homeless hot spot

This morning, I woke up at my boyfriend's house. As I left the building and walked outside, then walked diagonally through the famous Haight/Ashbury intersection, I realized just how many young travellers really are somewhat permanent residents of the haight. People still gravitate to San Francisco (specifically the epicenter of 60s hippy culture) even today. I saw about 30 or more, they all smelled terrible and had hella dogs, just chillin and sitting around on the streets. I'm not talking shit, I don't mind these people, and I do think space must be made for them in our society. I'm just not going to pretend like they're doing something important or relevant when they're just bums.

95% of the businesses on Haight street are only open from about 12-7pm, so in case you're ever in the area outside that specific limited block of time, you'll see a whole other side of haight street full of panhandlers, homeless runaways, drug addicts, and broke down hippies who are still living the dream. Basically, any time outside of peak shopping hours, when the most amount of tourists/shoppers are in the area, the haight looses its luster. Most of the time, walking down the street at night is tiresome for a beautiful, young, preppy gay guy like myself. I'll never understand why everyone thinks I have so much money to spare. To quote Miss New York, "Do I look like I give a fuck? Cause I don't!"

By travellers, I mean young homeless people who decide that the American dream doesn't apply to his or her life's vision. Jobless and without responsibility or conformity, they travel around the country together through various means and methods. Most of these people, if not squatting inside one of the actual thousands of already abandoned buildings throughout the area, squat in parks or even on the streets, basically anywhere they can set up a bed for the night. In many ways, I admire their ability to live so outside accepted norms and institutions, choosing to totally ignore the dominant capitalist ideology.

The thing about living that kind of lifestyle, especially if you're young, is that you're constantly travelling and moving through different places. It seems like an exciting opportunity to live life to its fullest, and do whatever you want whenever you want, which usually seems to be nothing. Nothing can still be a welcome release, especially if you have nothing to look forward to, don't want to go to college, and don't see working a bullshit minimum wage job as something you could handle doing. Some people may think it's glamorous, but it's nonetheless depressing. It seems like they're all on drugs (huge surprise) and stuck in a rut of some sort, that seems almost impossible to break once enacted. Obviously, if one has been unemployed for long periods of time, it will not be easy to find a new job as soon as you want to go legit again, cause sleeping on the street just got a little bit too uncomfortable.

For about 2 years, I lived about a 15 minute walk away from Hippy Hill. For those of you who don't know, it's the area across the street from the end of haight, and it's basically the place to go for drugs (weed, shrooms, LSD, DMT, + more, but those are what people usually go there for), and in fact many tourists come here on a daily basis expecting to buy these substances. Because I was out of a job for such a long period of time back then, and because I often don't want to really do anything aside from hang out and get as high as I can each day, I started hanging out there a lot! It was so close, and always offered some sort of entertainment, although I did see many sad things, such as fights all the time, arrests all the time, and even a case of abducted children living in the park (although it wasn't the only time I saw people living in the park with kids, and then of course get in trouble for it). I made friends with drug dealers and homeless people, who gave me valuable insight into other ways of life, and "flying below the radar."

However, after a while, the glamor of the alternative began to fade rather quickly when I began to realize how sad that kind of lifestyle really is. There's no opportunity for improvement, without playing into capitalism, your life can not possibly evolve. The thing about doing nothing is you never know when you're done doing it. It makes me really sad to watch people destroy their lives, day after day through alcohol, drugs, depression, and undiagnosed mental disorders. At the same time, I can understand their unwillingness to conform to capitalism standards which are in and of themselves, evil and exploitative. What can the government do? The money has to come from somewhere.

Hippy Hill and Haight street's homeless populations are very different from the kinds of homeless in other districts of the city. For example, the tenderloin homeless are the closest to death, and usually on hard drugs such as heroin, speed, crack and ocs. You can go to Pill Hill at any time and be offered OCs from homeless on the streets, usually the OC dealers do it out of a wheelchair. Next time you're in the tenderloin, take a look at one of the omnipresent wheelchairs, guaranteed within the next few minutes the drug dealer and addict will exchange white pills for cash. The homeless in haight ashbury are usually younger, and doing mainly psychedelics. I love how different kinds of homeless can be found throughout different areas of San Francisco. It just gives San Francisco so much more personality!

I guess I was inspired by Tales of Young Urban Squatters, by Claire Bursch.