Zo Gets Her Badge On

What the fork was I bitching about? There has been this badge up at Listics that took me forever to mouseover ... and when I did, whoa! Of course now it's long gone—I told you, I operate on Icelandic time—but there's nothing easier than helping yourself, on a Mac. Just drag that sucker to the desktop and it's yours. Unless of course FP has some kinda weird license on it. Copyright I get. That other stuff, no. It's not that I don't believe in the Good, or that it springs perpetual-like from the heart—I simply cannot stand anything that smacks of PBS.

So, after finally remembering what is thing was on my desktop—Frank! What greater honor, what higher accolade! I just do not know.

That Frank is ... an old hippie, is what he is. Not, of course, wholly unlike oneself. Old not in years—well, maybe that too, depends on your perspective, you child—but to have been a hippie is to forever after shed traces of that far-away state of heart, of mind ...

Dear HST, you can still see the line where the wave broke, from Grizzly Peak. On a good day you can see clear over the City and, way out to sea, the tiny peaks of the Farallons. The water is so bright.

What I have always thought, you see, is that the wave never broke at all, but rose higher and higher til it curled over San Francisco and fell into the Pacific, disappearing into the ocean. So that, really, there was never any end. Not for me, not for Frank, or Annie ... not for a hundred thousand other souls.

The wave may grow smaller as it ripples outward in both the ocean and the dusty dimension of time, may even seem to have disappeared ... but that is illusion, dear man. You know as well as I, wave do not die.

I write to Hunter Thompson even though he is dead. To get jacked that high, daily, in order to live, to write, the thought tires me near to death. Cool as cool really was, it was also unsustainable. Which became instantly clear the moment any of us tried to raise kids. One of the sadder scenes I remember from my time in the mountains was coming across a camp of completely stoned people, who never looked up ... and their bewildered, dirty children, who ran alongside the car like beggars, peering in at my kids. Hi! Where you going? What's your name? When really, they were scared, lost.

If I'm talking to HST again, there must be gonzo about. Which is at least half hippie anyway—at least for those who had edge. In Berkeley, we had edge. Hey, some of us still do. There's me ... there's Dave Winer ...

Edge as opposed to those drug-addled flower children in the Haight—present company excepted, Annie.

So here you are, dear href Frank. My public thanks. I've never received an award for being a pain in the ass. (Unless of course we count my divorce decree.)

You're the best,
Zo