About the Diary

I began the diary several days after I arrived in San Francisco in May 1967. I bought the 96-page copybook with a brown cover at the corner drugstore.

All this fit the literary life I hoped to begin, rather than the voyage I was about to embark on. I had come to San Francisco to start my graduate degree in creative writing at San Francisco State.

I didn’t know much about the Haight-Ashbury before I left Philadelphia. There had been a couple stories in the local newspaper, but I never expected to get swept up in it. I was an ambitious writer working on my first novel.

But the excitement was irresistible. I was 22 and ready for changes. It was fun, terrifying, sexy, crazed.

Only a few years before, I was thoroughly disposed to become a good husband, father, and wage earner, with regular attendance at church.

Although my belief in that world had been fading for some time, it would be dismissed within days of arriving here.

For myself, and many others, it was the birth of consciousness—personal, social, and political—no matter how much effort the media made to morph the Sixties into a spacey cliché.

Of course dissent of any kind was anathema in America then.

We threatened entrenched beliefs. We saw the lies early.

In writing the diary I imitated Joyce’s stream of consciousness style, describing the vignettes of my new existence in quick flashing images, separated only by commas. Periods were used to take a breath. Daily entries were made in pencil or ballpoint, depending on the budget that week.

At the time I titled the diary Keep Out: A Journal, with Scotch tape and a slip of paper taped on the cover. It seemed like the literary thing to do. At the same time, it was a warning to snoops.

I kept my diary on my writing table in the living room. It was easy to reach when the afternoon’s fiction was finished. Nights were free to explore my new world.

The diary began with a Kerouac-like description of driving across country in three days with a cousin and high school friend. We headed straight for Haight Street.

It was an embracing scene, an attempt to spread a tribal love that celebrated life rather than the death culture surrounding us. Not only the horrors of war but the loveless materialism supporting it created a generation of the betrayed and disenchanted.

I rediscovered the diary in 1980 when I tried to write a novel about the Summer of Love. The novel wasn’t successful but in the process I realized there was something of value between all those commas. Images seemed to slam each other with their intensity.

I thought I might type it up someday to see how the scrawl resounded in clear type.

But decades would pass.

Then, with the invasion of Iraq, I began to think the diary might have relevance to the tragedy we face now and the tragedy we faced then.

I first typed the diary in 1997, but now I wove news items into those that were already there. I added letters from Vietnam. I filtered in song lyrics. I edited the entries so they would be more accessible to the average reader.

I wanted to create a book rather than a literal diary to show how little has changed.

The Sixties Diary: Summer of Love is a section of an extended set of diaries that continue to the present. The diaries now inhabit a trunk in a Victorian attic in a house in, where else, the Haight-Ashbury.

Over the years they’ve inhabited boxes, drawers, closets, basements, garages. For several years they sat in a large grocery carton on a leaky porch in a city that loves to rain.

They survived, and so did I.

I’ll publish The Eighties Diary next. It captures the Punk period during the Reagan reign.