This time the questions come from
1: What is the SSSSTRANGEST experience you’ve ever …. well, experienced?
Hmm, there have been so many – I did a lot of LSD and Mushrooms back in the years before I joined the Navy in 1988, and only a very few times since I got out in 1993. I’ve had some intensely strange experiences under their influence. One night, some friends and I had gone to a Grateful Dead concert, and I went to one of the many school buses that dotted the parking lot that I had recognized from a previous show, and I bought some tabs of acid. As I walked back to the gang, I took two of the tabs, giving the rest to my friends. Well, they had decided right before I took mine that they were not going to take any, so I was tripping alone. That’s a strange experience. I sat in my seat an engaged in a battle of wills with Jerry Garcia. The rules were that when I stood up, he could quit playing. The funny thing is that I could feel him trying to will me to stand up. When they played “Sugar Magnolia” I stood up and started dancing. As it happens, that was their last song of the night. On the way home, I was controlling the weather, making it rain or not as I chose. The other guys commented on what weird weather we had on the drive home.
But as far as non-tripped experiences, the Crossing the Line ceremony is very strange. When a Navy ship crosses the Equator for the first time on a voyage, there is a ritual of indoctrination. As a Trusty Shellback, I cannot divulge the details, but highlights include a drag beauty contest, rubbing one’s face into the belly of King Neptune, and stripping off one’s clothes and walking naked back to one’s quarters.
2: Is there a TV show you would really love to guest star on, or otherwise participate in?
Even though I don’t really watch much television, I’d love to be on some sort of musical variety show. Do any of those even exist on US TV anymore?
3: When it comes to cooking, what is your forte?
This is a really hard question to answer – but, it’s the pie. My grandmother taught me at a very young age how to make a proper pie crust, well, several types of pie crust – for a time before I was born, and for some time after, my maternal grandparents were restaurateurs with restaurants in Chicago and then in Sacramento. I love to make pies and pie-like en trees, even though I don’t have enough opportunity these days to do so.
4: I’m going to give you all the resources and materials you need to create a huge public art project. Describe what masterpiece you’re going to spring on us.
I’d create a large perfectly smooth polished concrete circle with a 10cm lip surrounding it. Arrayed around about it would be rows of benches. It would have different purposes depending upon the seasons It could be a reflecting pool, or an ice skating rink, or an amphitheater, or an exhibition space. The lip would be embedded with some sort of nutrient bath, and hair follicles that would grow. So it would be a circle surrounded by a beard.
5: What do you think San Francisco needs?
San Francisco needs more tops! All those bootilicious bottoms are lovely, but there’s just not enough balance.
That’s the key to what San Francisco needs – balance. Life in San Francisco seems to be out of balance much of the time. And while that out of balance state is what lends San Francisco much of its magic, it also feeds into many of its problems. Sometimes it seems that San Francisco does everything with its whole heart without engaging its head, too.
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