[mark137]

Hi Toby.

So you lived in the Haight in 1973?  I’m curious about what you experienced then.  From all I have read (like from Charles Perry’s A History of the Haight-Ashbury) if you had to choose only one year to live there, 1966 would be it.  I wouldn’t be surprised, since in my humble opinion, that was when the best music was written and recorded (Revolver, especially.)  By the next year, the so-called Summer of Love, the Haight had deteriorated by the influx of thousands of drift-less kids, a far cry from the “original hippies,” like Peter Coyote of the Diggers.

When I first arrived in the Haight, I was introduced to a beautiful young blonde girl who went by the name of “Angel.”  This was because she was seriously strung out on heroin.  We conversed for a couple of hours while I was tripping on LSD.  We kind of connected in an oblique way, sort of like I could see where she was at mentally through the corner of my eye.  She wanted desperately to escape from her “boyfriend.”  Alas, I could offer nothing to her.  It was very very sad.  A real “bummer” trip, if you know what I mean.  It upset me for months.  Eventually, she disappeared.  However, most of the kids I met there were strung out on alcohol, mainly, and were recovering from the death of Kurt Cobain.  I kind of understood, as the murder of John Lennon in 1980 kind of destroyed my faith in humanity for a while.