When I think back to visiting San Francisco, back in the early 1990’s and the street cars attached to wires like giant TV antennas to heaven and the hills looking like a different country and it smelled like Eucalyptus and I didn’t find Janis Joplin in Haight Ashbury, but there were tie-died kids there who were following the Grateful Dead and they were talking about Babylon and our wrong ways, my wrong ways, I felt belittled, but they were barnstormers like Satchel Paige and so I warmed up to them and learned a new vocabulary. Shwag meant shitty weed. And a kind sister was someone to trust and I don’t remember the other terms, but there were many and good for them. I didn’t hop onboard, but it’s great that America offers so many cults to join, baseball being probably the biggest.
And so I stood in the midst of Haight Ashbury, knowing full well, paranoid that I was a square, a sheep in Babylon with a 9-5 slave job, working for the man, paying taxes, and soon a spot in a local cemetery and so I walked on from Haight Ashbury feeling lowly and lonely; I walked through Golden Gate Park and stumbled on a field of buffalo and I had never seen buffalo before and knew very little about them, just that the Plains Indians relied on them for food and building teepees and whatever else and that they thanked the buffalo for dying on their behalf and welcomed them to reincarnate or something like that and I thought about Lyman Bostock and continued, one foot in front of the other, to the windy, breezy, sandy dunes of cold Pacific Ocean and I wondered what was on the other side.
brewers baseball and things 