So many thoughts like logs from the clear cut in Oregon are floating in this languid river flowing uphill in Year 3 of Our Covid with the melting snow bringing more water makes logs jostle together with a strange gurgle on the rocks exposed by the geo-engineered droughts. San Francisco By the Sea ain’t the same old used to be. Neither of course am I. When I moved here food co-ops were still thriving in neighborhoods. Cafes were populated with people actually talking or reading a newspaper -no phone, no lap top-a friendliness and sense of community was still present, anarchist households of 5-10 people held monthly potlucks with music, there was a farm in the Mission, art house movie theaters were all around. Bookstores a plenty with hand picked used books flourished. All this died in the first tech boom.
Everything expensified. Time was for money. Coffee a commodity on the go. Conversation outside of work not sought. A cult of toil triumphed in the City. A corporate cult across the prestigious urban Military-University-Industrial complex of urbanized zones. A mind virus prefiguring Covid hysteria requiring no doctor only more toil.
Still in some the spirit is still strong which is good, my sense of humor remains excellent, side splitting with laughter at my favorite comedy show of Moi, fully visualizing my 35 year trip into the Wilderness of the Left Coast Big City saying No more than yes. I came here interested more in convivality and political engagement in real life than frilthy lucre. And as I moved deeper into my 30’s and knowing without lucre my tenancy in this town was Balmy alley by the mural garages where the junkies go to inject and drunks go to sleep I attended night school to become a paralegal. And I did. So here now I write. No escape from Destiny.
Guardini believed that to be a person is to enter into 1-thou relationships with other human beings and simultaneously to be aware of oneself as a knowing subject.
Ironic really.
Flower people end up working for the man.
Awful for you to witness the end of an era of youthful exuberance.
Just the old music left now. And memories.
Who knew? Do you think that you could have foreseen?
Yeah. We split, and you are right, the dot com thing looked good for the city, lots of high end work, I was in the middle of a remodel in the Marina when it crashed. The job folded, half done. The guy got wiped out. We got paid but it was touch and go. A shame, nice people really caught it, the lash of the prosperous almost.