Engineer of Safe Havens
On her first day at the Harris School, seven-year-old Alice Elinor Hays told her seatmate Sadie at recess that she might as well begin by stating her situation, then explained where she lived, offered her parents’ and housekeeper’s names, and said she intended to be class Monitor. After Sadie failed to respond, Alice conceded this had been probably enough information for the time being, and that if Sadie or the boy who was eavesdropping beside her wanted more, they would each have to do without.
Eight years later when she was fifteen, she told Sadie she had long cherished their time together for how it had helped her sift out her own insights from the general way of thinking and discover what there was of the real Alice. She added she had by that point accepted that she was different physically and socially, unusually tall and sharp-featured, and perhaps too intense and judgmental for …
Art is Dead in Frisco
The freewheeling spirit of Jack London, the Beats, and the Grateful Dead has departed from these shores.
Autistic tech barons and fentanyl addicts have snuffed out the glories of City Lights.
Except of course for spoken-word “poetry,” which must be cleansed of all potentially offending words and is subject to a strict 3-minute time limit.
Will Elon’s robots write poems about electric sheep? It’s doubtful.
In a recent article for the San Francisco Examiner, the free thrice-a-week newspaper, critic Max Blue argued that art was dying in SF. That news should have come as no surprise to readers and citizens from Pacific Heights to the Mission District. After all, the city itself is dying from the inside out. Nothing short of an economic miracle can save it, though Mayor Daniel Lurie is trying by making it a kind of free-for-all zone where cannabis dispensaries can legally sell food and alcohol along with weed. Year-round, chefs concoct new and exotic dishes to lure gourmets to tables, and bartenders invent cocktails to vie with the pisco sour, which Peruvians brought here when they came to prospect for gold.
Ever since the Gold Rush, the mega-event that put San Francisco on the map of the world, citizens here have never been reluctant to consume anything they can pour down their throats, insert …
Hippie Hell Week
Welcoming the Great White Buffalo has been an American tradition since 1972.
I lose my ladylove to a mescaline-laced cake, but am kept calm by Orthodox Jews who serve me vegan pizza.
Masturbating in front of little kids is uncool.
As I do most mornings, I awoke to the sight of a girthy, well-proportioned member. But on this particular morning, July 3rd, 2026, it wasn’t mine. The appendage in question belonged to a long-haired, bald-crowned hippie in his thirties named David, who was squatting a few feet from my tent with a diabolical grin, entirely nude. He’d evidently been holding that position for a while, waiting for me to unzip my tent fly.
“Heard you stirring in there.” David said. “Mind doing a tick check?”
Considering the circumstances, a tick check wasn’t unreasonable. Last night, David, another hippie woman named Krystyna, and I had hauled our suitcases, tents, sleeping bags, and other camping gear through several miles of Pennsylvania’s tick-ridden swamps and thickets in total darkness. Eventually David and I, abandoning all hope of finding our destination, set down our bags in some horrid bog and declared …
