The gutter punk problem reaches far and wide...
Skill Village -February 4, 2014 - 1:44 am
I was walking down Haight Street on my last day in San Francisco and I remember thinking as I passed a group of gutter punks camped out on the sidewalk getting high and beating on one of their many dogs, “Thank god I won’t see these bastards anymore.” Two weeks later I was sitting on a south shore beach taking in a quintessential Hawaiian sunset when I noticed some people huddled on top of a sand dune smoking weed. Then I noticed they were all wearing black dirty ripped shirts, vests covered in patches, cut off shorts, tattered black jeans and oversized backpacks, and they had the one obligatory dreadlocked chick with them. “Sweet Jesus, they’ve followed me here.” I thought. "No goddamn way."
The gutter punks have some how made it out here. Jesus, I can just imagine the look on the faces of all the poor saps that were on that flight. At first I thought it just has to be one small group that was a little bit smarter then the rest and somehow pan handled enough change and sold enough drugs in Golden Gate Park to buy one way tickets out of there. But no, there are groups of them stumbling around everywhere. There is already a very noticeable, underlining air of anger and resentment from the real Hawaiians and locals about the influx of non working penniless hippy leaches coming here without the lowest level of human trash flying over from the mainland to join them.
But why are they here? There is nowhere to loiter and beg for change here. Do they secretly love sunsets and 12 dollar Mai Tais on the beach? Is it the weed? I’ve heard stories about the quality of marijuana here, but San Francisco probably has the best weed in the world, and it’s pretty much legal. The cops there just look the other way when they see people openly smoking on the streets. Here you go straight to jail. What about the harder drugs that they love so much like heroin, crack and cocaine, or LSD and molly? Nope, not readily available and if it is available they can’t afford it here. That kind of island fun is reserved for the super rich. Oh, of course, it just dawned on me. The infamous Hawaiian Ice. Hawaii has the highest rate of crystal meth abuse in the country. No it can’t be that either. They don’t even make it here. It has to be shipped in to Honolulu making the price 4 times what it is on the mainland.
It must be the same reason most people come, the weather. But with the constant heavy rains that I’ve been seeing day in and day out they must be cursing the day they decided to come here. There is no shelter here. Everything is drenched and crawling with bugs including deadly centipedes and relentless mosquitos. There is no answer for why they are here and no solution to the problem.
When I was living in San Francisco I did come up with a solution. Get the city to put together a fleet of dump trucks. The dump trucks would be equipped with water tanks and high powered fire hoses. Every few days the fleet would patrol the streets and remove any offenders by first blasting them down the sidewalk with the fire hose, then they would hog tie them with zip ties, and throw them into the trash compartment of the dump trucks. The trucks would then drive them out to Tracy, California and dump them. Tracy is a small agriculture city in the central valley and the whole city is overwhelmed with the smell of cow manure. Of course they would eventually come back, but after a few trips to Tracy they would not come back to San Francisco. They would of course become Portland’s problem. The same could be done here with a little organizing and with the help of Matson, the shipping company. All the ships leave the Port of Kahului full of empty shipping containers, and you could easily get rid of all the gutter punks in one load. The only problem would be that when the Hawaiians saw how easy it was to get rid of the gutter punks, the hippies would be next, and then they would most definitely turn on the rest of us, and every Haole would be waking up at Los Angeles Harbor.