In Twenty-Five Words...

My FB friend, Carol, is a wonderful writer and author. She posted a memory of her first stab at writing, a young girl whispering secrets to her diary.

Writers write, that’s what she does for a living, I just doodle.

Aside from school assignments and letters home during summers away, the first real writing I remember doing was in a journal that I kept in the summer of 1966 while touring England with my church choir. Considered to be the best choirs of men and boys at that time on our side of the pond, singing in the English tradition. We wanted to be Kings College, Cambridge good, and had the joy of singing with them that summer. But I had just turned 18, England was swinging, Carnaby Street, Mods and Rockers, Trafalgar Square a familiar street show, much  like Washington Square in the Village back home. The Beatles had released “Rubber Soul” the year prior.

Pubs welcomed us with open arms, “You’re Yanks!” locals would shout with great cheer, beer breath and alcohol reddened faces almost too close, insisting on buying us endless pints, pulling us into their overwhelming camaraderie. We always vowed to leave in time to make curfew but rarely did. Drunken punting on the Thames and a run in with the aforementioned rockers.

They surrounded the four of us, flashing shiny switchblades, demanding to know why we thought we could walk unmolested through their turf. I managed to stammer out our collective ignorance of their territorial boundaries and had just started in on a profuse apology when the blade wielding eviscerators yelled in unison “You’re Yanks!”

More hours of undeniable hospitality followed, free beer flowed, we felt totally at home in a pub that was ground zero for those leather clad, cycle riding outlaws who were just scared kids our own age back then.

A visit to Westminster Abby was contrasted by a strip show in Soho where the same girl changed outfits and characters every hour, but always featured her ability to pop syphilitic Ping Pong balls out into the crowd from her fully loaded chamber. Local derelicts sat in the front row, very drunk, show after show, trying to catch her slimy high balls in their open mouths. Quite an education for me.

But it was the boredom of college in rural North Alabama that got me writing on a regular basis. The campus an oasis surrounded by a cultural purity that had been untainted by segregation or social upheaval, until the arrival of Northern hippies who had been recruited to help pay for the new dorms. Entry requirements were stringent, you had to be able to fog a mirror. They were interesting times, I wrote about them, reflecting on the ever changing social skirmish lines. Nothing meaningful, just snippets and snapshots. Many LSD fueled nights spent grinding my teeth, clutching an indelible ink pen, writing quick offerings on tie-dyed bed sheets, my first pre-desktop background. Near my head a cynical take on religion that has only grown, based on a challenge to consumers often found on the back of cereal boxes back in the day:

In Twenty-Five Words…

Let me tell you about God,

All the hungry, hollow structures,

Razed to praise his name,

The endless wars, unctuous whores,

In twenty-five words…

No less.

I still write in snippets, many hundreds of them, my own attention span similar to that of most of our society, no longer than my own manhood and often equally embarrassing.

hmh