There are aliens on Haight Street.

I see them sometimes in the twilight fogs as they scurry from lair to lair, cloaked and shrouded in the mist.  Who they may appear to be in the solar bright or a candle dim room is difficult to determine.  The aliens have come, of course, to witness and perhaps guide the flowering American Culture into peaceful maturity.

It could be so.

DreamBoy finds me sometimes when I'm hiding high on Strawberry Island - told me once that he can hear my emanations all over The Park if I'm vibing from the heights there.  Finding me, he will play the bone flute he wears on a cord around his neck and talk about the changes he sees and the progress being made by the Children around us.  Conversations with him are a combination of words and music as he celebrates the Free Clinic opening in a second floor flat at the corner of Clayton, and the success of the Diggers making their coffee can bread.  Distribution of goods and shared skills are his greatest joys making his flute flutter in ecstasy.
I am happier when I see economic development, since fiscal solvency frequently overcomes political opposition.

There are aliens on Haight Street.  They arrive in clusters of cosmic tourists staring glassy eyed through their disguises like passengers on the Gray Line tour bus.  Dispassionate observers, they come to record and analyze bead patterns or face paint without understanding what they see.  Some stay on as xeno-anthropologists, determined to study and compare local mating rituals to those of denizens who recently participated in a social upwelling on Lesser Zenob in the Phobaic system.  One can only hope they don't wander into pederast central at the Third Eye Bookstore or meet up with some chick that's got the clap.

Those Gray Line aliens don't always get their faces on right and if you look at them sideways when they think no one's watching, sometimes you can catch them straightening their expressions, adjusting noses and pulling up cheeks like a chick fussing with satin bra straps.  Somehow, they never get it together, the eyes too even or a poorly tailored chin - it's easy enough to spot an alien once you know the type.  I've seen webbed three fingered hands and pulsating ears on some of them that you'd never notice if you didn't know how to look.
DreamBoy disagrees, his flute is emphatic.  He has it on good authority that the aliens on Haight Street are bred from Earth born captives aboard space ships in orbit around Pluto.  The odd faces which identify them are the result of being raised in isolation, surrounded by bug eyed monsters or little green men.  They don't have our advantage of knowing what they're supposed to look like, DreamBoy insists.  Even implanted with microscopic transmitters and returned to Earth, he sees them as lost souls, prodigal sons who need to be welcomed back to the family.

But I say they are dangerous, these aliens on Haight Street.

Especially the ones who are truly human.  I mean, what we are trying to do here is expand the mind set of the Flower Children into a critical mass sufficient to shift the collective consciousness into another strata of action before the power mongers waste the planet.  These aliens are not a part of the project and their mental processes are an impediment to our effectiveness.  Get enough of them wandering around believing that real food (for instance) is manufactured and dispensed by machines and that Earth culture is primitive, backward even, because we still grow and cook, and a generation down the line we'll have food factories serving community troughs.
DreamBoy's flute says the idea works just fine for him, but he spends Tuesdays and Thursdays working with the Diggers, collecting and passing around supermarket leftovers.  I'd rather check out Stephen's Monday Night classes down at the Straight, be another mind in the room supporting his vibe.  It's part of the mob psychology, I suppose, but I've found that a larger group of people in agreement with a given premise facilitates the process of turning other minds, and tuning them to that concept.
Most people will accept and believe anything the environment assumes is real.  Like gravity.

But that's a heavy subject, heavier even than the little voodoo shop right across Haight where Cole street comes up from the Panhandle and zags west half a block.  It just appeared out of the fog one gray morning, a dingy store front replacing the posters and graffiti I'd been cultivating on the blank wall there.
That's my thing, propaganda.  I feed heads with concepts and ideas.  DreamBoy's into action, example - it's really a meat trip, a hatha yoga, like - tending the bodies.  Necessary, except that feeding the masses won't make them more able to feed themselves.  We've rapped it round enough times to know that nothing is going to change the other and I guess tolerance is the best either of us has to give.

The voodoo shop though, that's another scene entirely.  There's something about the place that smells wrong.  Might be the dude that runs the business - he's got pale gray skin with a greenish cast and his hair (if that's what it is) hangs down in knotted mustard colored strings.  He always has this bandana thing wrapped around his head like a headband, only the bandana bulges a bit over the nose, you know - moves like, when he turns his head.  Creepy.

I'm sure he doesn't belong here.

DreamBoy tells me I should be glad to see a legitimate entrepreneur doing well on the Haight, but I can't imagine what this cat's selling.  Besides some incense and a few packs of soggy papers, scummy pipe screens and candles, he's got poppet dolls with pins, tarot cards, some bone whistles, an unusual assortment of peculiar beads in the cases, crocks and jars of reeking herbs on the floor, dried roots like fingers hanging on the wall.  Across the back, behind the counter, there's a shelf with a neat row of labeled bottles, each one different.  When I go in there, I've noticed that everything in the place is grimy and covered with dust - except that row of colored bottles.
I tried to buy something from those bottles once but he wouldn't sell me any - said I had to buy the whole formula then wouldn't tell me what else I needed.  Wouldn't say a thing after that, so I split and headed for The Park.

Past the Donut Barn and the Cala parking lot wasteland, beyond the traffic, the Stanyan Street entrance to Golden Gate Park is a glory of greens and spirit delight after dogshit streets.  The near lawn is littered with pairs of ancient chess players and small clusters of hippies celebrating ephemerality by dancing with bubbles.  Absorbed in their own more traditional dance, the chess players take no notice of the flight and laughter around them.
I pass them all by, going down beyond the duck pond and through the tunnel into a glowing emerald wonderland.  The path divides and I must choose the left hand way that aims toward the Carousel and playground, or the right hand path that curves away toward a long crescent of towering eucalyptus and Hippie Hill where drummers count the pulses of the Universe.

It's as good a place as any to listen.
The path bends wide along the bottom of the hill.  There by the benches is where the drummers gather, facing a grassy pocket of meadow where frisbees, dancers and dogs weave in a pattern that might mean something - if it could be viewed from the right perspective.  DreamBoy and I sometimes stake out a spot near the crest of the hill to watch it unfolding below.  This is what he likes to do - I prefer to be dancing with the drummers, pulling bits of mindstuff from the shimmering, shaping it with music and motion, giving it life enough to dance among us for a turn or two before it dissolves or is absorbed.
The aliens who bring blankets and sit on the hill sometimes see these glimmers while I'm dancing, so it's not the waste of energy that DreamBoy claims.  He never dances or plays his flute here.  He only watches, looking for a greater meaning in the patterns, and so misses the point that any message hidden there is for the dancers.

The Park is where I go to clear my vibes.  I wander past the party at Hippie Hill, circling the tennis courts and choose the higher, unpaved trail above the bowling greens to cross the road unnoticed, and lose myself in a ferny hollow behind the Rhododendron Dell.  In the quiet, I can sort through my pieces, sift experience for essence and make note of the direction that events have taken.
I am uneasy about some of the changes on the Street.  More people are arriving, and younger.  Some are on the run from Mom, some on the run from The Man - either way, it brings out the Heat in force, checking them out, asking for ID's.

And the predators come prowling.

Not the weekenders and tourists, drawn to this maelstrom by curiosity and innocence.  No, it's the white powder people, the sex merchants, power trippers, reformers, journalists and film crews who come to snatch a bit of the magic and make it their own.  They are blinded with greed, can't see what they are grabbing at, and everything they touch is poisoned.
The aliens are easier to live with - even the voodoo shop seems less of a threat to the peaceful intentions of our cultural revolution.
On this point I agree with DreamBoy entirely.  It is only our solutions to the problem which differ.  Where he would protect and shelter the Children to the point of helpless vulnerability, I would teach and strengthen them, offering tools and skills and the power to take control.

I think it's the concept of personal power that he objects to - his goal is to have us all grooving as a hive mind, guided by some enlightened, benevolent spirit.  Arguing that strong people take advantage and begin oppressing weaker ones when power is left in the hands of the individual, he points at the histories of religion, government and business to substantiate his position.
I answer with Huss, Galileo and Copernicus, the Magna Carta, revolutions in France and America - times when The People have risen to take control of their lives or individuals persisted in the pursuit of an unpopular truth in the face of cultural opposition.  DreamBoy mocks me with his flute and says I prove his point, while I believe his system limits growth and potential, creating social entropy.  Anarchy seems preferable.

There is a bell behind me.  It rings and tinkles, drawing my attention back to this ferny hollow.  I've heard that in India people walking in the jungles wear bells to warn other beings that Man The Predator is coming.  Or perhaps it's the other way round, that victims wear bells to announce their presence to the carnivores and summon them to dinner.  Either way, I'll ease my way out of the undergrowth to truck on down the path away from the bell and around toward the Museums.

By entering the complex through the Music Concourse in the middle, I miss the school bus invasion around the Aquarium and Science museum.  Kids are great - a couple at a time.  In swarms and packs, something happens that's like taking an electric guitar and playing it directly into the speaker.  Two dozen sunny yellow school bus loads of them in the same building doubles or triples what I can tolerate and it's just too loud to learn anything there.

Besides, there's a bagpiper who practices in the pedestrian tunnel along here, taking advantage of the acoustics.

His music is well received by aliens who frequent The Park.  They come to savor the ghostly harmonics and phantom melodies that develop between and around the notes he actually plays.  Perhaps the music reminds them of home, or possibly the piper is some interstellar pop star come to study the musical techniques of this primitive backwater planet.  Since he isn't in the tunnel today, I wander on to the Tea Gardens and pay my respects the Buddha.

Generally I leave a gift with the other offerings in His lap or around the base of the statue.  Digging into my pockets I discover an odd bead that I first found on the floor at DreamBoy's pad.  It's not glass, he said, but Aphlabian opal and good quality for the size.  Sometimes it's hard to tell if DreamBoy is being real with me - like when he tells me the Aphlabian Secret Service can tap the opals as transmitters and look across light years at what's happening from the opal's point of view.
His flute laughed when I asked, but he was glad enough to let me keep the bead.  A pretty thing, it looks like an eye in some lights and other times it seems to be a globe caped with swirling clouds.  I guess even the nosey Aphlabians are entitled to be included in the Buddha's great compassion for all sentient beings, so I lean over the fence and toss the bead into pile of flowers left by earlier visitors.
Instead of going down to the teahouse, my feet take me past the pagoda, out the back gate, around the back side of the deYoung and into the Memorial Redwood Grove.

Across the Golden Gate, behind the new library in Mill Valley, is Old Mill Park.  Here the redwood trees hum and resonate, singing memories of creation passed through the earth, root from root in concentric circles like rain on a still lake.  Great stumps of Mother trees have circles of Daughters around them, and they in turn have smaller shoots springing from their bases.

Concentric circles all murmuring the Redwood Song.

The Memorial Grove in The Park is planted with seedling redwoods, sprouted into existence without the shelter of a Mother tree, regimented into rows and as unaware of racial heritage as any human raised on a spaceship around Pluto.  Instead of the Song, they hum and mutter with traffic noises, quarreling over root space like strangers in a stadium - not at all like Sisters whose circles have overlapped.  So I sing to them what I know of the Creation Cycle, of seeds sown on a still surface creating circles around circles expanding and growing, intersecting.  Spinning between the regiments, I keep the image in my mind while I hum, but I feel no response from the trees and in time I head home before the whole scene brings me down.
DreamBoy says my singing to those redwoods is like talking to a deaf man, or discussing philosophy with one of those kids that grew up in a closet without human contact.  He won't even play his flute around them because he says they won't hear, but I say communication is just a matter of finding common symbols - or teaching them.

It's a long barefoot wander up streets and down before I come out over the PanHandle - too late to buy a grease rich piroshki with onions at the bakery up from Cole.  Psalms for tea and bagels sounds a close second and certainly more interesting than going home for brown rice.  DreamBoy claims his objections to Psalms are aesthetic, that the amount of money going through the business is outrageous and in very poor taste.  I'm sure he'd rather come and share my brown rice, but I enjoy the energy at the corner of Haight and Masonic.  With Muni stops on each corner, the Tobacconist and The Phoenix across the street, a window seat at Psalms is like a box seat at the Hub of The Universe.

Twilight brings a drizzle that makes the streets hiss with traffic.  The concert crowd is out lining up for a 7-Haight or 6-Masonic headed downtown.  Tonight's dancers don't notice the damp chill as they file onto the buses wearing costumes of patched denim and antique lace - all ragged elegance layered over nature's beauty.  They are cloaked around with a sparkling mist of hallucins flashing, waiting for recognition.  These are indigenous, not the product of ingested chemicals.  DreamBoy maintains that they are evidence of kinetic activity on molecular levels.  It makes sense - though he rejects the validity of a sentient microcosm, adding that awareness is difficult to prove, lacking any recognizable form of communication.

While I make light of DreamBoy's warnings about them, there are Hunters in The City that make being out late and alone on the Street unwise.  I finish my meal before the dark is too heavy and head home to crash.  The weight of colored markers in my pocket reminds me that I've an addition to the ongoing epic on the side wall of the Straight along lower Cole.  It's not much out of my way, so I boogie down there to do my thing before it gets any later.  For this, dark is safer, since The Man has serious problems with the concept of free art and uncensored information, making major hassles for wall artists when they get caught.
The Cole street wall is fairly well lit by street lights, which makes the message more accessible, but leaves nowhere to hide when the pigs roll by.  The wall that was replaced by the voodoo shop had some deep shadows and a doorway to one side.  Never even came near getting busted in that space, but out here on Cole it's a different trip, and I get rushes of paranoia when I'm working.  Makes me wish for the security of shadows while I write about living in The Light.  Always looking over my shoulder, holding my breath to hear what's coming.

From this angle there's a clear view of the voodoo shop.  It's got a dirty window with the weirdest psychedelic lettering - never can make out what it's supposed to say  and behind it, dim yellow light silhouettes a group of people moving around inside.  This is strange, since I've never seen anyone in the shop except the dude that runs the place.
All day long, the door opens and closes, bell ringing as people drift through it, but I've never seen another soul in there - even when I'm nearly on someone's heels going in.  Never gave it much thought - except the day I followed DreamBoy through the door and he wasn't in the shop.  Later, when I found him on the street, he laughed and told me to lighten up.  Never explained a thing, just played on his bone flute - a funny little trill that had a playful grin and crooked finger, beckoning.

It's an intriguing assortment of people collecting inside the voodoo shop - must be quite a happening in there.  Freaks and straights and even a couple uniformed cops open the door and ease through it into the yellowness.  This much traffic makes work impossible and I abandon instruction for observation about the time the two cops come by.  It's not like they notice me, pen in hand beside the streetlight wall, they're deep into a conversation and when I listen to it - really pay attention, like - I realize I don't understand the words or even recognize the language.
But I know what's being said in spite of that - they're discussing all the changes they'd gone through since they arrived in San Francisco and how they hate to leave.

So I put away the pens and stake out that first dark doorway on Haight, across Cole from the Straight and across Haight from the voodoo shop.  I'm in place just as the door closes behind the uniforms.  There are others who pass through that door; some I know, or I recognize from around The Street, a number that I've spotted as aliens among the regular weekenders, come up the Peninsula and from EastBay to fill the meadows at Speedway, spend money on The Street and support our culture from the Outside.
DreamBoy and small host of other Flower Children precipitate from the darkness on the far side of upper Cole.  Led by DreamBoy's flute, they make their laughing way down Haight toward the voodoo shop.  A wilted wreath in her hair shedding rose petals, one of the chicks turns a pirouette through the open door.  The hippie cat holding it for her sweeps a low bow and twirls in behind her with a swirl of his cape.
DreamBoy is the last to enter and he stops, looks with a mocking smile across the street at my shadow in the lightless doorway, and brings the flute to his lips for a phrase that sounds like a shrug.  He slips into the illuminated shop and the bell on the door tinkles closed.

I watch the door open and close until the 7-Haight comes by with the ballroom crowd, homeward bound.  Some of these go into the voodoo shop and then the light inside goes out.
The Street is quiet and I tiptoe home through the gathering mists.

There are aliens on Haight Street.

They stare through you, blank faced and strange - grubby blanket people, desperate needle freaks, shivering pimply runaways - all looking for fulfillment of a NeverLand promise made to the lost hordes of pastel plastic people from the Suburbs.  Soggy sullen gray replaces the sun bright clarity and sparkling hazes that made up our yesterdays.  There are no more drummers in the park to sound the rhythmic variety of a moment.  In their place, coughing drunks rummage through the trash can by the benches, dropping rejected refuse where they stand, leaving it to the dogs and a surly wind with cold teeth and claws that grab and chill.

Not a wind for dancing - just moving on.

Across Masonic from the steam fogged windows of Psalms, the friendly corner grocery has become a liquor store dedicated to Black Power.  All over town, messages embodied in the graffiti and posters are increasingly vengeful and pornographic.  Instead of the Gateway to Enlightenment that DreamBoy and I always described to each other, Haight Street has become a Transfer Station for the Alienated.
Perhaps this is why he's no longer on The Street.  Most of those perfectly beautiful glowing Children who danced barefoot across dogshit and broken glass and never once stepped in it have split the scene, seemingly overnight.

The voodoo shop is gone, too.

Next morning, I went back and all I found was a funky old garage door set into the wall with faded rose petals scattered on the sidewalk in front.  The sign on it said to post no bills, so I left my message for free and went to have coffee at Psalms.  Someone there was talking about redwood trees growing north of here, whole mountains of them, miles and miles of interconnecting rings all singing the Redwood Song of circles inside of circles.
Sounds like a good place for dancing.

I'll let you know how it works out.

Peace, man - and Love.