Pseudotherapy

Of all the communities in San Diego County, Ocean Beach is the most laid-back. Inhabited mainly by hippies and surfers of all ages, it’s a village steeped in peace, love and “if it feels good, do it.” Live and let live is the prevailing vibe, and is proudly boasted in license-plate frames reading, OB: Not just an address, it’s an attitude and T-shirts reassuring us, It’s OK, it’s OB.

My daughter Juli has been an Ocean Beach resident for more than a year. Her apartment is a block and a half from the beach and three blocks from OB’s main drag, Newport Avenue. When she invited me to come stay with her for the weekend and attend the annual Ocean Beach Street Fair, I grabbed my Nikon and jumped at the chance.

I love Ocean Beach. It’s a tiny community, and its location sandwiched between Point Loma and the Pacific guarantees it’s not going to get any bigger (another popular OB license plate frame: Ocean Beach: It’s beside the Point). The only time new construction happens in OB is when an elderly building is torn down and replaced. There’s more cute little houses in OB than you could shake a Polaroid at. But the residents have even more character than their dwellings, and there’s no better spot for people-watching than Newport Avenue on a Saturday. Line the street with musicians performing, cooks grilling and artists selling their wares and you’ve got a great time just waiting to be had.

And we had one. We bought handmade headbands and gourmet biscotti and a glow-in-the-dark Buddha. We shared a massive gyro for lunch, washed down with the best sweet tea I’ve tasted since Georgia, and lamented that we were too full to split a strawberry shortcake. We listened to folk rock and surf rock, Peruvian flutes and African drums. We sidestepped well-mannered dogs and questioned the sanity of a woman wearing a snake and not much else. We counted pregnant bellies (dozens!) and tattoos (hundreds!), admired wood carvings and handmade earrings, and fled in terror from some clearly bloodthirsty dolls. And I took lots of photos, which you can view over on Flickr.

After attending a family birthday dinner at Red Lobster, which for the first time did not make me sick (yay!), we found ourselves dozing off in front of “So You Think You Can Dance?” I’m always an early riser, so I chose to sleep on Juli’s oversized and comfy sofa. I knew I’d want to get online soon after I woke up, and if she slept in her room, I wouldn’t have to worry about disturbing her. She warned me her neighbors would be partying till all hours, but that kind of noise never bothers me, and indeed I was asleep in minutes.

About 1:30 a.m. Juli woke me, nervous and angry. Some of her neighbors had seriously over-indulged and decided they needed to knock over the newsstand on the sidewalk below her bedroom windows. Not being satisfied with that, they then pushed it into the street. Juli had woken up terrified that they were smashing the cars parked along that street — including her beloved Pearl, which she just got back from the body shop after a city bus smashed into it in front of her tattoo parlor. Honestly, I think if those guys had damaged Pearl, Juli would have taken her baseball bat to their drunken heads. She kept going back to the windows to assure herself they’d confined their vandalism to the newsstand. The guys left for awhile, but then Juli reported incredulously, “I don’t believe this! They got a camera and are taking pictures!” This struck me as hilarious. I mean, why? To prove to your friends how drunk you got? Any friend who needs to know that should be at the party themselves. And why bust up an innocent newsstand in the first place? Did they object to the day’s editorial? Did they need laundry quarters at 1:00 in the morning? Maybe they’d recently been fired by the Union-Tribune and this was their version of going postal.

Eventually, Juli and I both got back to sleep, and as expected I woke early. Not on my own volition. Before there was even enough light to sneak between the blinds, I was startled to full alert by what sounded like a horrific traffic accident. My ears were assaulted by a grating like metal dragging on metal, accompanied by blood-curdling screams. I leaped off the couch and ran to the kitchen window, but couldn’t see any source of the noise, which continued intermittently for the next two hours. Eventually I realized it had to be coming from some kind of creatures, and I fervently hoped they were not carnivorous. However, it wasn’t until Juli got up that the mystery was solved. Turns out the racket was being made by the famous Ocean Beach parrots, a large flock of non-native parrots who’ve made OB their home. The colorful flock has been hanging around Ocean Beach and Point Loma for about 25 years and now numbers about 100 birds of various parrot species. They start foraging for food at the buttcrack of dawn, screeching and shrieking in a most unpleasant manner. Apologizing for forgetting to warn me, Juli admitted “those fucking birds” are the one thing she hates about living in OB. Well, that and the parking.

As we left OB on Sunday, Juli stopped to let me grab a few shots of the beloved Ocean Beach peace sign. I stood on the Dangerously Unstable Cliffs and thanked the Higher Powers for the little pocket of eccentricity that is Ocean Beach. Best weekend I’ve had in a long, long time.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Friends and Family, Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.