San Francisco part 2
After such experiences in San Francisco, my head was in the clouds, and when I bothered to check, it seemed my feet were still walking on the ground. But, alas, I was broke, in one of the most expensive cities in the world, no less. The connections that I had made over the weekend were weak at best, as it seemed the whole community, went up and disappeared until the next big party. So I went to look for work as a freelancer? to do whatever. One thing I was sure of, I didn?t want to be tied down and committed to any one M-F, 9-5 job, in any field, for that was the mentality I was trying to escape.
Part of the project and experiment I was working on was the theory and hope I could make my way traveling and pick up enough money working to hang out, and then move on to the next place, a modern nomadic ideal.
My first idea of being a gambling chess hustler on Market Street had mixed results?
as my victories weren?t quite enough to pay the bills for food and lodging.
I checked into many different international youth hostels across the city. I definitely recommend these places as a way of meeting with other travelers from around the world and learn more about different people in different cultures. I hung out with people from all across Europe from Ireland to Italy to Bosnia, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, different parts of the USA, and (of course) Japan.
Whenever I met a guy or girl from trekking from Japan, I always took the opportunity to ask them about anime, especially about Watanabe?s work. I was surprised to learn, from the dozens of Japanese people I spoke to, few of them had even heard of Cowboy Bebop, or Samurai Champloo, and fewer had seen them. Both anime had just a fringe devoted cult following in USA, but I had figured it would be something of a cultural treasure over there. Guess not. So I tried then to impress my friends from the Orient with my rudimentary Japanese language skills, listing the codes of Bushido. They nodded, and corrected my pronunciation, but I they didn?t quite know where I was going. Neither did I, really. I was looking for traveling partners of similar ideologies to join me in my Quest, but in this aside, I suppose, in my secret dreaming heart, I was looking for Fuu? I think.
With all the nationalities representing, I seemed to get on with the Irish the best, and the British the worst? (Loyalist Red-Coats!) just kidding, ya Limeys. But with the Irish it must have been something about our shared ancestral affinity to Fairy Folk. Heh. As I met more and more people from around the world, I began to see the differences in personalities coming through the hostels. The majority were more affluent, tourist-types in their 20s with an outlook that the world is one big pub and club crawl. Good on them, for what that?s worth, but they were only scraping the surface of life?s experiences. It was uncommon to see a traveler of explorer; rarer still was the adventurer.
As I searched the Bay Area for a good paying job, I got the chance to explore the neighborhoods and talk with the people. I got the distinct feeling that the city was going through a cultural lull; whatever was going on with the Technology Boom of the 90s, I had missed by about four years. I saw areas of South Bay where there were streets lined with arcitecually post-modern designed office buildings, with elaborate fountains and sculptures? all empty. With the Tech Bust of the past few years, the had made up a tech office ghost town as the bottomed out industry could no longer afford the lease rates of such buildings.
The days of the revolutionary freelance computer geeks were fading, as corporate jobs became more entrenched.
No, your eyes do not deceive you, that is Jin, in a blink and you miss it cameo in The Boondocks by Aaron McGruder. With this he makes a scathing satirical point of how Japan?s honorable samurai have given up there kimonos and swords in modern times for a suit and tie and briefcase. More on the Corporation in another post?
Having no luck (at that time) to harness my computer skills into a viable money maker, I decide to look elsewhere for work.
So while I was in San Francisco, I worked a variety of odd-jobs to stay float while I pursued my artistic endeavors. To maintain the nomadic wanderer style, I made sure I didn?t commit to any one job as to not be tied down. Over the course of three months worked all over the Bay Area from Marin to San Jose. I moved furniture, busted tile, bartended, stacked cinder blocks, set up banquets, managed alcohol concession stands, landscaped, stacked boxes in warehouses, dug ditches, mailed posters for video game advertising, controlled mosquito populations in cemeteries, buffed tile, installed cash registers, and worked setting up for Cirque du Soleil, and many others I forget (or choose not to remember), but the last one was by far the best, and I very nearly stayed on with the traveling aerobatic French-Canadian circus performers. The pay for these jobs was minimal, but I was happy for the most part, I was meeting a lot of new people from around the world, and though my labor wasn?t even covering my meager living expenses, San Francisco was an exciting city to explore and I still had a sense of adventure and quest to keep me motivated.
During this time I had been reading Jack Kerouac?s On The Road, written in April 1951, a largely autobiographical work, written as a stream of consciousness and based on the spontaneous road trips of Kerouac and his friends across mid-century America, is often considered a defining work of the postwar Beat Generation that was inspired by jazz, Bebop, poetry, and drug experiences. Featured prominently in the book were adventures in San Francisco.
While I was hostelling, I met up with a girl coming from Washington state who was with a guy my age from Australia, who both had similar interests in the book, and Beat Culture of pre-hippy San Francisco. The Aussie told me he even had the same birthday as one of the main characters in On The Road, and viewed himself as a kind of modern incarnation of him, so in the spirit of the book, I?ll use a pseudonym and call him Dean. The dark haired girl with firecracker eyes whom I?ll call Mona, had a sense of American city streetwise, which I could appreciate, mentioned that she, like Dean, was looking to recreate the vibe of traveling and writing like the Beats.
We talked for a while, shared some traveling stories, and soon the three of us were getting along famously. After some time and a few excursions around the city, Dean mentioned that he had acquired a bag of mushrooms, and that he had never tried them before, and he would like us to take them with him, and all together explore parts of the city.
Mona suggested we trip at Golden Gate Park , that sounded great, so that afternoon we hopped on a bus and headed out.
Ah, Golden Gate Park, the scene of many famous Be-Ins of the sixties and the Love Generation. If you were standing in the right place, and the wind caught you right, you could still feel it in the air. We found a spot on the expansive green secluded from the multitudes of colorful characters that inhabited the park, and shared a pipe of herb to set the mood. We shared our intentions of the trip, held hands and had a blessing with incense in a minor hippy-ish ritual, for good fortunes on a good trip. The amount of mushrooms we all took was good enough to get a good head full of swim, but stopped short of seeing dancing bears crawling over you.
A fine dose for an afternoon in the park.
While we were waiting for the onset of the entheogen, we decided to place hackey sack with a group of park going kids (teens and kids at heart in their early twenties). It was a very fun way to pass the time, which can be angst-y on the come-up, and served doubly as a bonding rite. All was going well until a belligerent, intoxicated, grizzled, middle-aged homeless looking vet stumbled in the middle of our circle, ranting and raving and spitting, effectively ending the game. As the other kids took this guy as a sign to move on, I felt a bit of the first wave of mushroom come on, and a newfound sense of courage in the cosmic giggle. I took it upon myself to try and talk this guy out of the circle, that he was interrupting our game. He made violent gestures and ranted how he had MADE the circle back in the sixties with Janis (I presume he meant Joplin) and how he wasn?t going to let punk kids tell him were to go. I stood my ground, and explained to him the peaceful nature of the game, and how he was spoiling a good time. He made a feinted lunge at me; I blinked and smiled. He winked and smiled back.
Yep, the classic ogre with the heart of gold fairy tale. He confided in me that he was Wolverine. I told him that his secret was safe with me, Logan. Shh? not so loud. He walked away smiling, and I knew I had made an ally, which could come in handy because he did look like he had seen some wars and could tear some shit up.
I looked back at Mona and Dean, who were impressed, then fell to the grass looking up at the clouds. That was the little quest/offering to get the trip going well. The clouds did their swirling thing, and I laughed hysterically, fixing on my face a perma-grin. It must have been infectious, because Dean and Mona soon joined me on their backs. The scenes hadn?t gone unnoticed by a bunch of onlookers from the hill, and one came down to check us out. ?"Are you spun?"? he inquired. I looked at the dude, who was upside down, gave him a thumbs-up, which was a thumbs-sideways, which set me off into another giggling fit. He called back to his friends on the hill, ?Yep, he?s spun!?
The three of us then ventured off to explore deeper into the park.
We climbed this really wicked(cool) looking tree, that each of us took turns morphing into.
The three of us went to a small garden at a cul-de-sac, and were met by three Buddhist monks, who had lost their way.
We gave them directions the best we could, and I had a weird sense of deja-vu.
Next, we stopped at Japanese Zen Garden for tea. There was a large stone wheel there in the middle of one of the paths through the intricately placed flowers. It was about 8 or so feet high, I felt so inspired to leap no hands style up and over it, and Dean and Mona followed in suit. As we got to the other side and had our tea, I saw a toddler crawling over the wheel with his parents. Then I saw an elderly lady with a cane, determined to make her way over, which she did. I had a Zen-like Satori flash of insight on the Circle of Life, the kind you get only when your third eye has been stimulated.
We read our fortunes from cookies as we paid tribute to a statue of Peter Pan playing his pipes in a fountain. It was getting dark, and was starting to rain, so we started taking some paths through the woods to get back out of the park. A few turns later, we were lost. I had already had this trip? but a guy named Angel floated in, and showed us the way out. We waited out the drizzle on a bench under a tree, and watched ball lightning electrify the sky as if it was a fireworks show just for us.
We headed back to the hostel? A very fun trip.
I mention this trip, because it was a moment of harmony, one of the last I would have for quite some time. Things just went downhill after that, gradually at first, than suddenly steep. My grandmother had just passed away, there were family problems at the funeral I went to back in Canada, and financial problems back in San Francisco, as no jobs could even come close to supporting my very meager existence. The trio that had formed day all went their separate ways.
Before splitting up we had a chance to recapture the magic we found that day, and I offered them a red pill/blue pill choice. Literally and figuratively, by coincidence. We had a chance of tripping another day on some goodies I had acquired in my wanderings in Haight St. In one hand, I had a bag of mushrooms, which were twinged slightly blue, and I said we could take them and trip around Golden Gate Park again. In my other hand, I presented a vial with 3 hits of acid that was colored red. We could take that, and see where the adventure takes us, and I would tell them about my quest? and I would have offered them the invitation to join forces. They chose the blue mushrooms. So we went around Golden Gate Park in what played out like a repeat? strange, empty of the magic and spark that was vibrantly flowing through our first trip; this one felt hollow. I don?'t blame either of them or hold grudges: It just wasn?t meant to be and I was crushed.
There were numerous other factors that compiled to make me leave. Missed connections, fleeting friendships; in the city if you aren?t liked nearly immediately by someone with a strong first impression, you?re passed over for someone more agreeable; a grim homage to the facelessness that overpopulation brings. There was a general lack of resources to stay afloat. Maybe in the end, it was the weather: it was getting cold, and for me it was time to blow this scene to warmer climes, so I got all my stuff together shouldered my pack, and got on a bus and, 3,2,1 jam down to San Diego.
