TERRIBLE TIMES (sic)

"What fresh Hell is this?" Dorothy Parker

aloha again,just random grousing.

i have lived in bad places.
in the 70s i lived in Haight Ashbury after the speed freaks had chased the flower children to remote communes in the hills (many are still there) the first night i moved in a man was shot to death on the doorstep of my apartment building then Alioto cut off bus service beyond Masonic.
in the 80s i lived in SF's the Tenderloin for a decade where i had to chase whores off the doorstep from crapping or screwing so i could go home.an area so tough that a man who was killed after waving $100 bills around was ruled a 'suicide'. once,when i drove cab, a pretty blonde stew from some airline was assigned to buy drugs for the entire crew.early on sunday morning it took her less than two street converations and a housecall to find everything she wanted.
in the 90s i lived in Oakland where crips had their wheelchairs stolen as a cover for drug sales. then i lived in Berkeley where robbery and car thefts were common at the North Berkeley BART station and a downstairs nabe was carjacked at gunpoint one Christmas. on Telegraph Avenue, just blocks from UC, people are routinely harrassed,assaulted or stabbed by aggressive panhandlers/addicts from the nearby People's Park drug bazaar.

so one can imagine what i thot after first reading the almost daily rants about Pacific Avenue in Downtown Santa Cruz in The Senile (the local daily rag and apparent mouthpiece for the Chamber of Commerce) i half expected to see lil old ladies getting their eyes gouged out with dessert spoons before being ground up and sold for catfood. nope,not yet. admittedly i found black tar heroin and other sundries available for sale near the Greyhound station (that's news?) but nobody robbed or struck me. when a rare black female panhandler demanded money i replied 'i never give money to anybody who dresses better than i do'.gotcha! i then found a nice bench (since moved) by the Brazilian lingerie shop and a shoe store to people watch from.

now i admit a certain bias, i have met Robert Norris (and i have a good friend who works with him as a homeless advocate) but if Santa Cruz the City would just designate an area,like the Pogonip Wildnerness, for homeless camping and health service and the like the Downtown would be much safer and shopper friendly.this is a party hardy college/beach/tourist area and the last thing you want is to be groped or hassled while puking your guts out against some car or storefront, right?

another true story,
in the 90s at a crip conference i was abandoned by local Paratransit (they lied & lied & lied,despite my witnesses) at Jack London Square in Oakland. so i pushed my wheelchair over to BART but of course both the elevator and escalator were broken so i had to slowly push my chair SIX MILES HOME up busy druggy San Pablo Avenue on a Friday nite (while SM was home worried sick,Paratransit lied to her too-repeatedly) all the phones had been ripped out along the way to discourage drug dealers (yeah right) and several times i was asked if i worked for Sleepy who apparently rented out wheelchairs for drug sales. now i was not just another schmoo on the street then but veep of the BCOD (Berkeley Commisson on Disability) with an annual budget of a miliion bucks to distribute for crip purposes.
i fear i was unkind to the max when Paratransit limped in to lie about how great a job they were doing serving the crip community...i actually OFFENDED them,imagine that.

in other news,
you Pagani are an optimist but maybe correct.(see Comment about immortality). as far as i know Randi Rhodes is off the air,for now .
(PS...SM wants to know how u found out about my blog? any more details u care to share???)

" i ache in the places that i used to play.." Leonard Cohen songmeister

i have another CT Scan on Monday so i am going to try and chill out until then.beautiful weather predicted...

namaste
semper grumpy
mega