Be sure to wear a flower in your hair...and carry a big stick

1/7/08 - University of California - Berkeley Campus

The thing about America is that it's really fucked up. But it is also amazing. It is full of vagrants and miscreants and strange possessed characters. A street flooded with crack addicts and alcoholics is not considered abnormal. I would love to know the story behind the bloodshot eyes and withered faces - many of these guys look like extras from a zombie flick. In my brilliance, I managed to book a hostel in the middle of the Tenderloin, which as I found out on my arrival, is a big mistake, for it is basically skid row. As I walked with my heavy and awkward bags up uncompromising hills, I could see poverty and tragedy in every badly lit alley and street. This is a part of the city that has been taken over by those who are truly beat and despairing. As I walked up one street I saw a drunken homeless man urinate on a car - welcome to San Francisco, I thought.

Fortunately, I had another hostel booked for the next three nights, and I have moved onto the nautically-themed Pacific Tradewinds hostel, which is caught between the financial district, Chinatown and North Beach. Staying at this little backpacker place, at the top of 3 flights of stairs which it shares with the Chinese restaurant next door, has been a truly bizarre experience. It is full of fascinating, and sometimes saddening stories. One girl, Veronica, is supposed to be getting married in 3 days, but she has fled to San Francisco. She has only just turned 18, and why on earth she would be wanting to get married at that age is incomprehensible to me, especially when her boyfriend dropped out of high school, is unemployed and is getting his income through what she referred to as 'other means'. From Arizona, she bears an uncanny resemblance to the classic archetype of the San Francisco runaway. 41 years ago, during the Summer of Love, there were 70,000 like her, most of whom were also on the run from something, and all of which had the own complicated past. Somehow, Veronica has managed to get herself into an extremely messy situation before she has even started university. Her family is trying to convince her to come home, but I don't think she has any intention of satisfying them.

Another girl has dropped out of college in North Carolina to pursue acting in California, to the horror of her parents. She seems passionate about what she is doing, but there also appears to be a lot of poorly hid insecurities under the surface, as if there were more to her story that she isn't telling.

Barry, a South African from Perth, works for his board at the hostel and hasn't been home in almost two years. He is escaping from what he described as a 'not happy time' back in Australia. Everyone here seems to be on the run from something, or on some sort of spiritual quest. Many at the hostel are dabbling in various forms of yoga or other eastern practices, which is hardly unusual given San Francisco's history of spiritual experimentation, dating beyond the beats and the hippies, who held as holy texts the I-Ching and Bhagavad Gita. The sad thing is, putting miles between themselves and their problems is not going to help them in the long run. Eventually these tortured souls of North Beach are going to have to deal with the shadows that follow them around, shackled to them like stones. The boys and girls of America are truly lost.

3/7/08 - Denver Airport

FYI - The Department of Homeland Security just raised the threat level to orange. Also, this airport is freaking huge.

Yesterday I walked around the Haight, which is full of dirty hippies who have absolutely nothing to offer. Ken Kesey would be rolling in his grave, for these people have no interesting ideas about life or how to change the world or their own consciousness - they spend too much time practically comatose. They have totally missed the point of the whole counterculture movement, while they sleep in its cradle, defiling it with their presence. Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park was awash with pot smokers, who are all trying to push their sub-standard green. Presumably the San Francisco Police Department must have more pressing concerns than worrying about a bunch of stoners.

I took a walk up Buena Vista Park, which was absolutely worth the climb - with the fog rolling in across the bay the view was magnificent. The most interesting thing about the Haight Ashbury, though, is being able to catch a glimpse, through recreating secondary memories, of what it was like 42 years ago. Aside from that, there isn't really much to differentiate it from any other strip of vintage clothes stores and smoke shops.

After surveying the out there weirdness of San Francisco, it seems to me that America is constantly in a state of civil war. The crazy, earnest left fight for survival against the equally demented and frighteningly sincere religious right, and in between there are a few thoroughly petrified people caught in the middle. Everything is taken so seriously here.

Looking around the airport, people are all going to so many different places - Topeka, Louisville, New York. There is such an energy about America, fueled by its bewilderingly massive infrastructure and the sense that everything is always moving.