When Did Water Become a Department” Daria Hilton

By Daria Hilton

Morrigan must have seen the phrase “water department” close to half of a million times in her ten years as a meter reader for the San Francisco

Public Utilities Commission. She never thought much about it. Without provocation, the question bubbled up one night as she and her bar mate Tommy sucked down pints of Guinness and watched the Hamms classic beer sign go from river to campsite to waterfall and back to river over and over.

“Hey Tommy, when do you think water became a department?”

“Water became a department at the same time a line became straight and narrow,” he answered with confident authority, “when white people took over the world.”

They drank to that, and to lost dog flyers, forklift drivers, found art and a bunch of other things lost to the haze of alcohol and alcohol-fueled sex.

As a month, and then two, went by, most of the memories of that night filed themselves comfortably into a heart-shaped box labeled mangosweet distractions. But the question continued to surface. When did water become a department? Morrigan blamed her unprecedented, and unwelcome, two-month stint of abstinence for her inability to let the question go. That combined with the city’s equally unwelcome fiscal decision to replace the old cast iron meter covers, which had featured a replica of the Golden Gate Bridge, with gray, lifeless cement rounds, barely distinguishable from the gray, lifeless sidewalks.

The new covers left little room for fanciful meanderings. The unadorned phrase, “water department,” accosted her over and over each day, making her inexplicably less and less comfortable. She eventually became uncomfortable enough to seek an answer. She went to her fallback, trusted source of unbiased information: the public library. It turned out that Tommy had been right all along. Water basically did become a department not long after white people took over.

San Francisco is on a peninsula, surrounded on three sides by salt water. There is and was fresh water there to be sure, enough even to supply the intense demand created by the population explosion that the gold rush spurred. Among the many demands the 1849ers made upon the peninsula, the demand for water was paramount. Private water vendors, The Spring Valley Company first among these, used their paid-for political power to condemn and seize whole watersheds. They made more money than the fiendishly opportunistic pick and shovel vendors. Water became and remained a for-profit department.

Walking out of the library into the

noonday sun and the tie-died beehive that turned out to be the tenth annual San Francisco Hemp Festival, Morrigan realized her small kernel of newfound knowledge gave her no comfort. Lord knows why she thought Medical Mary’s Miracle Brownies might, but she wolfed a couple down and tried to enjoy the scene.

The music got to her first. Some seemingly earnest and well-rehearsed band cranking out blues standards for the pot-sauced, booty-shaking masses, twirling about in their thrift store layers. Her friend Shanice would have called it cocaine blues, intense and empty. The uncomfortable intensity of the music increased as it violently ricocheted off the government buildings that contained the plaza and hammered her brain unmercifully. Mustang Sally, Ride, Sally, Ride…

With the usual pathways her thoughts steadfastly trekked obliterated by the brownie, the music hijacked Morrigan’s mind and took her for a ride with Sally that went something like: Astronaut, Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, the countless newspapers headlines, Ride, Sally, Ride. Space, NASA, fragments of a documentary about high-G training and g-induced Loss Of Consciousness (G-LOC), Ride, Sally, Ride. That first county fair and the dreadful spinning ride, The Round Up, that spun the puke out of her, Ride, Sally, Ride. In the briefest moment of clarity, Morrigan realized (again) that eating weed was much more intense than smoking it, Ride, Sally, Ride. She tried to sit it out, but the slow blues thump of the song pounded on.

All you want to do is ride around Sally, ride, Sally, ride.

All you want to do is ride around Sally, ride, Sally, ride.

All you want to do is ride around Sally, ride, Sally, ride.

She stood up and steadied herself, pushing her hand against one of the well-manicured trees. Electricity washed up her arm, across her body and into her battered brain. The horrible noise, by now the protesting screech of a sharply turned steering column low on fluid, vanished. She felt the pulse of the tree. Slow. Slower than rocks cooling in the comparative cool of a hot evening after a scorching day, slower than moss growing. Slow. Taken out of time and place, she could sense the roots of the tree gently spreading three asphalt inches below her feet, drinking calmly. And the breathing too. She could feel it. Not the clumsy in and out of lungs, but an electric exchange of molecules. Tiny trades that, repeated almost infinitely, created the solid, majestic presence before her out of thin air.

She was afraid to hold on, or let go.

“Dude! What’s up?!” exclaimed some suddenly present voice, followed by an exuberant embrace, both of which turned out to come from her friend J.J..

“Woman, are you high, or what?!”

Morrigan could only manage a uneven smile, relieved that she wasn’t being accosted by some love-hungry, hippy stranger.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

There may have been a conversation on her way to J.J.’s North Beach studio, but her memories were jumbled, snatches of bright color seen through a steamy, glass, dryer door.

She did remember the sex. Tongues employed in every manner imaginable not pertaining to speech. The music, Bach’s solo cello suites, gripping them almost as palpably as their entangled arms and legs. And the smell, more salty than sweet, the way the air smells on an isolated, hot, rocky beach.

Much later, when cogent thought returned, J.J. stated, rather matter-offactly, “The Hemp Festival doesn’t really seem like your style.” Even J.J.’s most outlandish opinions were stated as facts, a habit Morrigan adored him for.

“I was at the library doing research.”

“Don’t tell me. You’re still pursuing your alien/wheat conspiracy theory.”

“It’s not only my theory, and, no, I wasn’t, but I’m more and more convinced that I’m on to something with that alien/wheat connection.”

“You are a complete lunatic. How can you say that with a straight face?”

A day and half later, and an hour and a half late for work, Morrigan hustled herself and a steaming cup of muddy nirvana from Graffeo’s Coffee Shop onto the 30 Stockton. Content at first to revel in the soothing dark goodness of her coffee, the worms inside her brain began to edge away at the familiar coziness she felt after a tryst. They brought up the question.

“I answered that damn question,” she scolded the worms.

“The next obvious question is why did water become a department,” the worms countered.

Morrigan knew they were right. There was always a next question and why questions often required answers you couldn’t find in a library. The meaning she had never looked for wanted to be found. She sighed and sipped her coffee, accepting and appreciating the simple pleasure it afforded but knowing also that her life had been irrevocably altered. The bus rumbled out of North Beach toward a future as murky, stimulating and gloriously satisfying as the brew she brought to her lips and swallowed. Daria Hilton

By Katina Pontikes

She received antique roses weekly, heavily scented, red and perfect. Long romantic lunches were on Fridays; Wednesday nights were theirs alone. They had a special relationship, forged in mutual need and satisfaction. Both were passionate and content, wanted this to last forever.

He only rarely referred to his wife and her constant criticisms and demands. She listened attentively, anticipating what he needed to offset his current concerns. There were no noisy children to distract them or cause life stresses. A perfect arrangement for several years, no glitches, no bumps.

On the tenth lonely Christmas Eve something wakened in her. She no longer felt as valued, as special, and she knew she was aging. She decided to pursue a different goal, gently, to change the situation. They had “the talk” the day after Christmas, after their gift exchange.

He listened sadly, a weight suddenly on his shoulders, a change in his life. His marriage had become one of convenience, his wife managing daily affairs. The romance with his mistress was what motivated him, kept him virile. Divorce became the only way to maintain that feeling of control, of manliness.

The marriage to his mistress followed quickly, and they were happy. At first. Then, after a couple of years, routines started to exert themselves into their daily bliss. Someone had to run the household, do the mundane chores. Changes happened slowly, until they had extinguished all the heat and fire.

Now, she sits alone on Wednesday nights, afraid to ask where he is going.

By Bert Slocomb

With so much divisiveness and national animosity saturating the airwaves, press and political arenas of the United States over the issue of ‘Race’ that it would be well to discuss what we mean by the word ‘race’.

First, science has proved through world-wide DNA genetic tracking through the ‘female’ line that there is no scientific or genetic basis for ‘race’. What we do find is largely made up label used by all of us both unconsciously and consciously on some form or another to define and separate ‘US’ from ‘THEM’. Over the past decades genetic research has revealed two deep truths about people. The first is that all peoples are closely related, even though there are many more humans around today. Everyone on the planet has the same collection of genes, but with the exception of identical twins, everyone has slightly different versions of some of them. The second deep truth is very hard for some of us white Caucasians to swallow.

In fact, it is probably the most shocking revelation most of us will ever have to face and that is that ALL people alive today have their ‘origins; from Africa. Our species, Homo Sapiens evolved from Africa. Our original primeval genetic mother could have very easily have been a bright ebony skin-colored beauty.

No one is exactly sure of the exact time or place but our primeval mother could have been our primeval ancestor from one of todays several ancient tribes of Africa like the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania, the Khe San of South Africa or the Pygmies who spent tens of thousands of years separated from one another even before human emigrated out of Africa.

DNA is often thought of as a ‘text’ with these 4 letters standing for chemical bases: A for adenine, C for Cystocine, G for Guanine, and T for Thymine.

Over the 300,000 years or so we humans have been around there have been numerous small teaks to our DNA which have made us who we are, including the impact of both the environment and culture. Genetic research has shown that our Genome consists of 3 billion base pairs - page after page of ‘A’s,’ C’s, ‘G’s and ‘T’’s which are roughly divided into 20,000 genes. What genetics has shown is that ‘mixture’ and ‘displacement’ has happened again and again over thousands of years and that our human ‘mythical’ pictures of ‘racial’ structures are almost always wrong - myths that have accumulated over generations from faulty thinking resulting in the present increasingly dangerous paradigm of ‘US and ‘THEM’.

In the first half of the 20th Century, a prominent scientist from Philadelphia named Morton spent his whole life collecting human skulls. From his studies on skulls, Morton divided the people on the planet into groups based on the configuration of their skulls. Morton called his science ‘Craniometry’ He determined that ‘whites’ or ‘Caucasians’ were the most intelligent of the races. Today, Morton is known as the father of ‘Scientific Racism’. When he died in 1851 the Charleston Medical Journal in South Carolina praised him for “giving to the negro his true position as ‘inferior’ race”. So many of the horrors of the past two centuries can be traced to the idea that one race is inferior to another.

To an unforgettable degree, we still live today with Morton’s legacy. Racial distinctions continue to shape our politics, our neighborhoods, and even our sense of self.

The ceremony at the White House in 2000 celebrated the unraveling of the Human Genome evoked this statement from Craig Ventnor, a pioneer of DNS sequencing,....”The concept of ‘race’ has no genetic or scientific basis.”

With the present incumbent of the White House and many of his selected cabinet members showing increasing disturbing and dangerous signs and symptoms of ‘mythical’ racial profiling one can only hope and pray that in the best interests of the United States and the world at large they will remove their racial blind spots and learn quickly what the sciences have been teaching for decades, that the word ‘race’ is decadent in the lexicon of life and is only a dangerous expression of our own mental ‘myths’ and selfish fantasies of ‘THEM’.

Hello By Margie Kean

Here I am, back again And thoughts of you start flooding in, I like reliving that special day When, exhausted from the pounding waves We stretched out on our blanket, warm sun poring over us We drank it in Salt water drip-dried on our skin Leaving a fine silvery sheen That I tasted on your neck, your lips, You kissed it off my fingertips While together we watched the surf run in. Lace edged foam caressed the sand, Stroked our feet, would touch, recede, We felt the ocean’s stirring begin, Swelling, diminishing, swelling again, Building a wave that grew higher, high Seeming to block out sun and sky Until reaching its crest it hung there frozen For one exquisite moment then Crashed down, and with breath taking force In frenzied abandon rushed to shore Spritzers of foam, pushed ahead by the roller Spent at last, ran slow slower Fragmented sun sparkles bounced off the spray, Danced on our eye lids that sweet summer day! Together we watched the surf, then laughing, running, Feet spanking sand We threw ourselves on the breaking waves Bathed in the drowning sun’s final rays, Promising we’d come back again Was the end beginning then? I still come back How many years? I lose track But mingled ashes, sand and sea I feel you washing over me And when the surf runs in And nibbles my toes I know it’s you, Hello