On the way to the BART station, I passed the Mission District unemployment office, where a line of men and women spilled out of the front entrance and flowed down the sidewalk for half a block. Those queued up next to the building ranged in age from 16 to 60, most of them Hispanic or African-American, and most of them just standing there looking at nothing in particular as they waited for the line to start moving. Several of the adults had children with them. The kids, for the most part, stood patiently with everyone else, indifferent to their surroundings, as though they’d been waiting on that sidewalk since they were old enough to stand.

As I passed the entrance, I noticed a security guard looming in the doorway, no doubt there to discourage the hordes of unemployed from stampeding the government offices and all those government workers.

He didn’t look particularly happy standing there, but at least he had a job. Not everyone is so lucky, as the line he guarded so readily demonstrated. In California alone, nearly 2.3 million people are out of work. That’s 12.4% of the state’s workforce, a rate well above the 9.8% national average. And even the average is nothing to scoff at.

But these are the times in which we live. Just ask the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. According to their findings, employers laid off over 152,000 workers in November. In fact, for each month this year, between 133,000 to 200,000 have lost their jobs. Then there are all the jobs that went missing in the two previous years. Add them together, and that’s over 8 million since the recession officially began in December 2007.

Here’s another interesting tidbit. The Bureau basis these statistics on filings for unemployment insurance and includes only mass layoffs, that is, layoffs that involve at least 50 people from a single employer. That means people being laid off from smaller companies, those who do not qualify for unemployment insurance (such as the self-employed), and those who are no longer eligible because their time has run out, are not being counted. In other words, we’re a hell of a lot worse off than any of us care to think about.

And I’ve seen the consequences of these layoffs everywhere I’ve traveled. In one town after the next, stores were boarded up, buildings were abandoned, ma-and-pa businesses had gone belly-up. Add to that rising tuitions, cut-back in services, deteriorating public infrastructures and you’ve got a story that echoes from one coast to the next—an economic downturn that’s left communities beleaguered, institutions faltering, and families struggling to survive.

Yet despite these grim realities, politicians and financial analysts continue to suggest that we’re on the road to recovery. Not surprisingly, they point to the record profits that American companies continue to post. In the third quarter of this year, for example, US businesses earned profits at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion, the highest figure recorded since the government began tracking this information over 60 years ago. Yet little of that money has trickled down to the people who need it, such as those laid-off workers standing in line at the Mission District office.

(Remind me to send another posthumous thank-you letter to Ronald Reagan.)

Despite the record profits—and the enormous executive pay-offs they portend—jobs continue to disappear in alarming numbers, and the more lay-offs we see, the higher the rates of bankruptcies and foreclosures spreading throughout the US.

Consider this. In the same quarter that businesses were toasting their colossal good fortunes, bankruptcies continued to rise across the country. In fact, there were an estimated 1.6 million bankruptcies declared in 2010, with states like Nevada, Tennessee, and Georgia topping the charts. That’s up from 1.4 million in 2009.

Of course, none of these figures beat the record 2.1 million set in 2005. That was the year Congress decided to make it harder for individuals—not businesses—to file for bankruptcy and get rid of their debts. In October alone of that year, over 630,000 Americans filed for bankruptcy as they rushed to avoid the effects of the new law. Even so, staggering numbers of individuals are now left with no alternative but to head to the courts, despite the burdens added by Congress in 2005—burdens, as I’ve already mentioned, not placed on corporate America.

As you’d expect, along with the staggering number of bankruptcies is an equally dire rate of foreclosures. In the first three quarters of 2010, banks repossessed over 800,000 homes. And although the final tally is not yet in for the year, estimates put the number of foreclosures well over a million. In fact, 1 in every 492 homes is currently being taken over by the banks.

That’s not all. The yet-to-trickle-down economy has resulted in even more people losing their health coverage. Recently, the number of uninsured Americans jumped to over 50 million people, yet we’re still years off from Obama’s watered-down health care bill fully kicking in, that is, if incoming Republicans don’t manage to undermine what little gains we’ve made. That’s right, the party that wants to lower taxes on the rich is also the party that wants to eliminate health care for the sick and poor.

Guess what else. The GOP is also against extending unemployment benefits to people like those standing in line at the Mission District office, should they fail to find work in a timely manner. But as we’ve seen, the party has no problem extending tax cuts to the rich and powerful.

And the Democrats, unfortunately, rolled right on over and let the Republicans get away with it.

After I passed the unemployment office, I continued my walk down Mission Street, rode BART to the Embarcadero station, and found my way down to the waterfront. There I met up with my friends and we hopped aboard a ferry to Sausalito. It was a cool, but gloriously sunny day, as we sailed past Treasure Island, circled around Alcatraz, slid along Angel Island, and landed at the Sausalito Ferry Terminal.

Sausalito itself is a pricey slice of real estate swollen with boutique shops, trendy restaurants, upscale hotels, and massive homes that cling to the hillsides like jewels encrusted on a tiara. Throngs of mostly white tourists stroll along the sidewalks as they peek into storefronts and study the menus near the restaurant entries.

What I don’t see are boarded-up shop windows or abandoned buildings. And if there are any unemployment offices in the vicinity, they’re tucked away in the far corners of the county. In fact, I’m not sure Marin County even allows out-of-work people within its boarders, at least in those places within such close proximity to all these multi-million dollar dwellings.

That’s not to say Sausalito has escaped the economic woes of the past few years. In November alone, 10 homes ended up in foreclosure. That’s 1 in every 674 residencies on the chopping block. Yet if you consider that banks are foreclosing on 1 in every 99 homes in Nevada, Sausalito remains fairly unscathed.

At least that’s how it appears as we walk along the clean and manicured sidewalks. If I were to base my impressions of the economy on what I see here, I’d suspect that the US is experiencing a period of unparalleled growth and prosperity. The only evidence of hard times is the musician at the ferry terminal, with his stringless guitar, faltering voice, and dachshund propped up on his shoulder.

But every community needs its color, its entertainers, its performers, even if they must be imported from across the water. And in a place like Sausalito, where color is in short supply, the only way to mix things up is to fill the galleries with tourist art and ship in busloads of laborers to keep the houses immaculate and the gardens fit for the finest of the Bay Area royalty. After all, what would people think if the yard in the next-door mansion started to look a bit shabby?

The last time I played the song was two days ago, when I crossed into California from the southern part of Arizona. As I followed Interstate 8 along the Mexican border, I listened to number six twice and then to the rest of the CD, also part of the tradition. Another of my favorites is “River,” track eight, which includes several soulful bars from the Christmas carol “Jingle Bells,” a fitting choice given that we’re in the middle of the holiday season. The song also includes what I think is one of the best lines in a piece of music: “I wish I had a river I could skate away on.”

Like many of us, I’ve experienced more than one Christmas in which I would have liked such a river—those times when I’ve felt less than joyful, when the holidays were a test of endurance whose end was as welcomed as a spring day.

This Christmas, however, has for the most part been off my radar. Except for the outdoor decorations at campgrounds and on the houses I’ve driven by, I’ve had little exposure to the holiday season. I attribute most of my good fortune to having been on the road, watching almost no TV, and avoiding any shopping centers.

In fact, I had planned to spend Christmas driving cross-country, stopping only to camp or hole up in some low-key motel when I was too tired to drive. That was because I had intended to spend time with someone from a past life, and the only way I could fit in a visit with him and still meet my commitments on either coast was to make my cross-country trek while visions of sugar plums danced in everyone else’s head.

But those plans took an unfortunate twist, and I found myself heading westward sooner than I had anticipated. I attribute my early departure to the full moon, lunar eclipse, and winter solstice, a confluence of events that will never occur again in my lifetime.

Such signs, like traditions, are not to be taken lightly.

While driving across Texas, I spoke with a friend in San Francisco. He invited me to spend Christmas with him. At that point, I was still thinking desert and camping and had not considered trying to make it to the West Coast by the 24th. But the idea of spending the holidays with friends, with people I care for and who care for me, sounded much better than truck-stop coffee and country Christmas music blaring from the local radio station, so I hauled ass across the Lone Star state and the Land of Enchantment state and the Grand Canyon state and into California, the Find Yourself Here state. And now I’m in San Francisco and it’s Christmas day and not once have I wished for a river.

But all this has got me thinking about why so many of us feel depressed around the holidays. A lot of it, I think, has to do with loss. Loss of loved ones, loss of relationships, loss of traditions, loss of jobs, loss of health, loss of youth. And the holidays are so steeped in memories and filled with expectations it’s not surprising that some of us have difficulty dealing with this time of year.

Yet if my travels these past seven months have pointed out nothing else, they’ve at least confirmed what most of us innately realize—that loss is the inevitable part of living.

When I was in Georgia, I hooked up with several friends from back in my Colorado days. Not surprisingly, the conversation turned to people we had known back then, people who had recently died. There was Billy, whose cancer ruled out his needed liver transplant. Cubby, who died shortly after learning she had brain cancer. Kay, who was admitted to the hospital for abdominal pain and was dead three weeks later from ovarian cancer.

All of them this past year.

I had spent several weeks in Colorado during my travels, visiting many of the places where I had known these people. I also visited places I had traveled to with past lovers—California, Utah, and more of Colorado, among other places—all filled with memories of the good times we shared, poignant reminders of the loss I had felt when those times were over.

But loss is by no means my domain alone. Across the country, I met people who were sick, disabled, old, alone. People who have known their own share of losses. People who continue to know those losses. And for them, as for many others, it’s the holidays that often pose the greatest challenge.

Perhaps it’s this sense of loss that explains the grotesque over-commercialization of the holidays—and our general obsession with material gain. If we distract ourselves with enough things, we don’t have to consider the realities of life, particularly the losses we face every day as part of being alive.

In the United States alone, Christmas generates about $435 billion annually in economic activity, with each consumer spending on average $680 to $750, depending on the year. It’s no wonder that holiday spending is considered a harbinger of the economic trends in the months ahead.

Recently, I saw a clip of Oprah’s final TV show, in which she wears a red holiday dress, sort of like a Santa suit with cleavage, and gives away millions of dollars in gifts—everything from computers to cookware to CDs to jewelry to Volkswagen Beetles. The audience, of course, goes mad. They scream. They cry. They jump up and down like children at the start of summer vacation.

I wonder how the audience would have reacted if Oprah had simply announced she was donating the millions to charity, if there had been no whoopla or praise or sponsors salivating in the wings. Would the audience still be rolling in the aisles?

But I’m not very realistic when it comes to such matters. I tend to think our tears should be for something other than a free sweater. I’m like Joni in her song “The Last Time I Saw Richard.” I’m a romantic. My eyes are full of moon. And it takes a lot more than a friggin’ refrigerator to help me forget my losses, especially over the holidays.

Yet this year I’ve been lucky. Circumstances allowed me to easily sidestep the Christmas carnival. And without all the hype, I can kick back and enjoy the companionship of close and comfortable friends—a holiday tradition certainly worth hanging on to.

In the meantime, I try not to think too much about the rest of Joni’s Richard song and the fate he projects for all romantics: “Cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark café.” I bet if Richard had had a river to skate away on, he’d have been gone in a flash.

At the Van Ness station, a group of older teens boards the train. I notice them only because one announces, “I sit here. I sit here,” as she plops down on a seat that faces the aisle.

The rest of the teens soon follow her example and fill the nearby seats.

They are a group of kids with Down syndrome, apparent by the broad heads and round faces and short necks that they each share to varying degrees.

A man then enters the train and sits in the middle of them. At first I think this odd, given all the other empty seats. But then I realize he’s with the group, that he is, in fact, their guide or coordinator or counselor.

He’s a tall man with a short dark beard and athletic build. He looks the type more at home playing pro baseball than herding a group of teens—any group of teens. Yet there’s a sense of self-assurance about him, a sense of calm that emanates from his clear eyes and unruffled continence.

When the train starts moving, the boy who sits nearest him clenches his fists as his face stiffens with fear. Yet his movements are almost imperceptible, and if I had not been looking in that direction, I would never have noticed the shift.

The counselor—or whoever he is—also notices. Without saying a word, he places his hand on the boy’s forearm. There’s a sense of strength and tenderness in the way he calms the boy with his touch, a sense of reassurance and patience and compassion.

The boy calms down quickly and the rest of the ride is without incident. When we reach the Embarcadero station, the counselor herds the teens together and leads them out to the platform, his face as calm and assured as when he arrived. I leave the train through a different door and do not see them again.

I walk up to the next level and exit through the turnstile, then climb the last flight of stairs to Market Street. There I’m assaulted by a wall of people who speed along the sidewalks without regard to who they push, step on, bump into, or cut off. Most are part of San Francisco’s business community, the nine-to-fivers racing from appointment to appointment. They talk on cell phones, read text messages, listen to headphones, walk with blinders.

I’m suddenly aware of the way I’m dressed. My shorts are tattered at the edges. My sweatshirt is ready for a facelift. I’ve walked too many miles in my Columbia lightweight hikers. And now I find myself surrounded by Armani suits and Prada handbags and Gucci shoes and Cartier watches with enough gold and silver to supply half the bullion at the US mint up Market Street.

It doesn’t help that I just lost a button on my shorts and hold them together with a safety pin.

When I cross the road, I’m nearly run down by the driver in a Lexus who has little patience for people on foot, despite the Walk sign that opens the crosswalks to pedestrians like me. Two minutes later, the same thing happens with the driver of a Cadillac SUV.

I decide to grab an early lunch at a small diner that advertises Mediterranean food. I walk inside and stand before the counter, studying a wall menu that announces everything from gyros to falafel to hamburgers. The woman behind the counter eyes me impatiently, until I finally order, then she never looks at me, never says anything except how much I owe.

When I tell her I want a glass of water, she grunts an acknowledgement. But when my order arrives, there is no water. So I ask again. With an air of annoyance, she tells me that I’m supposed to grab a cup from the stack and get my water from the soda machine. Then she flashes a look that’s meant to remind me of how stupid I am for not having read her mind.

These sorts of things—the pushy pedestrians, the annoyed drivers, the rude counter clerks—are repeated everywhere I go in the city. The impatience and indifference and intolerance are, in fact, a way of life, as are the attitudes of entitlement and privilege.

Yet San Francisco is only a small slice of the pie. Recently, Tennessee’s Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey called Islam a cult. Arizona’s new immigration law lets police detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally. A Memphis councilwoman received death threats because she supports the rights of gay workers. BP CEO Tony Hayward is expected to receive a severance package worth over $18 million. The latest statistics out of Afghanistan indicate that July was the deadliest month for US troops in our nine-year war. No statistics were provided about civilian casualties.

I walk up to the Powell station to catch the J train. As I start down the stairs, a man knocks into me without saying a word. When I show my transfer to the attendant at the ticket window, she does not look at me, does not acknowledge I’m there. She pushes the button to release the turnstile and returns to whatever she was doing. I head down to the next level and enter a crowded train. I find a teenage girl sitting with her feet up on the seat next to her, the music from her earphones so loud I can hear it even in the din of the station. She never makes room for anyone else to sit down.

As I stand in the center of the car, holding on to a handrail, I think about the counselor on the L train with his gaggle of down-syndrome teens. I think about his commitment and his patience and his compassion. I wonder how he or anyone can maintain such dedication and a sense of purpose in a land that can seem so devoid of any of these.

From people like him, I have much to learn.

I’ve also seen cows, tons of them, scattered across the grasslands that sweep over the hilly landscape. That’s because cattle and dairy ranches have been part of this area for generations, long before the feds designated the place as protected. Ranching, it seems, has been grandfathered into the park.

What I haven’t seen are white fallow deer. Although they used to roam freely, the National Park Service (NPS), in the last few years, has slaughtered most of the animals—90% by some estimates. But the NPS didn’t do its own dirty work. They brought in hired guns. Wildlife exterminators. Species mercenaries. Bambi hitmen.

The company, White Buffalo, Inc., out of Connecticut, specializes in remote euthanasia of unwelcomed species. Their sharpshooters came into the park and shot the deer while they were feeding—supposedly in the head or neck to guarantee a speedy and humane demise. The NPS then donated the meat and hides to non-profit or charity organizations, at least that’s what they say. Local hunters and hikers often found the dead animals scattered throughout the forests, their carcasses rotting, their eyes plucked out by scavenger vultures.

Even so, the NPS is bent on eliminating the white fallow deer. They believe the animals represent a threat to the local ecosystem because they’re a non-native species.

And they are. The deer don’t belong here, not in an evolutionary sense. A wealthy rancher imported them into the area in 1948 so he and his cronies would have something fun to hunt. But the establishment of Point Reyes National Seashore made the hunting illegal, so the deer—a hearty lot, it turns out—went forth and multiplied.

But the NPS believes that the white fallow deer are extremely disruptive to the region’s natural ecosystem. Unfortunately, the NPS has yet to present definitive evidence, particularly carrying capacity studies, that prove the deer adversely impact the environment to the point they need to be exterminated. Even so, the NPS insists that the deer must go if the park is to be restored to its original pristine roots.

The problem with this strategy, however, is that the park already blossoms with other non-native species, such as Himalayan blackberry, scotch broom, eucalyptus trees, and jimson weed.

Then there’s the coyotes. These critters arrived only 500 years ago, pushed north by the encroaching human populations as they traveled up the coast by way of Mexico and the Southwest. That makes these howling canines a bona fide non-native species.

And what about all those cows? I can’t quite see how dense cattle populations and modern ranching techniques and miles of fenced corridors can have any less of an impact than a few white deer.

Of course, none of that compares to the impact of human activity. If the NPS is serious about restoring the park to its original state, or even close to that state, the park better get rid of most of the cars and most of the people.

But then, taking a step backwards is never easy. Even the NPS must realize this. Too many bad decisions have already been made, and the best we can hope for is to preserve what we’ve got. Virginity is never retroactive.

All the NPS can do is to decide what is acceptable non-native invasion. But that’s like determining what’s acceptable collateral damage, a phrase bandied about freely when we invaded Iraq.

Even so, the NPS must decide. They must contend with the fact that the white fallow deer were brought into the region without considering the impact on the land, both then and in the future—sort of the same logic used when deciding to invade a country without provocation and without protecting the country’s infrastructure or its people and without thought to the long-range consequences of such an invasion.

But the government, it seems, and by extension those of us the government represents, are in the business of trying to clean up messes that are the consequence of poor decisions. Unfortunately, strategies to clean up our messes are often implemented in ways that call for a callous indifference to the sanctity of life and to freedom from pain and suffering.

We have a history of intervention that mismanages, misappropriates, and misrepresents the truth. Not just with Point Reyes or Iraq, but with Katrina and Afghanistan and Vietnam and our national forests and the latest environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Poor decisions keep being made, and we find ourselves making more poor decisions to try to fix them.

Only about a hundred white fallow deer remain at Point Reyes, and the NPS wants to get rid of those too. But there are still plenty of cows and plenty of cars and plenty of fences and roads to keep the cars and cows going.

And there appears to be plenty of owls. I heard two of them hooting last night, along with the howls of distant coyotes. Sounds well worth preserving—in Point Reyes and anywhere else we can save them.

I only hope none of those birds are spotted owls.

I step over to the cash machine to retrieve more quarters for the second load. I reach into my pocket for my wallet. My pocket is empty.

I race back to the front-load washer and look through the window at the sudsy water filling the tub. I see my shorts on the top of the pile. I envision my wallet sloshing around in those suds.

I try to open the door but it’s fused shut, so I rush over to the attendant. I ask whether there’s a way to stop the washer once it’s started.

She stares back at me with a look of both indifference and disdain, the kind of look that the bored and frustrated and powerless give those who are momentarily at a disadvantage, the kind of look that provides them with a temporary sense of vindication and superiority, that leaves them feeling something akin to satisfaction.

“No,” she says. “You have to wait.” She looks away before she finishes speaking.

I return to the washer and check how many minutes remain. Sixteen. I look at my shorts longingly. I watch them go round and round. I watch them take my wallet on a Six Flags whitewater river ride.

I step outside to wait out the rinse and spin cycles.

The laundromat sits next door to Guerneville’s only coffee shop. Together they form what constitutes the town center.

Here you’ll find the full spectrum of the town’s finest, residents and visitors alike, patronizing one, both, or neither of the businesses. They lounge in the chairs, hang out at the picnic tables, huddle around on the sidewalks.

Here you’ll find the eighteen-year-old mother with her three children, the aging hippy with her tie-dyed shirt and Birkenstock sandals, the volunteer firefighter from the station across the road, the queer couple celebrating their twentieth anniversary, the wasted teen who’s been smoking weed since ten, the suburban family with their 2.3 golden-haired children, the Silicon Valley bikers who just arrived on their new Harleys, the homeless man who carries his house in a plastic bag, the state-supported, heavily medicated, chronically ill SSI lifetime wards.

I sit down, more toward the coffee shop side of things. Next to me, a guy in his late twenties bums a cigarette from another man. The second one is older and taller and stringier, with circles under his eyes so dark I think he’s been punched in the face.

“I just got out of jail,” the younger one says. “I have no cash.”

The older guy hands him a cigarette. “No problem, man. I won’t ask why you were there. None of my business.”

“Wasn’t so bad.”

“Hope you didn’t murder anyone.”

The younger one shakes his head. “Nothing like that.  Parole violation. Only thirty days.”

“Get yourself straightened out, that’s what you need to do. Figure out your passions and follow them.”

The young man smokes. “I know what I want. I’m gonna be a farmer. I’m gonna raise chickens.”

“Chickens.”

“I can’t wait to eat my first one.”

“A chicken eater,” the black-eyed man says.

“I can’t wait.”

“When you plan to start all this?”

“Already have. My husband and I bought eight acres near Sebastopol.”

Decades ago, Guerneville was a popular family vacation spot—campsites, cabins, canoeing—all in the heart of California’s redwood country, next to a slow-moving bend on the Russian River. The influx of drop-outs in the late sixties and early seventies, along with their carloads of drugs, changed the area forever. The bikers showed up around then too—and not the Silicon Valley kind. Then the queers arrived, with plenty more out-of-control substances. There were also the wine connoisseurs, bouncing from winery to winery, swelling in rank every day.

Throughout all this, the families kept coming.

So what you have now is a bit of everything. That and the aftermath of an area that in the last twenty years has been hit hard by floods and failing economies.

I go back into the laundromat and check the washer. Nine minutes to go. I return outside and take a seat nearest the door. I listen to a man grumble about the state of the economy. He talks to a woman whose got that rich New Ager look, a cross between an astrologist and an heiress, with wavy blonde hair that cascades down to her waist.

The man’s probably in his fifties, with a short, thick body and hair that’s long and matted, dark brown and streaked with gray. At least half of his teeth are missing.

He tells the woman he can’t work because the Mexicans are taking all the jobs. “Try to earn a living,” he says. “Try to get anything done, and they get in the way.”

I take note of his teeth because of a previous visit to Guerneville. Several years ago I spent a few months down here, hanging out, writing, getting to know the region. On more than one occasion, people who lived in the area said, “You must not be from around here. You have all your teeth.”

Such is the nature of meth.

I step into the coffee shop to use the restroom. A sign hangs on the bulletin board in the hallway. It announces a meeting for Guerneville business owners to discuss the growing problem of homelessness in this area. The goal is to bring people together to discuss solutions that everyone can live with.

But the town is facing problems in which homelessness is only one of the symptoms. Many of the businesses have closed, buildings are falling apart, tourists are staying away in record numbers. But drug and alcohol use remains high. So does unemployment.

On the last three evenings, I strolled through town in search of a place to eat. Many of the restaurants were closed, the streets nearly deserted, not unlike a western ghost town in a Gary Cooper movie. Granted it’s the middle of the week, but this is still July, the height of the tourist season. I’ve been here in tourist season before. I know weeknights are slower. But weeknights in July should not be like the dead of winter.

The Safeway is busy, though, at least it was this morning. I stood behind two women in the checkout line. The first dug through her purse as the cashier rang up her groceries. After a furious search, she announced that she couldn’t afford all the food. So she handed back several items—candy bars, salsa, pasta sauce, Cocoa Puffs, a bunch of rhubarb. Once she got the amount down to what she could afford, she paid for the groceries, all the time apologizing for causing any trouble.

The next person in line, the woman in front of me, pushed a cart that carried a baby. All she bought was a tube of Blistex. She paid in cash, took her change, and rolled away. That’s when I noticed the case of blue sports drink in the bottom of the cart, hidden from the cashier by the baby seat.

A lot of the people who hang out in the makeshift town center have nowhere else to go and no money to get there. Jobs are in short supply. Businesses are struggling to survive. Relatively few tourists are coming and those who do come are not spending.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics puts California’s current unemployment rate at 12.4%, compared to a U.S. average of 9.7%. The state has lost nearly 245,000 jobs this past year.

Yesterday, I read in the San Francisco Chronicle that gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman has spent nearly $100 million on her campaign and might be donating another $30 million to the state’s Republican party. As Meg Whitman has discovered, power does not come cheap.

Republicans, not surprisingly, are salivating. Democrats, I’m guessing, are running with their tails between their legs.

I wonder whether any of that money will find its way to Guerneville. I wonder if the people who need the money the most will ever see it.

I return to the laundromat and wait out the last two minutes of the wash cycle. When the warning beep sounds, I open the door, pull out my soaked shorts, pull my soaked wallet out of my shorts, and pull my soaked money out of my wallet.

It might be the only clean cash left in California.

She stands at five-feet-four, minus a couple inches for her perpetual stoop. When she walks, she never lifts her feet off the floor. It’s more a sleep-walker’s shuffle—a mix between indifference and the result of a stout, squat body that no longer wants to move.

The café where Grace works—and perhaps owns and has done so for her century-long career—is a nostalgic gateway to Hollywood’s golden era. In addition to the years of grease and grime, the walls are covered with movie star posters that range from Mae West to James Dean.

My favorite is a large silver screen version of The Last Supper, with Marilyn Monroe in the center, Humphrey Bogart to her left, and Clark Gable to her right. Also at the table are Elvis, Cary Grant, Marlon Brandy, and several other Hollywood dignitaries from days gone by.

Though it’s only a few minutes past noon, I’m the only customer. I open the menu and try to read through the grease and food stains. That’s when Grace shows up, her pen and pad poised to take my order. She stares at the space across the table as she waits for me to decide. Old rock-and-roll music pours from the crackling speakers—currently an Elvis song, though nothing I recognize.

Grace dyes her hair a bright red-orange. Judging by the thick gray roots, it’s been a while since her last treatment. She has a bulbous nose that hooks down toward meaty jowls and sagging lips, giving her face a squashed look, as though years of gravity have caused it to cave in on itself.

She has a look about her of a person not fully in this world, an old woman biding her time, only partially aware that she’s still alive. It’s the look of someone who has watched too much television, someone whose eyes have been permanently glazed over by sitcoms, reality shows, and mouthwash commercials.

If she were of a different generation, I would suspect too many hours in front of a computer.

I close the menu and order eggs and hash browns and coffee. She writes down my order. I feel as though I participate in an ancient ritual.

Grace shuffles over to the counter and calls my order to the two Hispanic cooks. She speaks in a stilted, halting voice, as though she’s never fully learned how to use her vocal chords, as though she came from a place of cloistered silence and was dropped here on Mission Street.

When a few other customers trickle in, she smiles, greets some by name, takes their orders. None of them talk on cell phones or send text messages or work at computers or listen to iPods. I can’t remember the last time I was someplace where I could say that.

In between customers, Grace sits at the counter and stares at the stainless steel walls and the shelf full of hamburger buns and loaves of white bread. Occasionally, she squeezes behind the counter to take a customer’s money—cash only, rung up on a manual register unable to match today’s prices.

Grace lives in a world locked in ’50s memorabilia, free from the Internet and hand-held electronic devices—a holdout against progress and the gentrifying forces that squeeze in around her. Grace lives in a world of diminishing returns, a world that leaves her little space in which to retreat.

In some ways, Grace might be considered one of San Francisco’s more fortunate. She has plenty of food, a place to spend her days, and in all likelihood, a home of some sorts—though for all I know, it could be a back room in the restaurant.

Many in San Francisco are not so lucky. Any visitor to the city can quickly discern the severity of the problems associated with homelessness, substance abuse, and mental illness.

Last night, as I waited for a bus on the corner of Eighteenth and Castro, I watched one man get into a debate with a garbage can, two men curl up on a blanket next to the curb, another two men yell drunken insults at a third man across the street, and still another man so bent and twisted and inhibited in speech that he could not formulate the words or gestures necessary to beg for money.

Anywhere you go in the city—outside the wealthier neighborhoods—you’ll find a wide range of drunks, tweakers, junkies, panhandlers, mentally ill, and homeless people so disabled they can barely move. Any night you find the disheartened, the discarded, the walking wounded. This is the San Francisco not mentioned in the brochures.

According to the San Francisco Homeless Services Coalition, about 35,000 people are homeless in the Bay Area at any given time. Of these, 62% live on the streets during the night. In fact, San Francisco proper has the highest rate of homelessness of any U.S. city.

Yet San Francisco is by no means alone. About 800,000 people in the U.S. do not have a place to live—and as many as 20% of them have fulltime jobs.

There’s more. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 20-25% of the U.S. homeless population suffers from some form of severe mental illness, yet only 6% of the general population suffer the same fate. In fact, mental illness is considered one of the top causes of homelessness for single adults.

Yet the U.S. spends only $2 billion a year on federal programs aimed at helping the homeless. Compare that to the $700 billion spent on defense. (That’s according to the Washington Post. Some estimates put our defense spending a lot higher.)

As I sit in the Mission Street café—trying to eat a slice of toast so saturated in margarine I can barely get through half—I gaze toward the display near the front window, a wide shelf covered in fake cellophane grass, the kind you find in Easter baskets. On top of the grass are hundreds of plastic animals and plastic flowers and plastic houses.

While studying a rather sick looking frog, I notice a woman out on the sidewalk, slouched against the building, so tweaked out she can barely stand. She appears to be in her mid-sixties. She wears a blonde wig. She wears lipstick the color of bing cherries. She wears false eyelashes so long her eyes seem entangled in spider webs.

She smiles at several men who walk by, perhaps attempting to turn one last trick. But they don’t acknowledge her. I don’t think they even see her. Many talk on cell phones. Many are plugged into earphones. Many are texting as they walk.

Many look as equally lost.

We are a culture of damaged and displaced and dismissed souls. But as long as we have our iPhones and Facebook pages and HD televisions, as long as we let ourselves be endlessly entertained and distracted and misled, we don’t have to look at those we leave behind. We don’t have to be accountable, feel responsible, take action.

I push my plate aside and sip what remains of the coffee. Grace comes by and drops off my bill. She says that I should jot down my name and phone number on the back of the check. She says I could win a $25 gift certificate. Then she smiles and returns to the counter.

When I pay my bill, Grace punches the sale into her ancient register. It rings and the drawer pops open and she counts out my change like a little girl playing bank teller.

I did not write my name and number on the back of the check. And Grace never says a word. She smiles and returns to her seat at the counter.