take shelter in another town, but preferred to stay living outside in Salem in hopes one day his woman took him back.