Lone Star Swan is an old man that lives in the doorway of a used bookstore. Most people in the neighborhood know him as Swan, although he also goes by the name Messiah, and in fact he does look like an Old Testament prophet, with his bushy gray beard and wild long hair. He is known for feeding pigeons around the neighborhood and as the publisher of a page-a-day newspaper.

"I feed 75 lbs. a day" Swan says, "It costs over $600 a month and I live in a doorway to save on rent. I got about five hundred birds."

"I’ve been feedin’ the birds 31/2 years here in the Mission district. Over 3 1/2 years you really get to know them as persons. At first they all look the same, then they start to look different. They have different styles; some are swaggering and bold, Rocky Marciano’s of birds, some are shy and dear. The seagulls are like wolves and alligators. They land and scream and catch the donut bites in mid-air. They catch like outfielders, they’re real jocky. I mean, America loves jocks, they oughta love seagulls and pigeons. There is not one flabby pigeon in the whole world. They’re doin push-ups across the sky, a thousand push-ups a minute. The more I look at ‘em the more I realize this is the advanced Human Being. Toilet paper, sewers, underarm shavers, all the gadgets and crap, the biggest job of human society is to cart thousands of tons of feces away from itself at all times. These birds come self equipped: a set of feathers, flys, it’s warm, it’s a raincoat and it’s probably radio antennae into the dream universe. I’m really hooked on these birds."


He can usually be seen shuffling purposefully down the street wearing an old down jacket (regardless of the weather), a 20 lb. bag of golden "henscratch" in each hand and a skinny brown cigarette poking out from his ragged beard. Birds suddenly fill the sky and follow him down some alley where he can feed his flock in peace. They jump on his head and eat out of his hand. "Gooseneck Jones pioneered hand-feeding," he says in a toothless Boston accent, " I got names for a lot of em. The white bird with the hooked beak, I call him Ollie Angelo. The bird with the twisted beak, that’s Muffin. The dark one, that’s Rosewood." Along with the henscratch which is purchased at a pet food store, Swan collects old bagels from the bagel shop across the street and old donuts from a donut shop whose name he won’t reveal in order to protect their identity. During these "Feeds", as he calls them, he takes the opportunity to check for injured birds. Broken wings, twisted beaks or lacerations are common, for the life of a pigeon seems to be filled with constant danger. Most often the injuries are caused by cruel thread traps. These are criss-crossing threads installed on roofs in order to prevent birds from landing. The birds tend to get their feet caught in the threads. He says this can cause circulation problems or cut through the flesh and put them in jeopardy of loosing a foot. He carries a small pair of scissors and tweezers with which he performs delicate thread removal operations.




When Swan is not involved in his bird feeding activities he can usually be found sitting on an upside down milk crate in front of the bookstore, smoking and mulling over his notes for The Rag. The Rag is a one page photocopied newsletter that Swan writes and distributes throughout the neighborhood. He has done this everyday for at least fifteen years.

" I used to live in an old Volkswagon, but they towed it," Swan recalls, "They took everything that was in there, all my copies of The Rag from the first few years."

The Rag is part beat poetry, topical political humor, cartoons, experimental graphic design, political diatribe, and mad visionary rant. Each issue contains the bulk of his philosophy, in case the reader is unfamiliar with his writing. Yet for the regular readers he feels the responsibility to vary the themes in new and interesting ways. He is quite good at this and has probably re-invented his basic message well over three thousand times. He keeps no archive of his writing, the majority of it is gone, although there are a few people that have substantial collections.
The name also varies from day to day, one days title being a riff on the title from the previous day.
The Rag, Agency World, Hagi Magi, Poetry Flesh, La Flambe, the Daily Gronk are a few of his
regular titles. He heads down the to the local copy shop where he stores an old Smith-Corona
typewriter and spends the morning translating his handwritten notes, usually illegible scrawls on
the backs of paper scraps, into the days edition of the Rag.
Sometimes Swan will walk into a cafe, survey the crowd, and hand The Rag to only one or two patrons out of twenty. I'm not sure what his basis is for this decision.



In the early 70’s, Swan was working as a news reporter and documentary filmmaker in the midwest. He met Dan Rather when the famous newsman appeared at the local station for some disaster story. He remembers all the women at the station swooning over Rather.
Soon thereafter, Swan packed up the wife and kids and drove to New York City to take a news job. He became so stressed out while driving in the big city traffic that he never made it to the station, instead just turning around and leaving the city. The marriage fell apart, a nervous breakdown. followed and eventually Swan found himself in San Francisco’s North Beach, home to down and out beat poets.

" I sat in the café with my mouth hanging open, but in my mind I was flying around in my dreams." says Swan.

These experiences in the dreamworld formed the basis of the message he writes about in the Rag. Swan claims he was in this dream state for a period of seven years.

"When you dream, you’re in your own dream geography," says Swan, " and I flew really fast in one direction, like a man walking out of a forest to see if I could go beyond my own dream. And I did, I crossed out of my own dream and saw the dreamers spilling forever like huge soap bubbles. I flew seven years with the angels and the buddhas."

" Dream, Castenada said it, Buddha said it, Zen said it, I say it, dream is the secret, dream is the next frontier. That’s where we’re all going, we’re all plunging 500 mph towards death. It seems like yesterday I was a little kid, barefoot, running up trees and now here I am old. Death is racing toward us like a locomotive at all times, that’s what’s coming next. We oughta go look at it, we oughta send 100,000 dreamers dreaming, cuz that’s what matters. It matters more than Chevy’s, Fords, high rises, fur coats and cash and jewelry. Dream is what matters."

Swan is currently working on decoding the secret, double-meanings of the events and words related to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and bombing of Afghanistan.

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