SAN FRANSISCO AND THE NEW AWAKENING

By this time in our travels, I consider myself a well travelled, seasoned veteran of the world. In my mind we had been a lot of places and seen a lot of things. But in reality I was still a naive little small town boy from Alberta. My image of myself was this all knowing, all experienced veteran of the travel wars. However, I now realize that I was still a far bigger part, conservative hillbilly, than this worldly image I had of myself. Well, welcome to San Fransisco and let’s broaden your vision and understanding of the world we live in. What I describe in my little story today are issues that were not a part of life. Nor in my tiny sphere of understanding of modern life.

To say I was exposed to another side of life, society, diversity and cultural differences would be making a huge understatement. San Fransisco introduced me to more changes in myself and previously held truisms, than any other place in the world. One of my first experiences with the differences in culture came from the fact that San Fransisco was a very open and accepting society. At this time, they were probably the leaders in recognizing and understanding diversity. Very early on in our stay there, I was watching the local news on TV. When, suddenly it broke away, to show a major parade going down Market St. (I think), in San Fransisco.

While I am watching, a full on muscular and hairy looking guy, breaks out of the crowd. He then gives a policeman, directing traffic, a good full on smooch right on his mouth. Then he runs back into the crowd. Geezus I thought, someone is going to get shot! Intrigued I continued to watch. Soon, along comes an all ladies motorcycle club. Proudly displaying their colours, which said “Dykes on Bikes” and performing a parody of the Shiners on their mini bikes. Holy crap “Bubbaloo, you gotta come and see this”. Clouds of smoke hoovered overhead all. Joints as big as baseball bats and bongs as big as tuba’s were everywhere. It went on and on. Wow was all I could say! I gained about ten years of understanding of differences in one news cast.

Another thing I was exposed to, and this was at work, were issues that were so common and accepted that they had names, that I had never heard before. For example, one day I was looking for a colleague and arrived at his area of work. “Hey, do you guys know where XYZ is”? “Ya, probably off powdering his nose, he’ll be back in a bit”. Hmmmm I think, powdering his nose, what the hell does that mean? I had no frame of reference, but had a mental image of this guy in the bathroom with a big old powder puff out, fixing up his makeup.

Curious I go back to my area and ask my coworker why XYZ would be putting on makeup. “whatdya mean he says”, “well his coworker says he is probably powdering his nose”. My guy gives me a sympathetic look and says “wow you really are backwards aren’t you. What they meant was he was probably out snorting some cocaine to help him thru the day”. Truthfully I had no idea.

My third step towards enlightenment and the understanding of the world, outside of my small experience base, happened in the office and took place over a few weeks. Every Tuesday at lunch a group of supervisors, volunteers, conscripts and curious gathered around a table in the conference room to discuss ways of making improvements to our work processes. This in order to make us more, efficient, effective, competitive and any other buzzword that you might want to throw in, that basically mean how can we make more money for the company, while employing less of us?

Anyway it was mostly the same group that got together each week, and brought up issues we thought that might change work for the better. The discussions were sometimes lively and invariably small cliques of like minded thinkers started to form. In our group was a women, of about 35 years old (similar to me in age), not particularly attractive, but very strong in support of many of my ideas. We were never introduced but sat near each other in these meetings.

One day I needed to speak to her about something we had discussed earlier, but didn’t know how to contact her. I asked my bud and he did not know who I was speaking of. I was getting a little impatient and told him, you know the women, sits down the table from me, not very pretty, about my age, etc. He starts to laugh and says “Oh you mean Dougie?”. “Nope I says, I’m talking about a woman”. “Hehehe” he retorts, “that’s Dougie, one of our designer’s. Used to be the world’s ugliest man, but had an operation and he’s now the world’s ugliest woman”. I’m going what? What?

The reason I bring these stories to this blog, is that it would be hard to live in San Fransisco at that time and not have some kind of mind altering experience. For a lot, they altered their minds with chemicals. For me just living in San Fransisco was enough to raise an awareness of the changes too come in society over the next few years. I can relate to wanting a change in my life. I had always known that I was destined to be a great athlete, I just got stuck in a no talent body!