Stand By Me

The stupidity of daily life everywhere

I am still wrapping my head into heavy medicine post-Covid in San Francisco by the sea. Just imagine my bill without insurance for my wife's brain surgery and hospitalization-$160,000. Surely any other expense incurred is trivial.

And wrapping the head around almost 66 years of life in USA and wrapping that into world history from San Francisco vantage point. “Passage my soul to San Francisco” said Walt after he had initiation into the Mushroom Mystery with Swami Beyonda Ganja.

The famous suppressed sixteen cycle Fairy Poems of Whitman greatly influenced by Browning were shared with four people one of whom was a customer of Bibliophile Rare Books in the Castro. Walt documented and dictated like a sleeping prophet to the mysterious Ef who got City Lights to publish.

Walt described in minute detail eleven weeks in 1945, when one block uphill from my studio apartment, the Fairmont was the Capital of the World hosting delegates from more than forty nations representing eighty percent of the world’s population to write the United Nations Charter. On June 26, 1945, President Harry Truman signed the new Charter. At about the same time, financier and philanthropist Benjamin Swig purchased fifty-four percent of the Fairmont for $2 million which he described as follows: “When I bought the hotel, it was obsolete. It was more of an apartment house for the extremely rich, many of whom were characters in the true sense of the word. It was rundown and neglected. The plumbing was bursting – we had ten to fifteen leaks a day – there was no carpet on the floor and the whole thing was just an old ladies home.”