I came to San Francisco a long time ago. When I first got here in the Psychedelic Age, it was like finding heaven on a hill, Nirvana in Noe, peaches and cream, and the Aurora Borealis.
Losing San Francisco
As time went by, and the psychedelic dust settled, it became quite another city: square, with neat rectangular streets, beautiful parks and sea lions at Fisherman’s Wharf. I stayed anyway since there was nowhere else to go and I still knew some people, though some had died and some had moved away. But there was a job, always a job, and you need a job, no matter how mundane it is, to live. And there was a cottage too with low rent in an acceptable neighborhood. So I stayed.
Finding It Again, Moving on
We all have to move on sometime, whether to another town or state, or by dying. But I’d like to try doing that another way this time. When I move on, when I die, I want to wrap the city around me—a Sufi spinning it up in ecstasy—and trail both the old San Francisco and the new right along with me into the next world. I don’t mind so much the dying. But I really hate to leave home, so I’ll take it along. Better still, using the magic and power of the old San Francisco, rather than leaving at all, I’ll grab heaven itself and wrap it around the city and my psyche in it, and go right on living. Nobody else has to know. Things will change then. We’ll live forever, energy and physical bodies wrapped up together. No messy death. But everybody else will believe it’s always been this way. They won’t have a clue. But I’ll know. And I’ll laugh, loud, with a chuckle in the belly that comes right straight from God.