Miller, I less than three you. For more, see my email address in my profile (for the record, I’m a firespinner, as well as a hippie chick. More or less.)
There are several suburbs and neighborhoods of Chicago crawling with hippies. Most of them are my friends. I happen to know which one **Sarahfeena **lives in, and she’s absolutely right about it. Some of my best friends lived there until moving to Asheville.
Haight-Ashbury? Shit, there haven’t been respectable hippies living in fucking Haight-Ashbury for 40 years. San Fransisco got taken over by the queers years ago, didn’t it? Try Seattle, Boulder or, as mentioned, fucking Asheville. I’m quite sore about that, you see, as the Chicago area is losing quite a wave of interesting and cool people (otherwise known as my friends) to Asheville.
We’re here though, among you; we’ve never gone away. Some of us are the children of hippies, some of us are adult converts, and some both (like me). Most of us do actually bathe on a regular basis. Quite a few of us loathe patchouli as well. Those who wear it are the ones who like it.
And yeah, quite a few hippies are misguided, naive, delusional or just plain crazy. Of course, quite a few Republicans are misguided, naive, delusional or just plain crazy. Quite a few yuppies are misguided, naive, delusional or just plain crazy. Quite a few *people *are misguided, naive, delusional or just plain crazy.
Hey! Go find your own smokin’ hot red-haired girl to talk to. I know it’s gotta be kinda tough, you bein’ up there in Scandinavia-land and all, but still…
Great. We need more fucking hippies like we need a hole in the head.
Tell them it’s like Deliverance down here. We eat possums. Everyone belongs to the Sons of Confederate Veterans. We all drive pick-up trucks with big gun racks and Toby Keith blaring from the radio. They’d hate it.
That kind of stuff never happens here in Cleveland. Sure, we residents of Northeast Ohio tend to be liberal as a whole, but anti-consumerism protests, drum circles, giant puppets … nope. The wildest we get are peeling Kerry/Edwards stickers on our fuel-efficient compact cars.
There’s an honest-to-goodness communist bookstore in Cleveland Heights, though, and the Whole Foods near my house does a booming business.
On a more serious note, before your friends move, you might let them know that underemployment and affordable housing are huge issues here. It’s easy to get a part-time job in the tourist industry; what’s hard is finding a job with decent wages and good benefits. And because so many folks are moving here, housing prices have gone through the roof. Locals are being priced out of the market, which sucks.
I swear, you can’t swing a cat around here without hitting a digeridoo-playing, pot-smoking, firespinning, dreadlocked vegan Yankee. Nice folks, some of them, but it’s seemingly impossible to stop the tide.
Man, hippies are everywhere! And some of them don’t even stink, but they’ve all got the attitude.
A few weeks ago a hippie came in and applied for a job. We’d talked a little before and she seemed like a very organized and together person. I was all set to offer her the job, but first I tell her it would involve working a three or four hour shift every Saturday.
“Oh, I can’t work Saturdays. I need my whole weekend to decompress (serious heavy emphasis on the word) and having to work would just ruin my whole vibe.”
The kicker was that she didn’t have a job at the time. She was decompressing from a weeklong binge of reading and watching TV.
I think we’ve had a communication error. They’re already there in Asheville, for about two years now. Every one (eight of them so far) has a better job there than they were able to find here. I don’t know how long that will last, of course, since everything you say is true. I was there for a visit recently, and while it seems like a wonderful place, geographically, socially and whatnot, it did seem to me to have the same clothing store repeated several times over, several very similar restaurants all within walking distance of one another, etc. In other words, redundant markets that are only supportable when you have excess out-of-towners with excess cash to burn. I wasn’t convinced that it was sustainable - ironically enough in a town that prays (preys?) at the altar of sustainability.
Although it was interesting to me that each of them was very careful to point out the same drawbacks you mention: good jobs are hard to find, it’s an isolated center of leftness in the middle of redneck country, and housing is getting ridiculously expensive and ridiculously shoddy as unscrupulous developers are building houses in drainage ditches and selling them to Yankees who don’t know what they’re getting into. It almost felt like a rehearsed speech the Ashvillites had cooked up together.
Gotcha, WhyNot. I didn’t realize that your friends had already moved. It’s not so much a rehearsed speech as a warning to people who tend to look at the area with rose-colored glasses. There are great things about living here, but definite drawbacks, too.
But, to get back on topic…uh… get a haircut and a job, patchouli-boy!
My BFF used to live in Santa Cruz, and being a hippie/techie (interesting combo, I know), really loved it there. Work moved the family to New Mexico, and she seems to fit in pretty well there, too.
What’s “BFF”, btw?
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BFF is netspeak for “best friends forever.” It’s the term the kids use to refer to their best bud these days. (I’m so hip and down with the lingo, can’t you tell? ) My BFF is my best friend from grammar school. She’s a hippie & a socialist, and she’s awesome. I’d never hold any of that against her!
lived there until moving to Asheville.
