Yesterday and today in Haight-Ashbury

Yesterday, we visited the fabled Haight and Ashbury district in San Francisco to check how today’s hippies are faring. Even though I might have visited the famous street corner during my first trip to San Francisco in 1971, I really had no recollection of the place. Like many old things in this world, the block has not aged too well and aside from the Amoeba records store and of its fascinating paraphernalia of old vinyls and vintage rock concert posters, nothing in that street stood out as really unique or interesting. Everything was mostly dirty, tacky and struck me as being out-of-date, like frozen in time. I bet that I would have loved it the way it is today when I was in my mid-twenties, but I must have changed an awful lot in the forty year interval. That says a lot about the passage of time; the “free-spirit” that inhabited me back in the sixties and early seventies must have faded a lot and has made room for a much more conservative mindset, even though I try my very best to resist the idea…