Berkeley was like a woman who you believe holds the secret to life. You practically worship her. And then you realize, no, she just wants something from you, even as innocuous a thing as live through you. There is a panic of realization. And then you step away and watch her as she lives out every odd, bad thing you perceived was there in her moment of mystery.

A provincial woman, then, who could not see the forest for the tress and yet had great inner beauty still lodged in her, somewhere in the folds of her hills and bad streets and run-down Victorians.

Berkeley was certainly one thing when I arrived and another when I left, about 10 years later. the post-60's period hit it hard. It went through a funky, pc period of time where the bums pissed in city hall and no one seemed to matter.

Berkeley is not an underground culture it is a series of them. There is a political underground, a counter culture sort of underground, a cultic underground, perhaps many more have sprouted up in the last 25 years.

Intelligent women with absolutely non-receptive souls. Manipulators therefore but who later would feel , if not sorry, resigned to the fact they couldn't manipulate anyone. I met them in every point of the city.

Berkeley, if nothing else, was vision. I saw the computer revolution, Internet, and solar power all in Berkeley. it was a fantastic manufacturer of vision and, on the negative end, fantasy. I discovered the difference between imagination and fantasy in Berkeley. that imagination was substance, it was something that had legs and could walk around the real people but that fantasy was something that belonged to boys rather than men. And for all of that reality counted. Reality was a big luscious thing filled with boats in the Marina and angry women, paper flying along the wonderful avenues, people pretending to be someone they were not and so on. It was the charm and aspect that one adapted to.

It nearly burnt down twice. Reagan sent old helicopters over it to bomb it and chase out the young rebels. it is full of boring smart people who say the same things and have the same outlook on everything imaginable. But, it is promise and quirky stuff here and there.

I discovered that the communists and socialists drink good wine and come from wealthy families. Their idealism is some kind of disguised hatred for the privilege they were born into and it destroyed more than a few. Well, what is a world without a few drunken, idealistic communists? Those, in other words, who have never grown up because their mothers paid them off not to enter the real world. This was plenty afoot in Berkeley.

They drank good wines and lived in houses that looked out over the whole bay area as though they were pro counselors in Rome and the Empire was at their feet. But they had nothing to do but prostelize on behalf of the poor and left-out; people they never associated with and whose lives had more meaning and fiber than their own.

Yet, as the communist knows, money counts. Money is able to produce any sort of life the imagination conjures up.

There had been the generations of students. Activists and party types, that was the size of it. The scholarly types were usually ashamed of their passions and kept them hidden behind either activism or parties. It was always amazing to me how the smart guys denounced everything that was smart for things that were purely dumb. That happened quite a bit.

David Eide
January 24, 2014