magerette
Hedgewitch
- Joined
- October 18, 2006
- Messages
- 7,834
Kind of all of the above, really, except 'cult'--happy to talk about it, it was a very ...formative experience.You lived in a commune? Cool! Care to tell more about it? A living hell/a crunchy hippie utopia/a cult/something else?
That about sums up the fun parts.(I know a quite a few people, from a pretty wide range of age groups, who did that; I even stayed with one of them for two weeks; the place was called the Atlantis Art Colloquium, run by a part-time poker player, part-time landlord, full-time pothead called Marvin Marsian. It was a way cool and sometimes surprising experience, like when I first ran into Mooncat the house astrologer/nudist, or when Robie put weed into the communal stir-fry without bothering to mention it. "I like cooking with grass," she later explained.)
The place was called Mad Green, and it was located in a four story multi-flat frame building in the San Francisco Mission district. ( Mad Green of course being a rip-off of the house called Big Pink, where Bob Dylan and the Band used to hole up and get high and make records.) We had Dave the postal worker whose enslavement to the man paid the rent and bought the groceries, along with the allowance my first husband the Blind Buddha received from his parents and Soc Sec Disability for actually being legally blind, a few permanent residents and an assortment of crazed hippy types from all over the country who came and crashed and traded their illegal substances for a few weeks lodging.
I'm afraid as communes go, it was extremely slipshod, and the same people (me) always did the dishes, took out the garbage and cooked the brown rice and tamari and salted plums while the other same people sat crosslegged on the floor and discussed how to save the world and where to find the best acid. No doubt the whole saving the world thing would have come off much better without that second ambition. We did have fun though and nobody was seriously harmed or harmed anyone else. (--someday I'll scan my wedding pics and you can get a better flavor.)
I remember a few amusing anecdotes; once when Eddie Sneath (alias) went grocery shopping and convinced the Safeway checkout girl that he could indeed purchase a gallon jug of Ernest and Julio's finest with his food stamps because he was using it to flavor the hot dog stew he intended to make, and once when a San Francisco cop stopped his motorcycle and asked me to take the marijuana plants out of the front windowbox and grow them in the back where no one could see them.
The end of, and point of the story I guess is that nothing ever got done, the losers used the producers, and eventually everyone just drifted off and left the world pretty much unsaved.
- Joined
- Oct 18, 2006
- Messages
- 7,834