I have some friends who are serious hippies. Not your typical second-semester-college-Environmental-Science-minor hippies, but serious, lovely we-live-in-a-log-cabin-built-by-Amish-dudes, dirty-barefoot don't-call-us-hippies hippies. T, the man of the house, identifies plants all over the state of Michigan for a living and sits on the boards of various community groups and nature preservation societies. J, the mama, takes care of the two kids, helps run a food co-op, and is finishing her degree. They even had a local magazine article written about them as "non-traditional" parents, which in western Michigan apparently means being opposed to immunizations. That's them in the picture on the right. Some local photoshop guru decided it would be funny to superimpose their kids' heads on their bodies, and vice-versa, to visually represent the shocking possibility that "non traditional parenting" might be "all mixed up."

A couple years ago they took a family vacation and stopped in Frisco, and I got a call from them letting me know they were in Golden Gate Park. That was all the information I needed. I found them about ten minutes later at the foot of hippie hill, a grassy slope near Haight Street where you overhear conversations between stoned dudes saying shit like, "back in the day, Jefferson Airplane and the Dead played right here, man. . ." and you don't know whether to believe them or not. On an average Saturday afternoon there are guys with jester hats and devil sticks, Scandinavian tourists, potheads, and a few aging hippies. It's not what it once was, but it is still a holy place for hippies, like Comorah Hill is for the Mormons. I'm sure an excavation of hippie hill will someday reveal some sacred, shit, man, like the baby carriage Robert Crumb pushed down Haight Street in '68 stocked with unseen issues of Zap Comics written in an ancient form of Sanskrit describing epic battles between the righteous flower children and the evil, tapir-riding squares.

Now most of the people lounging around hippie hill on your average afternoon look like they perpetually inhabit a world that yuppies only get to know during Burning Man. They are not so much hippies as they are very dirty, very smelly drug dealers with feral dogs. Shockingly, a number of them also have children. These kids live in a world I cannot even imagine (thankfully, I have never been to Burning Man). Some of them have mohawks, piercings. Can kids get tattoos? If there's a tattoo parlor in Frisco that will mark up an eight year old, these kids have tattoos. In the past I have felt sorry for them, living in a hostile environment shaped by their parents' irresponsibility. But when my friends sat with their little family at the foot of hippie hill, grooving to the racket of ten guys playing African drums and some middle-aged loser playing a xylophone and some jerk wearing goat pants playing a lute, they said something I didn't expect:

"Wow, people must not hassle you about raising your kid here. That must be so great."

And that made me question my own judgmental attitudes toward those stoner hippie hill families. How different was I from the assholes back in Michigan looking down on my friends for being (in their eyes) "dirty hippies"? My friends watched their five-year old son run off and play hackey-sack with a group of Judds, while their two-year old daughter stood there, smiling and swaying to the "music." I thought about how difficult it must be to try to raise a kid "differently" or "alternatively" in Kalamazoo, Michigan, which is actually somewhat more sophisticated than most small towns or suburbs (it has a few colleges). But back there, anyone trying to be a little different has to sweat about nosy jerks giving unsolicited opinions all the time, whereas here, man, everything goes. Back home, anyone trying to do something "non-traditional" faces constant judgment for decisions they make as parents. In San Francisco, it might have seemed to my friends, there must be so much freedom you can give your kid a mohawk and fifty hausfraus aren't rushing to their phones to call CPS.

And there is a lot of freedom here. That is truly one of the great things about this city. Shit that wouldn't even be tolerated in NYC is tolerated here. You want to tattoo your face to look like the map of Middle Earth? Why not! You won't even get fired from your job as IT coordinator at a big-five accounting firm! You want to live in an alley and shit on the sidewalk and howl at unseen tormentors every day starting at four in the morning outside an apartment building full of people trying to sleep? Shit, the city will pay you $350 a month to do that. Lucky for you, the people in the apartment are all too politically correct to yell "shut up!" like New Yorkers do on television, so you can get all your raving done in peace. You want to start a he-she performance art troupe that sings variations of Puccini's Nessun Dorma translated into Eskimo-Aleut over break beats? We'll give you an art grant and a place to perform it. Call it a gala and half of Nob Hill will show up wearing ridiculous hats. Smirnoff will sponsor the after party.

Just don't admit to being a Republican.

Otherwise, anything goes.

As a parent in a place like this, you are far more likely to find yourself criticized for using formula or allowing your child to consume snacks filled with trans-fat than you are for raising them to worship Satan or taking them to the Folsom Street Fair. And to my hippie parent friends getting hassled for forgoing the provincial symbols of "normalcy," i.e. television and sports and video games and Christianity and central air and Disney, that must seem really refreshing.

If you sense a theme running here over the past week, you're right. I am probably in one of those phases where I obsess over the idea of maintaining my own ideals and values and worrying about how I'll end up reconciling those with the fact that I am now a parent and have to be responsible for her development. I know that out there beyond the liberal archipelago of San Francisco and Portland and Seattle and the college towns between here and New York there is a lot of pressure towards conformity and "normalcy." Now that we've actually got some people reading this blog, I'd be interested in hearing how others have coped with that pressure. See, we're considering a move out of Babylon. Is it possible to live somewhere where you and your children might be perceived as "different" or weird and not let it drag you down too much? Is it even is bad as people make it out to be? Does parenting in most places really revolve around play groups and sports games and dance lessons and talk of curtains matching crib sheets and which minivan is the best and all of that? In avoiding such things how important is finding a community of like-minded parents? How do you find a community of like-minded parents? What if you can't? Is it worth the trouble, the staring, the gossip, the constant judgment? Is it rewarding? Is it worth the scars it leaves on your kids? Or should I start seeking out Mephistocles right now to get the best deal I can for my soul?