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.