These photographs were shot in the early 1970's when a group of us lived at a place known to one and all as the "Rip Off Ranch" because we all worked at the Rip Off Press, a comix publisher located at the foot of Potrero Hill. Originally the house was acquired by a group of freaks out of Austin, some 22 of them at one time, all packed into a three bedroom flat, passing it over to other Texans who arrived as they moved out, generation after generation shuffling through. When I arrived there were five of us, four Texans and one lone Sole Proprietor from Seattle.

I realize now if I only half realized it then that I was looking very hard for some kind of life that made more sense than the life I'd lived so far. My father's generation had busted their butts to find a good job, a nice home, a wife, two and a half kids and a late model car. Good stuff, we're told. Everybody likes it. Everybody thinks it's swell. I grew up in that environment, kept my head (down), did what was expected and got through grade school, high school, college and the army, deformed, I think, but alive and still able to wonder if there might not be something else. Anything else.

That house on Potrero Hill allowed me to meet a whole lot of people I'd never met before, all of them on searches of their own. The underground comix movement, a little bit like rock and roll, attracted people who were similarly driven, of every different kind and persuasion: crooks and geeks and drug addicts and artists and writers and wits and raconteurs and just plain ordinary folks. Talent, both nurturing and destructive, fascinating people who were out into the world like cannon shots ready to explode. They were not easy times and I was not always an easy person (read asshole), but the people I met there understood me at some level and what I was about.

I haven't found that "thing", whatever it is that I'm looking for, but with time I've realized that's OK. If you're a searcher, if your bent is to search, then you search and you sample. You read books, you meet people. Sometimes you hole up in the closet and examine your navel. Sometimes you travel, sometimes you write, sometimes you photograph, sometimes you don't. Sometimes, for a time perhaps, you keep a journal.