i’m in San Francisco again. It’s still a far cry from what i pictured in my earlier post, but i will say that i like it. i like the place very much.

There are just as many homeless people here this year as there were last year, and they’re the most upsetting thing about the city. i really have to wonder at the hearts and priorities of the people living here when there are so, so many middle-aged men - all of them black - wandering around downtown either shouting for money or enjoying a crack buzz. Homelessness is, of course, a very complex and difficult problem in many places in the world. What i find suspicious about so many American cities is that the homeless people have dark brown skin.

Here in Toronto, a veritable “tossed salad” of faces and skin tones, as they say, it becomes a bit of a Where’s Waldo exercise to find black homeless people. Our homeless come in all stripes. What’s more, you get a lot of independantly wealthy “weekend homeless”, who appear out of nowhere on weekends in only the high-traffic areas of town. Some of them, like the bearded guy on the Southeast corner of Bay and Bloor, are destitute.

Bearded Guy lies around in a sleeping bag on the sidewalk moaning, cup in hand. The curious thing about Bearded Guy is that he’s only homeless from Thursday to Sunday, and he’s only on the sidewalk when there’s no snow. It’s exciting to know that he is blessed with a miraculous healing experience as soon as tourist and pedestrian traffic dies down, only to spiral into dire need the following weekend. Quite a roller coaster of a life.

Aside from being black, the key difference in San Francisco’s career panhandlers is that they’re much more creative and enterprising. i walked out of my hotel with a fellow i met on the plane, and a very eccentric-looking but absolutely groovy black guy smooved up to us. He was wearing a caramel-coloured shiny leather trenchcoat with a cool black fedora. He was small and scrappy, like i imagine James Brown to be, and he had crystal blue contact lenses that unnerved me a little. He gave us three restaurant recommendations, told a joke, showed us a mathemagical trick, and told us how to get to the tiki bar i wanted to visit, all before finally hitting his pitch about how he wanted to go down the block and tuck into a big bacon cheeseburger. After all that, i was glad to throw him a few bones.

When i walked out of the Bay Area Rapid Transit Station, a panhandler shouted with open arms “WELCUMM A SAN FRANCISCAAA!”.

Contrastingly, pro panhandlers in Toronto expect you to give them money. The most they’ll do for you is open the door to the subway or to Tim Horton’s when you’re perfectly capable of doing it yourself. Most often, you’ll just get a guy robotically chanting “Spare change ma’am. Spare change ma’am. Spare change sir. Spare some change ma’am.” It seems like the difference between a country where everyone is taken care of through social service programs and welfare, vs a country where you’re on your own and completely screwed, while constantly being fed the line that opportunity is all around you and you get out of life what you put into it.

i also hear the sourdough in San Francisco is pretty good.

i’ve been sucked through a TimeHole.

That’s where you wake up one day to discover that an entire year of your life has sped by, and you didn’t experience a second of it. Oh sure - you have memories of everything that happened. You know that last year, you went to your cousin Kate’s wedding and you broke your toe walking into the coffee table and you took that vacation to St. Sunny, but you didn’t actually experience it. It’s like someone hit the big cosmic Fast Forward button on your life, and you find yourself a year older and a year chubbier.

The gap in the dates between this entry and the last is about a year. My life has been fast-forwarded. A few of the entries i wrote about have been erased forever. To save myself the pain, i prefer to blame this on being sucked through a TimeHole. In reality, suffice it to say the following: if you meet a Seattle teenager in a chat room and he offers - nay, insists - on hosting your site for free, don’t do it. Walk away. You don’t need to suffer the pain of having your funny entries about Farting in Bed and What’s the Deal with the Bazooka Joe Comics deleted for all eternity. You don’t deserve that. Walk away.

Just … just walk away.

So since i didn’t walk away, i find myself in the unenviable position of having had stuff deleted. Everything i wrote from around January 2007 onward is gone. Thankfully, that only accounts for a few entries; my passion and time for this journal died down a little when i acquired a little baby who needed food and diapers every five minutes.

But there’s something inherently awful about losing so-called “knowledge work”. i’d much rather lose something like my teevee, because i know that somewhere in the world, there’s a blueprint for the thing, and that a man in a moustache just has to pull a lever on a machine and - SCHLANG - out comes a new teevee exactly the same as the old one.

Not so with writing … particularly the stream-of-consciousness nonsense with which i fill this site. (i call it “stream of nonsenseness”.) Once the thoughts stream from my mind through my arms to my fingers, and are released by the keyboard, it almost amounts to permission for my mind to forget them. It’s okay to destroy the blueprint. No new teevees are required.

That work is lost and no blueprint exists. Worse still, i can’t even remember what was lost. i think i wrote three entries on the strict high school administration that formed my worldview of people in power and will ultimately lead to the Great Urfhaug Uprising of 2013 (check your history books from the future). There was probably something in there about the baby.

It’s a shame, really. One of the reasons i keep at this journal is so that i can look back years later and wince, and scream at the computer screen and say “IF I ONLY KNEW THEN WHAT I KNOW NOW!!!” Sometimes as i type, i try to listen to those echoes from Future Me. What’s he trying to tell me? Exercise more? Don’t get on that bus? The winning lottery numbers for next Tuesday are blah blah blah? i’m not sure.

i’m left with a few paragraphs to try to sum up one year of a life lived, and it was a doozie. The hugest news is that i left my job last September to strike out on my own. i’ve never really mentioned here what my job was, and i don’t think i will. Basically, like so many of my generation, i sit down all day and push electrons around into interesting piles until it’s time to go home, and if we ever run out of oil and coal and uranium at the same time and the power goes out, i’ll be as useful as a solar-powered flashlight.

My daughter learned to walk and talk and throw temper tantrums this year, while i learned to take tiny steps and to interpret baby babble and to give stern time-outs for such dire offenses as swatting at mommy and daddy’s faces like a little velociraptor and refusing to put the banana peel in the garbage.

That’s it, really. i suppose the year hasn’t been all that interesting. There will be tales to tell, for sure, as i find myself flung from the cliff this month with my severance package expiring, suddenly having to eke out a living on my own by killing whatever dinosaurs i can find and dragging their tasty carcasses back to my luxurious cave, a cave that i couldn’t really afford to begin with. Presently, i’m writing this entry from my hotel room at an industry conference chock-full of dinosaurs ripe for the killing. It’s early in the morning and i’m finishing this entry to achieve a certain peace of mind before i wax up my club and go hunting.

i’m not sure how my two random readers who stumbled here searching for Stephanie Seymour’s cock will feel about it, but for as long as the electrons stay in their neat little piles and our uranium stores keep uraniating, twistedhip has officially returned.

A fun game that people play when reading the little slips of paper in fortune cookies is to add “in bed” to the end of the sentence. My wife and i just ate some fortune cookies.

Her fortune:

“Being aware of your fears will improve your life.”

“In bed!” i added. “RAHHH HA HA HA!! Get it??”

She rolled her eyes at me.

My fortune:

“Being kind to others will bring rewards.”

..

…

wait for it …

…..

“… in bed.”

Ah. That was satisfying.

i propose adding “in bed” to certain other phrases to make them that much more palatable. Take, for example, a heavy tax assessment:

Dear Twistedhip:

Your income tax return has been assessed. Please remit the sum of $21443.95 to the Accounts Receivable department of any Canada Revenue Agency branch by March 21st 2008. You may also pay by cheque or money order by mail, or by credit card when calling the toll-free number in bed.

BWAH HA HA HA HA!!! That was so worth it.