I walk with my dog to and from work most days, and on Friday evening my dog was attacked by a pit bull mix breed dog. It was terrifying and traumatizing.

It was 5:30'ish and dark out. We were across the street from City Hall walking beside the Civic Center Plaza when the pit-mix approached us. It was wearing a prong collar and leash but the owner was not at the other end of the leash and was no where near the dog. The pit-mix ran up to my dog, went right up to his face and with a stiff demeanor delivered a hard stare.

My dog is not a submissive type, he never rolls over for any dogs, and he let the pit-mix know with a growl he did not welcome the look he was receiving. I gave a little tug to my dog's leash and told him, "Let's go, let's move along" and he dutifully followed my command. However, the pit-mix didn't care what I had to say and kept a stare on my dog and followed us.

So I turned to the pit-mix and commanded it to stop and stay. He looked up at me and listened, for a moment, and then returned his focus  on my dog. So I started yelling at his owner to call her dog. 

She was a large obese woman smoking a cigarette and was standing about 100 feet away, just watching. I yelled at her again, demanding that she call off her dog. She called him but he didn't listen to her, and then he attacked! 

I started screaming and tried to run away with my dog, but he just kept attacking. My dog fought back. I kept screaming, "Get your fucking dog!" The lady started to walk over to the scene. I yelled, "Fucking get over here now! Get you dog!" She just walked and smoked. 

Two homeless men who had been laying on the sidewalk started yelling at her, "Drop your cigarette bitch! Get you dog!" and then they got up and made their way over to me to help. When she saw them making their way over she started to jog and soon enough she standing beside the fight. I had yanked at my dog's leash a few times and pulled him out of the fight but her dog kept coming after my dog, and my dog was fighting back.  

When she arrived to the scene she just stopped and stood there in a daze, like a zombie drug daze, cigarette in mouth, watching the fight. I screamed at her again, "Get your dog off my dog!!" The men were yelling at her, too "Grab his leash! Grab his leash!"

Again, I yanked at my dog's leash and pulled him out of the fight. This time she went to grab her dog's leash. As she picked up his leash her dog lunged at my dog's back leg and bit into it, and then she pulled at his leash, pulled him off my dog and the fight was over. 

She stood there, mouth agape, silently looking into some mid-distance. The men came over to me and my dog, asking if were were okay. I began palpating my dog to assess his injuries. His back leg was wet with blood and saliva, and he was limping. I lobbied one last yelling fit, "God damn it lady! Getting your fucking shit together!!".

I thanked the men profusely for jumping in to help, and then me and my dog booked it out of there. Both of us were in shock and adrenalized. We had another mile to go before we reached the safety of home, and we desperate needed to not attract anymore trouble from the troubled people (and their dogs) on the street. 

Once we were inside my dog could let his guard down and he began to tremble. I cleaned his wounds, putting pressure on them to stop the bleeding. Then I took him to the vet emergency room for an examination, pain pills and antibiotics. We were released from the vet at 1am and when we arrived home we fell asleep beside one another. Exhausted and traumatized. 

I haven't been writing because I've been working long hours and weekends. I'm becoming weary and edgy. I need rest, I badly need deep rest. 

The walk to and from work in recent weeks has been slightly less intense. The city is continuing to power wash the streets regularly and the practice does seem to be mitigating the formation of entrenched encampment communities. The open fentanyl use has also decreased, I'm not seeing as many people blitzed out, face down along Polk and the side streets. I suppose the arrests of drug dealers that I'm reading about in the news is also altering the scene. Now that the slumped-over street druggies are subsiding, the mental patients are coming into the foreground. So many mentally disturbed and ill people are on the streets around here. They are freaking out, living in trash piles, picking obsessively at their abscesses, walking around with their pants pulled down, talking and screaming at voices in their heads, covered in layers of grimy dirty, smelling like dog shit, and sometimes acting scary violent. 

They have no where to go. The druggies and drug dealers go to jail and rehab. The mental patients have no where to go. We don't have any infrastructure for them, no where to put them where they can be cared for, and if need be, monitored for life. I don't know a single person who wants people in a such terrible state living on the street, and, no one with any means appears to have the will and ability to free America from the horrors of this newly dawning abject reality.

The 2nd Annual Music City Songwriters festival happened today. It was exactly one block long with two stages, one at each end of the block. All the bands were rocking and possessed talent. The crowd was small and the vendors were sparse but the effort to make the festival mighty but small was valiant. I'm looking forwarad to future iterations and seeing where this revitalization and redefining effort goes. There appear to be a lot work going into turning Polk street around. There are the Lower Polk , designating it the hip, rock'n, place to party 

Polk street becomes an all night party on Fridays. I returned home at midnight, after an evening of working in my art studio, and the street was bustling. People were spilling out of the bars, restaurants and venues; stumbling, shouting, and laughing as they roamed from one place to another. Low rider sedans and party busses with bumping soundtracks cruise, firecrackers and muffer-less motorcycles boom. 

When I first moved here I thought there would be no way I could live with the noise of a street party happening outside my place. I adapted, and now I feel comforted by it. There's a sense of reassurance in knowing Polk street is not just a place where lost souls congregate, deteriorate, and lose themselves to hard drugs; it is also a place where people come to get drunk, dance, eat, celebrate and enjoy life. 

It's pretty much all back to the way it was before. The city was only able to keep the streets clean for three days. 

The Cedar, Myrtle, Olive, Ellis and Willow Street communities are returning. Tents and handmade structures are being erected. Down and out, filthy, dirty, torn and ill fitting clothed people are increasing. Some zombies slowly ramble and others quickly shuffle. 

And everyone seemed to be in good spirits, on the hottest day of the year

About a week ago the city announced they would start cleaning up the streets and urban blight, and it appears they are making a go of it.

Three days ago, on my walk to work, I passed Cedar Street as it was being power washed. No one but the power washing workers were on that street and for some weird reason the cleaning solution smelled like a Jolly Rancher candy tastes. The people who live on that street were lined up along Polk, against a wall with their stuff stacked beside them. No one seemed distressed about the situation, they just stood calmly in a waiting state.

As I walked onward I passed the habitually crumbled and nodded-out trash dwelling squatters that once lived for weeks on the corner of Polk and Ellis. I'll call them the "Squatters" because they not only squat locations but they also hold themselves in slumped over squatting positions with their long dirty hair perpetually hanging in front of their turned down faces. The Squatters were now lined up along Polk beside a building's wall, all their trash from their corner habitat was spread along the wall and they were sleeping like curled up cats amongst it.

A little further along on that walk I saw that some of the long standing tarp shelters that lined the north side of Ellis were not there. And Willow Street, on either side of Polk, was now only sparsely populated with people and tents. 

Yesterday's walk to work revealed that the clean up effort was holding. There were still addicts crouching about on the side streets smoking fentynal and crack, but not as many as usual, and the tents were still limited in number.  

Today no one was camped nor hanging out along Cedar Street, it was clean. Along the north side of Ellis, in front side of the Civic Center Inn, there were now only one or two tents. All the the ensconced handmade shelters that occupied that sidewalk were gone. Seeing this change blew me away! The side walk was clear, reclaimed, and returned to an accessible and safe place to stroll along. For the past few years and only just days ago that site had been severely congested, desperate, disturbing and filthy. That community was now gone. 

As I crossed Eddy the usual gathering of addicts and mental patients were loitering in a daze outside the Shanti Project, taking turns meeting their water needs at the curbside dispenser. When I reached Willow Street I was astonished. The deranged scene that dominated the west side had disappeared! While the east side appeared to only accommodate a small spillover of loiterers from Shanti.

On my walk home from work I saw that the Civic Center Inn, a boarded up and broken looking  motel covered in graffiti and surrounded by street dwellers, had a new look. In just one day the place had been restored with a fresh coat of paint featuring light-toned manila accented with dark grey. The parked cars that lined the motel's backside lot, cars with busted windows and broken bodies, were no longer there either. All that remained in that parking lot were two guys taking apart bicycles.

The Squatters had moved again too. Their pile of refuse had been relocated further north along Polk. They now lived beside the curb of the sidewalk, their 20+ feet of flotsam and jetsam lined half the sidewalk all the way to the corner of Geary. They had created a new narrow path for pedestrians to traverse, one that that required a witnessing and careful navigation of their fragmented mess. The Squatters were a scene unto themselves, untouchables, that could not be cleaned up by the city.

Me and my coworker M. walked home together today. At Eddy and Polk a young woman - round, dirty, disheveled, red and swollen, was running towards us, looking at us and yellling, "I'm so mad!! Fuuuuuck!! I'm going to fuck you up! I want to fuck you up! Fucking want to hit you!!!". She was swinging her arms about, fighting the moment she was living through. Just as she said, "Fucking want to hit you!!!" she threw a sloppy, but clearly directed, punch at M. who ease-fully stepped aside and dodged the hit. We both moved into the street to keep a healthy distance from So Mad and continued along at our staying-alive disco pace. 

Then up ahead we could see the city cleaned up the week-long street corner encampment at Ellis. A pile of debris was created on that corner by two folks with long hair that they perpetually kept draped in front of their faces. Pedestrian had to weave their way through their path of detritus littered with broken things and hunchbacked, crumpled, sleeper and picker friends whose pants rested on their knees. One morning I counted six people littered amongst the litter. Some were sleeping in the trash other were picking through it. They all seemed like rather gentle and quiet hoarders, albeit wholly obstructive. It got the point where pedestrians had to walk into the street to carry on.

Crossing Ms. Mad was a disturbing moment that quickly transitioned into a moment of cheer and hope upon seeing the corner of Ellis and Polk cleaned up. This neighborhood requires moment to moment awareness, it demands to be witnessed.  

Something strong and deadly was in the drugs today.

At 9:00am I passed at least 4 people who were completely checked out. Zonked. Splayed in somnolence. Gently twitching in a dream state. 

Belonging is essential. We belong on earth. We belong here, now. 

I see the downtrodden street dwellers haphazardly nurturing one another, huddling together, belonging with one another. 

I have long suffered from a longing to belong. To find myself in a place where i am deeply seen, understood and genuinely accepted. I think this is a very common and ancient longing amongst most humans. 

It's not uncommon to feel like you don't belong to the family that raised you, or the school you were forced to go to, or the company that you work at. Sometimes you just don't feel like you belong here, now. 

We / You / Me belong to this earth. This time. This moment. 

And when we feel and know we don't belong somewhere we instinctually seek out a place to belong. For a swelling population of mentally broken and drug addicted loners the dirty streets of SF's blighted neighborhoods have become places of belonging. 

I see groups of fentanyl smokers slumped together, tweakers picking through detritus together, odd selections of people huddling along dead zone alleyways passing lighters, fidgeting and laughing together. To be with more than your Self is the way to survive and to belong. 

I have heard that the fentanyl overdose crisis is fueled by loneliness. A lot of people are dying alone on SF's streets. And I see a lot of people trying to survive, simply accepting that they belong here, now.

Me and a work mate were walking home from work together along Polk, and as we began to cross Post we see a fight break out ahead of us. Men are tussling and pushing about in the entry of an electronics shop. Then the fight spills onto the sidewalk. 

There are about 5-6 bystanders holding a semi circle around the scene. We hold back, stay on the corner and keep a distance.

It's two against one. One guy swings a bag at a grubby and disheveled looking shirtless man wearing an all black oversized mens suit. Another guy waves a stick in the air at the grubby one. The scene is clear, its local shop keepers fighting off petty crime and defending their livelihood.

The grubby one quickly gives up the fight and runs into the street, looking around at the scene, he turns his back on it all and walks away. 

Stepped out this morning, walked down Polk, and the side streets were devoid of most of the people that had built up over the past 3 weeks. 

Today the city cleaned up. Streets and sidewalks were washed. A lot of tents were gone. Trash trucks and clean up crews were out and about. There weren't a bunch of near dead people lined up outside the nonprofits that try to mitigate their abject misery.

Today the streets looked tidy and actually smelled better. 

Two days in a row, on my walk to work, two different street bums told me they loved me and I was beautiful. I thanked them and offered them a devotional bow. They both said, "You're welcome." 

The days are getting warmer and that summertime feeling is softening peoples hearts. Hard men are pausing to share gratitude and kindness and love. May we welcome and share moments of loving kindness, however they may show up. 

Mind you, living in this area, there is easily another way I could have experienced those dirty street zombies.  I could have interpreted those moments as experiences of harassment and unwelcome attention, because I was also also walking through a scary, dirty, smelly dystopia.

The streets off of lower Polk are becoming filthier and more crowded everyday with drug addicts, mental asylum seekers and people who are unable to care for themselves. There's just more dog shit too. 

I read the Summer of Love wasn't that much different from these times. It the Tenderloin today's Haight Ashbury (without the green space)? 

About two weeks ago it appeared that SF was really making a good faith effort to clean up the streets. I commend them for trying, again and again. The city does make an effort - sometimes. 

And I find it completely mind-numbingly. logic defyingly, and really fucked-up that the clean-ups only last for about a week (if that!). It doesn't take long for the alleyways and lower Polk to repopulate with broken down people getting high. People sprawled across sidewalks, unconscious, twisted and disheveled, trashed, stuff spilling from their bags and carts. 

It's so obvious when another round of fentanyl is dispersed because a wake of living dead flows into the streets and drops to the ground. Last Thursday, I was walking home from work and saw people lining streets that had been previously cleared. Streets that had been held in a suspended state of magical thinking that maybe, maybe this time San Francisco was actually showing signs of improvement. Nope. The reality is a new crop of addicts arrived last Thursday. Sitting, lined up, along the grime stained, piss scented (but cleared of debris) streets falling into oblivion as they get high.

There's a man who limps around the neighborhood, and he is seriously sick. I'm going to call him Mr. Leg. He fashions himself in shorts, a t-shirt, cavas baseball cap and flip-flops - like as a surfer, or a tennis player, or disheveled prepster. He is dirty all over and his right leg is a gargantuan stiffly swollen red and purple abscess ridden mess. It looks like it will surely be amputated and/or be a major factor in his demise sooner than later. Every time I see this fellow limping across an intersection he is all smiles and positive energy (except for that leg). Go figure. 

I recently saw him sitting on the sidewalk in front of Frank's Shoe Repair. A good citizen - a genuinely concerned and disturbed gentleman  - was standing over him and calling for emergency services to come take care of Mr. Leg. While on hold with the operator the gentleman would say to Mr. Leg, "You can't go on like this.... This is not okay.... You need help..... "

I gave the gentleman a nod of acknowledgment and he thanked me for witnessing his good deed. 

An hour later I saw Mr. Leg, limping across California street with fresh bandages on his leg. Emergency medical services came and went, and Mr. Leg had taken their handiwork and repurposed the bandages into a what appeared to be a tourniquet tied around the upper portion of his leg, all those grapefruit sized weeping accesses were uncovered and on display. And he was all smiles. 

The wine bar is loud. 

They like to amplify onto the street their patron's laughing, singing and boozy rants. Karaoke reverberates on the buildings, it echos through the street and wafts into the orange'y light polluted night sky. When it's karaoke night I get to hear off key, out of tune, top 40 schlock being broken down by a gaggle of slushy ladies.

Tonight there's a man on the mic, saying clever things, using comedic timing in his delivery and garnering laughter and applause from a small crowd of winos. I am grateful that he is not yelling nor singing loudly, as the ladies often do. He sounds civilized. Then again, all I can hear is his tone. For all I know his words could be ghastly. 

I had alway imagined a wine bar to be a quiet, relaxed, plush and sophisticated environment. A place with soft leather, wood paneling and pleasant acoustics. Nope. Not here. 

The wine bar is loud.

I moved to Frank Norris a month ago and upon arrival I started having a nagging thought, "Blog: Frank Norris Chronicles".