My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

(a 4th grade level photoshop job and a story written by me trying to make a sentence as hard to read as Cormac McCarthy’s)

I walk around the city streets and we got people driving around in city issue pick up trucks grabbing the junk people in apartments so butted up to each other a pigeon couldn’t shit between neighbors leave out on the edge, the high edge, of the curb – where other city workers paint colors on to tell you “No Parking”, “30 MINUTE ONLY” and other bad motoring news.

It’s all day long, someone sets a chair on the street. Someone comes by and looks it over, picks it up to walk a few blocks with it, then thinks twice. He sets it down and if those city trucks aren’t quick, someone else will pick up the chair and bring it back inside out of the waste stream. But for how long? Possibly years. Possibly hundreds of years. All of us have a little street trash in us. A book here, an end table there.

Those city workers hopping out of trucks like cowboys chasing down a stray calf grab anything close to that thin red-painted “No Parking” strip rubbed in black splotches by curbed tires have dark blue union suits, one big zipper all that stands between them and whatever fecaljuice dust they’ve spent a shift collecting on themselves picking up what no one in the city could use – crusted kitty litter trays, moldy boxes from basement storage, abandoned camps of homeless tramps.

But the point is I’m not a hippy. I walk around 16th and Valencia and there are two wars our country is fighting on the ground somewhere – with an all volunteer army – and I can’t even tell. Things feel good. I’m making money. Everyone seems to be making money. Guys are selling hot dogs wrapped in bacon on little four wheeled carts like any ice cream hawker would covet if he found himself suddenly in the cold North Coast of California and no one was buying Choco Tacos or that one with the bunny face. That guy is making money.

I’m like, “Where are all the hippies?” How did we get to hating hippies so much? All they wanted to do was stop a war and listen to music. A lot of it happened right here in my city. What am I doing? I’m growing my hair long. Not only that, I’m committed to my beard. That’s not a hippy. Doug plays a banjo. I just ate a pot cookie I got as a tip for delivering some furniture. (The cookie came in a little plastic ziploc sandwich bag – the good kind where the two separate colors on the grooved plastic parts that create the ziploc action combine to form a new third color? I think it’s blue, that new third color. That’s the bag the cookie came in.)

I’d like to be a hippy. But I work too much. Not true, actually. Maybe I am a hippy. Not the kind that stops wars. Just the kind with long hair, eating pot cookies while everything seems fine that’s going on at home. Home is this dicktip San Francisco. That seven square mile foreskin. That diverting piss stream of the Bay and Golden Gate bridges. More closely, it’s The Richmond District, not The Mission. Out here I open my window and watch tall grasses in the yard behind me bend in the breeze. No one walks by. There’s always a little breeze out here. It carries cold water in it. Drives a lot of people away.

I hear an occasional motorcycle engine working through gears, the sound of a skateboard’s tiny brittle wheels chattering over the aggregate in the tar. The engine house a few L-shaped blocks’ walk away calls out a howling dog on 26th Ave. That dog wailing emotion back at the electric spirit of the ladder truck’s siren breaks my heart every time. If I ever leave here I’ll always remember that dog and the steam-hiss of the gas meter when it came through a cycle. I picture gas coming up through pipes behind the lath plaster and paint on the walls behind my bed as I lay down in the dark, waiting for the sound to cease. Unable to sleep. Not gas to kill me, it worried me that I couldn’t see it. I could only hear it.

So maybe I should be a better hippy. Care more about war. Play music to try to stop it at least.