More Silverstein Among The Hippies

"A guy in a blanket panhandles on the corner with a sign, It's Debbie's birthday--Help me get her high," Shel reports, recalling his Hashbury highlights. "The other night, some guys sneak into the zoo, shoot a buffalo, drag it out, and the Diggers have meat for their free food line. A beaded girl takes me home, makes 'like' to me and never speaks a word. An old man on a soapbox: 'You've tried pot, you've tried LSD--now how about giving Jesus Christ a chance?' And everyone talks about the 'death of the hippies' and they stage a hippie funeral and some people who were just sitting in doorways getting stoned march to the park carrying a giant coffin, and they set it on fire and do a dance around it and everybody says, 'Well, the hippie thing is dead.' And then they all go back to Haight Street and sit back in the doorways and start getting stoned again. And the funeral is over, but the corpse is still grooving."