January Fun in the Mission District of SF

On a recent trip to San Francisco I decided to take advantage of the SFMOMA for the first Tuesday’s promotion that they do every month. I was extremely pleased that I did so because it created such a sense of joyous and overwhelming excitement within me that I was on a veritable plane for the remainder of the day.

As life often does I had come to discover during my outing that a young man had recently been shot on the BART by BART police, which of course did not surprise me as police have a habit of shooting people. I decided to take my wonderful energy and give some of it back to the world to help balance what was an infuriated and disgusted SF public.

So I promptly made a small piece of signage that read Free Hugs.

My sign was not an instant hit, in fact the population of San Francisco is quite standoffish to the idea of a free hug. I was not dressed in a suit as I often am but I also was not covered in garbage so I doubt that it was my presentation that was to blame. I also was able to weed out any possibility of them not hugging me due to lack of enthusiasim because I can assure you friends that I was indeed, quite happy to be there volunteering my services, smiling, singing, announcing excellence like a troubadour on parade.

The police said they would get in trouble if they accepted a hug

I basically had to come to the conclusion that only those who really didn’t need a hug actually took one. In fact most of the takers looked quite pleased and in a good state of being.

Kids loved the free hug thing and so did a multitude of more well to due appearing folks, as well as the local homeless population, but the general populace was not keen to come over to the side of the takers. I wonder if they had already received a variety of free hugs that day and so therefore were not being greedy. I have to assume that would be true because I for one would never disregard an opportunity to amass a free hug.

I think I will try this experiment again sometime. I am heading to Kentucky and we might have to see what becomes of the Free Hug thing there.

On a very happy art side of things I will be doing quite a bit of preliminary sketches and drawings for my etchings I am going to concentrate on in the second half of January. I hope to have quite a few series complete by the time that my birthday rolls around. We shall see though how intense things get. I might just end up locating a patch of hug starved citizens that require my assistance.

Be well and love life. As Ghandi said, be the change you want to be in the world.