This is a city where people come to be themselves, or to be weird, or to turn into vehicles for their own
fops. They develop a fop: a silly hat, a funny hair growth, a grossly extended tattoo, and they become the fop.
Who needs to have character, to be a person within themselves? Look at my fop! This proves what an
interesting person I am!
I met Georgina the Fop-Magnet at my hostel. Georgina was a fun, intelligent English accountant, but with one remarkable power: every wierdo in San Francisco wanted to talk to
her and be her friend. And now me. It was funny to watch: one minute we'd be sitting
talking about something perfectly normal, then bang, here comes the looper of the day, in his
bare feet and tattoo (note the multi-element fop) to stare straight at her, and announce "In this state
it's legal for me - not you! - to carry a sidearm! Dressed like this!" And then he'd
march straight off! Leaving me wondering whether to hit him or laugh.
It's All About Me
Hum. Travel. I once pictured myself as an intrepid travel-hero striding manfully
across the continents, with never a glance behind. Now, I'm tired again. Fatigue builds up over long
periods of travel and you can't shake it off. And there's worse. You meet so many people,
for such short periods - a hour, ten minutes, a day, a week - that new people, new friends,
seem less and less real as time goes by. You want to build walls of silence, of privacy against
having to explain yourself again. Sometimes it seems that travel, instead of broadening
my mind, is making me more isolated and self obsessed.
I could go home I suppose, but
that would look bad. Spent a lot of time here trying to figure out what to do.
I'm going to Quito, Ecuador, where, mirabile dictu, I can afford to
have my own room. My own room, for the first time in over four months.
Can't wait.
I'm glad to have seen so much of the U.S. but it will be good to leave it now. There is
an undercurrent of fear and suspicion around the place. It's only slight, but which each
vague FBI alert, each anthrax scare, it grows just a bit. Added to the strange squalor and machismo
of the American city, it has become taxing. Quito is of course more dangerous in that sense,
but what else do you expect from a poor, struggling country. In the U.S., the greatest nation on
Earth, these things are harder to fathom.
But America does get things done. What a remarkable place North America is. All I have seen was
wrought from almost nothing in just three hundred years. And as I wander round all the communities here,
Chinese, Spanish, all the Asian and European and Latin American immgrant neighborhoods, I wonder,
where would all these people be if there weren't an America to escape to? Slaves to the land,
to the whim of a warlord, to poverty, to hopelessness? And here they are, with at least the possibility of
freedom. And if offered the chance of freedom, rather than slavery, even with a chance of failing, of falling between the
cracks, who would say no?
Las Vegas is dull. Tacky and dull,
and filled with the most unsympathetic run of humanity
I have ever seen. It reminds me of nothing less than a gigantic airport waiting lounge, filled with
a convention for the most terminally overweight, stupid and miserable people in America. All of whom
had saved up enough from their wages from the chicken factory to come here for a week. They wandered
between the hotel buffet and the gambling halls, all the time wondering in their hearts why they weren't having
any fun yet.
The hookers meanwhile, had
left the streets and gone into marketing. At every corner,
in addition to the usual USA Today newspaper vending machines, there were free papers
advertising personal services, complete with picture and a short write up. I found these articles
to be the most creative and original entertainment to be found in this whole city. But then
as the writers were, apparently, all 18-year old college students, fresh, energetic and
with a desire to try something new, I guess I shouldn't be suprised at such talent.
The city is attractive, all the hills, the districts. Chinatown a babel of Chinese, the Mission
district a rapid Spanish chatter, Haight-Ashbury a stream of shops and bistros. I met Elisabeth,
an old workmate, who took me cycling. She said, did I mind a couple of hills. Of course not, said I, the big man,
thinking she meant a couple of times round Telegraph hill then stop for an ice-cream on Fisherman's Wharf.
