We left San Francisco when our daughter was one-and-a-half, but that was plenty of time to get a good sense of the playground culture prevalent among the city's doucheoisie parents (among whom I was certainly a member by default). Papa Wallet Chain or Middle-aged Fauxhawk Dad would tail his toddler named after a Russian novelist or minor Zoroastrian prophet (I know, I know: pot, kettle) around the playground, giving him maybe seven inches of freedom to prevent any fall to the lawyer-vetted recycled-rubber surface two feet below. There was always plenty of parental compunction over one child's unwillingness to share whatever gewgaw had attracted the attention of another (or anxiety over the second child's expressed desire to possess what wasn't his). Conversations ranged from the annoying ("Oh, our Lola just loves kimchi!") to the nauseating ("I'm pretty sure all the Burmese words little Friedrich is learning from the nanny will be a real advantage when he applies to graduate school.") It seemed that every child born to parents of such refined taste was destined for greatness, for here they were: far from the meatloaves and casseroles of the provinces, bilingual, already totally digging good music and cool clothes. . . They were living proof that their parents weren't quite. . .parents.

If you wanted to cause a commotion you could casually mention you weren't that stressed about the 2011 public school lottery. And if you wanted to cause a riot, you could light a cigarette upwind of the NPSI-certified teeter-totter.

When we moved to Detroit, I immediately noticed a curious difference in playground culture among fellow parents. In Detroit, most people didn't even bother getting out of their cars. They just pulled in, turned up the WJLB and let the kids go feral on the climbing structures and swings. I liked this because it meant I never had to engage anyone in small talk, and if I did it certainly wasn't going to be about the advantages of Chinese nannies over their Latina counterparts. But it meant now I was the guy following his kid around making sure she didn't fall.

The other day I took the kids to the biggest playground in the city and let them loose. After a while I glanced up and noticed that all of the eight other parents on the playground were dads. This is not altogether strange in a city where nearly half the working-age population is unemployed or underemployed. I put my book down and sat there admiring these other fathers playing with their kids, indulging myself in a bit of imagined solidarity. I imagined conversations we might have, although I was pretty sure no one wanted to hear me complain about how hard it is for me to get my kids to eat kale & quinoa salad. Like me, some of these guys had two kids with them. It isn't easy doing this no matter who you are. You've got to deal with their crap all day and then deal with all the people who think you should be doing something more. You've got to keep them fed and keep them safe and keep them happy. Look at what good dads these were, bringing their kids to the playground on a Friday morning, what hard work this is, what a deep responsibility.

Then I smelled the weed.

A dad about twenty paces to my right had just lit up a blunt. Normally when you see people smoking weed they're all parsimonious about that shit, doling out tiny little servings in pipes or furtively passing around those wet, limp little joints until some guy who smells like reggae pulls out a clip to smoke the roach. Yeah, this man didn't give any indication that he considered marijuana to be a scarce resource or something that really ought to be enjoyed in private. He ashed his blunt against the stairs of a slide and took a long hit while my son ran right past him and his own daughter ran towards him yelling to watch her do something or other. Alright, Deanna, he breathed without a cough or sputter. It was kind of awesome, but totally burned a hole and burst my sober reverie.

Sure: tough job, this. So tough one of your colleagues sees fit to light up an enormous blunt at 10:30 in the morning. I mean, couldn't he at least have waited until after he made lunch?

Occasionally I have to tell people what I'm doing for a living these days. I try to avoid such situations by never leaving the house, but that just makes it worse. When they do ask, I have to be honest and tell them the truth with shifty eyes and then follow my answer with some exclamation about how good it feels just to be out of the house. Usually men ask the question ("so what do you do?") And when I tell them I am home taking care of my daughter, some chuckle uncomfortably and inevitably say, "playing Mr. Mom for awhile, huh?"

That kind of happened this past weekend. There is this rich little man from Cincinnati whose antique cars my dad occasionally restores, and he came by while my dad and I were working in his shop last Saturday. When he asked me what I do, my dad answered for me: "Dutch here is playing Mr. Mom for a few months."

The rich little man obviously didn't hear him right, or perhaps he is simply accustomed to not really listening to anyone. "Oh you don't want to do that," he said. "My wife had back surgery last week and I had to take care of my son all day, let me tell you, you don't want to go anywhere near that kind of work. What a nightmare." My dad later apologized for his friend, noting that this was a man who bribes his 13-year-old son not to misbehave. In cash.

Still, I had to wonder why even my own father felt the need to explain what I was doing with my life in terms of a Martin Mull film from the 1980s, and also to place a time limit on my doing so when I have never set one for myself. He is clearly a bit uncomfortable with my choice.

I actually don't mind telling people what I do, mostly because I'm pretty comfortable with the decision. And more often than not, I discover some envy in those who ask. "That sounds so great," they say. Or, "You're so lucky. I would give anything to go back and spend those years with my kids." More and more men, it seems, are open about admitting that they would like to do what I am doing, or regretting that they didn't. I have now been doing this nearly six months, which is almost as long as Wood stayed home and I worked. But Wood always had a job on her horizon. Me, I'm trying to avoid getting her pregnant again so that I won't find myself in that 9-month endgame. I like this gig. I have no intention of going back into an office any time soon. If anything, as Juniper gets old enough for preschool, I see myself opening my own small law office but spending most of my time writing.

The one thing that does trouble me even with all the positivity about staying home I get from other men is that all the positivity seems tied to the idea that this is just a temporary phase: that I'm down on my luck but making the best of it. The underlying assumption, of course, is that the natural state of anyone with a penis is to be winning bread, and though I may have been temporarily gelded, before I know it I'll grow my balls back and they'll rest comfortably against the crotch inseam of a pair of dockers once again. One thing my favorite senior partner said to me when I quit my big law firm job was that the longer I spend away from the big firm environment, the harder it will be to get back in. "Despite what people say," he said, "these firms are still old-boys' clubs, and you will not find a lot of acceptance there for what you are doing." But the longer I spend outside of that environment, the less desire I have to return. Quitting that job feels even more significant to me now than it did at the time. I was on track to be a partner there in four or five more years, locked into a cycle of heavy work and heavier pressure. When I first arrived at the firm, I watched as a senior associate on the cusp of partnership worked until midnight every night and every weekend day. Assignments he gave would occasionally draw me into this hell. One Saturday he didn't call me into the office, but the next day I came down in the afternoon. He showed me pictures of his new son, who had been born the day before. In the maternity ward one day, in the office the next. That is the life I left.

And now I feel as though I have been cut free from that life. I can't even begin to explain how good it feels. I will go back to work eventually, and what makes that exciting for me is that I think I will be able to do it on my own terms.

While making our way across the country last August, we stopped in Salt Lake City for a couple of days. From the baby-changing facilities everywhere we went to the quality of the playgrounds, it quickly became evident that the residents of the Utah territory consider baby-rearing a serious enterprise. At a particularly huge park with an amazing playground, we pushed Juniper on a cool swing like we had never seen in swinging San Francisco. A few swings down from us, a comely young Molly was was pushing her 4-year-old daughter. She couldn't have been a day over 23. Suddenly a little girl ran right in front of the swings. Wood dove and grabbed our swing, narrowly preventing a major collision. Molly's much-larger daughter, however, was already near the end of her downward arc and her feet struck the other little girl directly in her head, and the other little girl went flying. Both started screaming. The mother of the girl who had been struck ran over to her daughter. Like the prim mother who was already comforting her daughter on the swing, this woman was young, blond, and attractive, but she had multiple facial piercings and distinctly bare shoulders. We'll call her Apostate Mama.

While they comforted their children, Molly said to her daughter in a voice loud enough for Apostate Mama to hear: "You'll be okay Oleatha, it's not your fault. That other mother wasn't watching where her little girl was running." Apostate Mama, with her arms around her own sobbing daughter, then said in a voice loud enough for Molly to hear: "Shhhh, I know, I know, Shalee, you're okay. That girl's mama wasn't watching where her daughter was swinging."

I really don't like talking to other parents at the playground. I just don't want to get involved in the Machiavellian politics of whose child is best or whose child hit who. I suppose I come off as standoffish with my anti-social playground attitude, but I really don't care. Luckily, in Detroit, Juniper and I are usually the only people at the playground. We spend a lot of time alone at the huge playground on Belle Isle, which Juniper calls "Playground Island." Sometimes there are some black parents at whatever playground we go to, but they and their kids are usually so busy treating us like we are a rare species of migrating birds that we never get into any of the bullshit. Occasionally, when the playgrounds are completely empty, I think Juniper might like to play with some other kids, and I take her to a public playgroup in a close suburb where a bunch of white people just let their kids loose on a room full of broken and mismatched toys. I usually bring a book. It's the only time I get to read. Have I ever mentioned how much I miss having the time and space to concentrate on a book? Juniper usually sits playing quietly a few feet away from me, so I can get a lot of reading done there, plus it exposes Juniper to white kids. Diversity, they say, is important.

Yesterday, Juniper was feeding a baby doll in a little plastic high chair when some boy about two years older than her came up and punched her right in gut. Juniper did not cry or scream, she just looked up at me with a face that seemed to say, "Father, what cruelty is this? What kind of world did you usher me into, where a lad can just walk right up and punch you in the gut?" I gave her a look back that said, "Welcome to the real world, kid." But then she started crying ferociously, and I comforted her. By then the kid who hit her was already on the other side of the room whacking some other kid on the head with a toy broomstick. A few minutes later I looked up from my book to see the perpetrator barreling towards us, pushing one of those wheeled toys designed for kids three years younger than he was. He rammed it right against the high chair where Juniper's baby doll was enjoying a quiet meal of Salisbury Steak and pickles. The Salisbury Steak went flying, the baby doll was vertical for a few seconds, and Juniper landed right on her butt. It was at this point that I employed the glare.

I have this really nasty glare I give people who cross me. It belies a certain degree of physical toughness that I certainly lack. Case in point: while walking past a San Francisco housing project several years ago, I gave the glare to a bunch of teenagers who were yelling nasty things at me. I subsequently found myself on the ground getting the shit kicked out of me. Nonetheless, I was comfortable enough that I wouldn't face a similar fate from a four-year-old bully, so I gave him a nice strong glare, 5 or 6 seconds of serious eye contact, after which he ran to his mother, crying. "Mama, Mama, that man made a mean face at me."

His mother responded in a voice I could hear from the other side of the room, despite the conversation some of the other parents were having about their favorite menu items at Panera Bread ("I like the turkey and artichoke sandwich!"): "I saw him, Otto. I don't know why he made that mean face at you. Maybe because he was reading and you bothered him by playing around him. Sometimes people who are reading don't like to be bothered by little kids." I nearly said something to her right then, but I remembered my Sun Tzu: "If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him." If I said something to this woman, I would be falling right into her trap. I said nothing.

Later, on the drive home, I realized that the rules of this type of combat are simple. "Never directly engage the parent of the kid who just punched your baby in the gut. Just tell your baby in a voice loud enough for her to hear what a little shit her kid is."

Original comments here

Today is my last day of work, and I am feeling really guilty.

I have an easy job that pays well. I don't stand on the highway in the hot sun with a jackhammer tucked under my gut all day. I don't work with my hands plunged into the disarray of dead fish guts. I don't even sit in a cubicle forced to listen to my co-workers discussing the latest additions to their pez dispenser displays on top of their monitors. I have my own office. With a view of San Francisco Bay. And a door. That closes. I once worked with a guy whose previous job had been to walk up and down a line of cows that had entered a slaughterhouse, holding a captive bolt gun up to the head of each, and then pulling the trigger to drive a metal rod into their brains, killing them instantly, one after another, all day long. This, he said, was way better than what they used before: a sledgehammer. Sometimes, with a sledgehammer, the cows didn't die right away, but collapsed to the ground, twitching. Ah, beef. Now there's a job I wouldn't have any guilt walking away from.

As a lawyer, my job was to look for cases that have been already decided that bear some relevance to the predicament your company has gotten itself into. With the internetization of legal research, this is nothing more than fancy googling. What a privileged motherfucker I am to walk away from this job, there's no doubt about it. How many millions of people would trade places with me, to get paid what I paid, to dick around on the internet all day? I just punched myself on my right cheekbone on your behalf. Goddamnit, that hurt.

I remember how, when I was washing dishes at Russ', there was one of those big industrial clocks above the sink, and I would sit there at watch the minute hand on the clock drag itself around to all the numbers. I would figure out how much I was earning per second, before and after taxes. I would sit there and see how long it would take me to earn a penny. A nickel. Sometimes I used to go and hide in the bathroom or the walk-in refrigerator for fifteen minutes, only to emerge triumphant fifteen minutes later thinking, "Ha ha, bitches. I just earned $1.28 (before taxes) to take a shit or eat raw cold colds." Near the end of my tenure, I was so rabidly bitter I was ready and willing to perform both tasks in either hiding spot. Time had, as Poor Richard once warned, become money. Just not very much of it.

In my four years as a lawyer I have felt a brief kinship with that former self, in that lawyers are accountable for their time in "billable hours." That means that over the course of a year, a lawyer is required to "bill" a certain number of hours, in my case slightly less than two thousand. A billable hour is divided into tenths, so if you open up a letter from opposing counsel, that is a tenth of an hour even if it only takes 4 seconds. Spending all day in a warehouse in Santa Rosa looking through boxes of documents, however, is only 8.0 hours, though it feels like 12. Usually tasks fall somewhere in between. Writing an e-mail is 0.3 hours. Researching an issue 1.2. In their evenings, mornings, and afternoons, lawyers measure out their lives with coffee spoons. Time, again, means money. Just a hell of a lot more of it.

One hour of my time was charged to the client as $355.00. Remember, that's for fancy googling. I saw only a small fraction of that, but it was still way more than I deserved.

I have joked on our about page of my new career as a "Gentleman of Elegant Leisure." One of the earliest and most successful lawyers in Gold Rush San Francisco was a man named Ben Moors, who knew absolutely nothing about the law. He had memorized three speeches by the orator John Randolph and one by Daniel Webster, and delivered one of those three speeches in court with "magnificent gestures and impressive oratorical effects" no matter what the subject matter of the case was. He once slapped Senator David Broderick in public, and while on trial for that offense he described himself to the court not as a lawyer but as "a gentleman of elegant leisure." I knew the second I read those words exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up.

Unfortunately, my Calvinist Dutch ancestors bequeathed to me more than just a core-rotting frugality, but also the Protestant work ethic in its most concentrated form and a liberal dose of Protestant guilt (and that's the only liberal thing they gifted me). So here I sit, wondering why I feel so guilty because I have but a few more hours to sit well-paid in this chair, abandoning a job others would kill for because the most precious time in my life is that I spend with my kid, and that's how I want to spend all my time.

When I graduated from college, no one was willing to pay me to translate the Annales of Tacitus, nor was I willing to stick my entire head up my own ass and scream until someone gave me a PhD. So I went to law school. My Calvinist ancestors, looking down in their sensible black smocks from their preordained spot in heaven, approved. I worked hard to get to where I am. I'm not afraid to admit that. But today, those ancestors shake their heads in shame. And despite all my anger at those long-dead envious windfuckers, they have succeeded in making me feel guilty.

You might suggest that my guilt is really fear of the unknown that lies ahead. Or, if you are an academic (and being nice to me), you might suggest that it is shame, really: shame that results from the societal anger felt by all those "condemned to wage slavery," the cogs in a laboring society. They feel anger towards those who choose a different path because they themselves once "knew better" about what they wanted from life and dreamed about doing it before they accepted their place in what Max Weber called the "iron cage" of labor that no longer merely enables human activity, but traps and envelops it entirely. If you are a real Marxist, you might suggest that my guilt is showing an inclination to be an unwitting agent of ideology, the guilt an embodiment of mainstream cultural values.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All I know for sure is that this guilt is real, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who feels some form of it.

I am interested in a theory of elegant leisure. I know it may initially seem ludicrous or insulting to insinuate that taking care of my kid will be "leisure," but I hope you'll hear me out. I had plenty of traditional "leisure" in my lawyer job (passive web surfing, blogging, drinking) but it still wasn't fun. I expect a lot of hard work as a stay-at-home dad, but I'm hoping it will also be fun. I want to reexamine what the word "leisure" means, more along the lines of what Cicero called otium cum dignitate ("leisure with dignity"). I am eager to start living a life that I don't have to measure out in coffee spoons, a new life that is deeply meaningful and satisfying in ways that this old life was not.

We've placed a bid on a house that's perfect for us in downtown Detroit. Wood smartly put the kibosh on my dreams of the Frank Lloyd Wright fixer-upper, and for not much more than the cost of a down payment on a house in San Francisco we hope to soon own our first home in a city that most people don't even like to drive through. I can't say that I blame them. Detroiters are notorious for not heeding traffic signals; you can't assume because your light is green that some guy won't blast through the intersection at 40 mph. When people out here in San Francisco ask me what Detroit is like, I say that while I've never lived there, it feels like it's somewhere between Mad Max and The Road Warrior: chaotic and menacing, but not quite post-apocalyptic.

But I have also been telling people how excited I am to live there, and that I think Detroit is incredibly beautiful.

We have been getting "the face" for awhile now when I say such things; you know, the one where they look like they're smelling a particularly turgid dog fart. It usually accompanies the words: "You're going to raise your daughter there?" The speaker's eyes then dart from side to side, anxious, as though the men in the white lab coats are about to get out of their white vans and rush us with straitjackets to take us to the loony bin. "Have you ever actually been to Detroit?" we've been asked four times.

It's really starting to piss me off, and probably setting me up to reflexively become one hell of an asshole about it. But before I get to that, a slight digression:

Despite my recent accolade as a mommyblogger and my honorary degree from vagina university, I am still a man. That means I am pretty dense about some heavy shit, like all the fucking insecurity and the "judgmentality" among interacting parents (particularly moms). Despite all the shit that went down a few weeks ago and all the veterans of the mommy wars banging their tin cups all over the internet, it didn't really dawn on me until my wife explained it recently: "parenting is a really fucking hard job," she says, "one that certainly makes me insecure. So we all slog through this job wondering if we're doing the right thing and always feeling terrified that we're not, and then when we encounter someone who has done some other thing, made some different decision, we take that insecure energy and turn it into judgmental hate." Now that I fully understand this subtext, I have heard playground interactions and seen blog conflict where all this runs like electric current through every passive (or not-so passive) aggressive comment. It makes sense. For many of us this is the first time in our lives that our every decision affects the future of someone other than ourselves, and that's an enormous, uncomfortable responsibility. I was reading MamaC-Ta's post from a few weeks ago about all the hate she was getting for dressing her kid the way she wants to, and I really started thinking about how all this insecurity and judgment boils down to a relatively simple chiasma:

(1) Parent A makes an intentional values-based decision to do something (i.e. formula feed, co-sleep, cry-it-out, let her baby watch television, leash or spank her kids, or feed them junk food).
(2) Parent B makes an intentional values-based choice not to do the same thing, often creating a false sense of both insecurity and superiority in Parent B, who feels that it takes so much more effort and sacrifice to make the value-based choice she has made for her child.
(3) Parent B resents (and judges) Parent A for making the "easy" choice.
(4) Parent A feels the blatant judgment from Parent B, often creating a sense of guilt or insecurity for making the choice she has made. Parent A now resents (and judges) Parent B.

In any interaction, multiple values-based conflicts may exist at once, creating a tangled web of judgment and insecurity. Nearly every values-based parenting choice exists on a continuum between two dichotomous poles. Any time a parent takes a strong position or makes a particularly "polar" values-based decision (i.e. "No TV! Only wooden toys!" or "TV teaches my babies to read! They learn so much more from their leapfrog toys than they do from wooden blocks!") the judgment just becomes intrinsic to the choice. You really can't win, unless you learn to just accept that judgment and insecurity are a part of this process, and ultimately if you have a strong sense of personal values you just make decisions according to those values and try not to ignite the insecurities in the other side. Easier said than done.

We're learning that one of the most contentious of these values-based choices is the decision about where to raise your children. Despite having known quite a few awesome, successful people who grew up in the city of Detroit, we keep hearing from ordinarily politically-correct liberal people that we simply cannot raise our baby in Detroit. Some list proxy excuses like bad schools, personal safety, and corrupt city government and nonexistent city services to try to convince us that it's the wrong decision. The bottom line is that Detroit is black and for many people that's enough. Does all this judgment add to any insecurity we have about our decision to live in the city? A little, and I've written about it honestly before. Is that insecurity going to stop us? Hell no.

But what it is really threatening to do is make me really resent the people who imply we are making the wrong decision, that we are making the wrong choice and jeopardizing the safety and future of our little girl. I recognize that it's all just part of the chiasma: some judge us as crazy or simply bad parents; others resent us because they assume we think we're better than them. It's the latter that I am most concerned about, probably because our general views are less divergent. I think our decision to live in the city is viewed by those sensitive about living in the suburbs as a rejection of their decision (or sacrifice). In other words, we are choosing to live in a place they perceive as too dangerous to live not because we like danger but because we would never live in a place as lame as the suburbs. And that part is true. Wood and I would never live in the suburbs. But I'm not going to turn this into a "why Dutch doesn't want to live in the suburbs" post. That must be such a tired subject among actual metro Detroiters. I'm just not going to argue about how statistically it's more dangerous to commute for 90 minutes a day on congested highways than it is to live among black people.

When Wood and I were 19 we drove to Canada with Wood's college republican friend and a group of her high school friends who all grew up in Farmington Hills, an affluent exurb of Detroit. In Canada, the drinking age was 19. To get there, though, we had to drive through downtown Detroit. It was late, but some concert must have just ended at Joe Louis Arena and we got stuck in highway gridlock not far from the Detroit/Windsor tunnel. Everyone in all the other cars was black. The tension in our car was palpable. The Farmington girls were terrified. They started talking about the people in the other cars as "they" and "them" and one even went so far as to call them "animals." I couldn't hold it in anymore and I got into a shouting match with her. It was a certain kind of ugliness you don't get to see too much, given how privileged people are taught to be so careful with their words. For the rest of the evening I had a headache and I didn't want to go into any of lame clubs these girls were dancing in, nor did I have any desire to drink. Wood sat with me out in the empty streets of Windsor, her new boyfriend driven to contemplative silence.

It's infinitely tricky to explain why you see beauty in a place where so many others see only ugliness, without also explaining that you see ugliness in the places they find beautiful.

God knows not everyone from the suburbs is like those girls from Farmington Hills. I know plenty of people who grew up in the suburbs who are now living in the city that their parents' generation abandoned. I also know plenty of people who grew up in the suburbs, raise their kids in a streetcar suburb, and are completely awesome. I love how beauty can flourish amid all different kinds of ugliness, how it can overcome its context, whether it be urban blight or suburban sprawl. You are ultimately unique from the circumstances that shape you. You don't have to think the way everyone around you thinks. You are not condemned to be a bad parent just because you had bad parents. You can make values-based decisions and stick by them no matter how many people tell you that you are wrong.

From this bully pulpit I will share some of the beauty I find in a city that so many have told us contains only ugliness. I may share ugliness, too. Like everywhere and everyone, I'm sure it has plenty of both.

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?