Driving Sue Banducci to divorce. I started driving for Veterans Cab just after I moved to San Francisco in 1975, or it might have been 76. I soon discovered some regular rides were very lucrative, but you had to beat out the older drivers who would sit at an intersection at a specific time for one of the really good tippers. I was at Broadway and Columbus about 12:15 one night when the dispatcher called out “Broadway and Kearny.” I shouted “Bingo.” Tommy said “Pick up Enrico at Banducci’s.” He rolled into the cab, very jovial. He said “oh, you’ve never driven me before, Swing out through the tunnel and cut over to Lake on Anza.” I drove him out to 14th Avenue. It was a fun trip, lots of fun banter, and he did tip something like 25 bucks. Well, I said, let's try Broadway and Columbus tomorrow at 12:15, I get how this works. 12:20 Tommy said over the radio, "Broadway and Kearny." I yelled “Bingo.” 25 bucks in those days was real money. Tommy said, “Take Sue home. Be care...
SAT, Naranjo, the Enneagram, the beginnings, and “the Work." Originally written for "The Enneagram Monthly" to be published in 2021 Claudio Benjamín Naranjo Cohen (24 November 1932 – 12 July 2019) is gone. Óscar Ichazo (24 July, 1931 – 26 March, 2020) died less than a year later. The meditation teacher Ajahn Dhiravamsa (5 November, 1934 - 28 July, 2021) passed away more recently. Rezeleah Landman Schaeffer has left us though I can find no obituary. The only teachers and leaders still alive from the early history of Naranjo’s SAT are Kathy Speeth who told her story of sitting in Gurdjieff’s lap when she was a young child and the Nyingmapa teacher Tarthang Tulku who had an enormous influence on Naranjo. At 86 Tarthang is still teaching though no longer traveling internationally. These were the men and women who first introduced the Enneagram in the West. My friend Dan Kaplan forwarded an email promotion for a course by some proponents of the Enneagram that promises to unlo...
I was too afraid, and probably at the time, didn’t have enough personally at stake to join ACT UP. In 1990 the Sixth International Conference on AIDS was going to be held in San Francisco. It was a huge event; the cases had begun to skyrocket, the death toll enormous, effective treatments few. San Francisco was one of the major epicenters of the outbreak. ACT UP had been founded by Larry Kramer in 1987 to push for more funding for research and treatment. In the face of the slow pace of development of the drug companies as well as their funding through the NIH, we knew that there were going to be massive protests and disruptions at the Conference. I remember that Rick Levine had a poster presentation about Maitri at the conference. I found it, tucked away in the tunnel that connected the hotels to Moscone Center. But Rick had convinced me that if I was to attend the conference, I should try to concentrate of seeing what therapies might be coming up that could be effective for "the ...
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