patrick.net

So I lived in Encinitas, CA and later in the Bay Area. Although I did encounter a few characters in the Bay Area, by far and away, San Diego had the most. A lot of people there are in a different world, indeed, a different culture. First, it is indeed a car culture. Quite a few Baja bugs, jacked up trucks, due to the proximity to the desert and Mexico, more n likely. I saw lots of exoctic sports cars that were probably bought used, that were slowly decaying, not housed in a garage, gathering dirt and sand, paint fading...

One good friend was a hippie hipster. A bon vivant. Enjoyer of microbrews, weed, and food. Yes, he was a bit “husky". Also a guitarist and somewhat of a musicologist, at least with regards to “modern rock.” His tastes were more Joy Division, The Cure, Love and Rockets, Sisters of Mercy, etc. He still spends a lot of time going to concerts and traveling. He was a biotech lab rat but “retired". His wife is more of the careerist, climbed the corporate ladder at a large San Diego medical device company, and still working. I notice this trend a lot, sort of a role reversal, where the wife brings home the bacon, and the dude takes it easy.

Another former friend was a Deadhead from Long Island. He and a buddy drove cross country, ultimately to San Diego. I let them crash at my Moonlight Beach studio, until the landlord complained, and they went back to sleeping in their classic Chevy van with buble window and trippy paint job. The dude had the most intense multicolored dragon tattooed on his chest that would always draw onlookers at the beach. He told me that he was driving around Long Island on acid with friends when he thought he was in an animated cartoon and had the idea that his car would just bounce of a tree. Well it didn’t, needless to say. Anyway, he became the graveshift delivery driver for VG’s donuts.

Another friend I met on the bus. If you didn't know better, you would have assumed he was mentally retarded. He had really bad hemiparesis, including facial paralysis, and so struggled to enunciate words. He was a massively broad dude, could have been a linesman in football, but his life took another course. He was evicted from his family home after his mother caught him drying cocaine using her hair dryer. He migrated to Florida where he worked as a free diving salvage diver. He told me about one big cocaine buy gone bad where he was ripped off by dudes with machine guns. Thought he was going to die. Half his body was paralyzed and so he had to swing the paralyzed side around to walk. It happened in a rollover accident where he was thrown from the vehicle which landed on his skull. He was sent to a rehab facility but he bailed, not wanting to be around vegetables who weren’t getting better. That’s when I met him, when he escaped from rehab. We smoked unbelievable amounts of weed when we hung out. To the max! - as we would say. He loved jazz and introduced me to a lot of that music that was happening at the time.

There were more friends of interesting backgrounds. Maybe I should write a book.