Monday, October 15, 2007

Haightful behavior

You shouldn't hang out in my neighborhood unless you like revisionist hippies who were born long after the Summer of Love (a period of peace and harmony that revolved around the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets and lasted --- according to cultural historians -- for approximately three and a half seconds.) I don't understand the embittered people who skulk around the Haight just so they can scrap with helpless hippies. The other day I was hanging around near the organic food store -- the same one where I knocked the strawberries into the street -- and I saw a small bulldog of a man screaming at a hippie who had asked him for spare change.
"I won't give you a handout,'' said the bulldog man. "I'm not the government.''
"The government takes money away from me and gives me nothing,'' said the hippie.
"But I'm not the government so leave me alone.''
"But if you're not the government, why don't you just give me money anyhow?''
The conversation devolved to the point where the bulldog man started threatening to stab the hippie in the neck with a set of car keys!
Anyhow, the point of the story is: if you dislike people who smoke Thai stick while wearing pilled-up alpaca sweaters and walk the streets in packs of 11 or 12 people while carrying ferrets and walking huge clumps of dogs tied to leashes made out of hemp, you might want to go somewhere else. Personally, I have no problem with these behaviors. After all, I'm from Santa Cruz.

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