In ancient Greece a daemon was  good or malevolent "supernatural beings between mortals and gods, such as inferior divinities and ghosts of dead heroes" 

 In Hawaii, they seem to be our Homeless and Addicted and Mentally ill. 

I was driving to work-out the other day [is that an oxymoron?] and saw in my peripheral vision a man dressed all in black, walking across some grass. He appeared to be one of the many, many methamphetamine addicts we have here in Hawaii. Nobody really looked at him and he looked at nobody; it was like watching someone from another dimension accidently cross my own.

There are a lot of homeless people here in Hawaii for a variety of reasons. Hawaii is one of the most expensive places to live in the U.S. We have a ferocious meth problem here. ["Don't even try it once!" warn the constant ads. But somehow, they all did.] The weather is always nice so people can live outside 365 days a year, unlike say, Chicago. We have three brand new homeless shelters that remain empty because they have rules that nobody wants to follow: No drugs. No alcohol. Nobody sleeps in them.

 So they live and sleep and shoot up and drink in an almost separate space than those of us working, driving kids to events, going to a movie. I have several homeless people I give money to. I don't care what they do with it. When my inner voice prods me to give, I give. Those particular people don't live in my periphery and seem to be living in the same place as I do. But to others they are invisible, I can see it in the faces in the cars around me.

They become active ghosts, a lot of them. We don't make eye contact because they might ask for money or swear at us or rage at us. We protect our children from them. They are so bored or mentally ill or high they talk constantly to invisible people who I guess live on a level not visible to the rest of us, though quite visible to the 21st century daemons. So there are layers around us at all times and sometimes we see those who pass by and sometimes we don't. It's a bit like Dante's Hell. With palm trees.

These ghosts took over the beaches. They took over the parks. Finally the local government had to do something because people from Chicago do not want to spend thousands of dollars on their one Hawaii vacation and not be able to go to a park or a beach or walk down the street without being accosted. Up went the homeless shelters that the homeless refuse to use. Sweeps of beaches and parks. New loitering and camping rules were instituted. The signs say: Park closed from 10:00pm - 6am. So there is a constant march of men and women, marching like a game of tropical musical chairs on the island. When the music stops they bed down in a new spot for the night. 

I watched my modern daemon dressed in black walking on the green grass. He looked like a charcoal sketch in motion, almost two dimensional. It made me believe in ghosts and space aliens that supposedly walk amongst us naive humans, living their own lives, watching us, unwatched themselves. He was like another swatch of paint on an oil painting of an average day surrounded by average people. Layered colors, black swatches. He marches to get his next fix. It is not out of the question that someday that could be me. There are no guarantees, only surprises. The light turns green and someone honks behind me.