Jotting down the first thing that came to our mind was a game we used to play back in the 1960’s. At about 9 in the evening, after the first couple of marijuana joints, we needed something to tee off the rest of the evening. Someone would take the sheet of paper and jot down the first weed vapor-inspired bit of idiocy that came to mind. One by one, the rest of us would add a phrase, sentence, or paragraph. One of the ideas that seemed reasonable at the time was to put on a bit of an act while doing it – make it seem more profound than it was. The optimists view was that, our inspirations would meld, and remarkable prose or poetry would emerge.
The following day, we would sit around the Tarry and Taste donut shop on Charles Street, having coffee. One of us would be the designated reader. The reader would choose the style of the reading: serious, jocular, or dramatic. That person would then unfold the inspirational work of the last evening and begin reading it. The first problem would be figuring out what the heck was on the paper. Penmanship was the first thing that suffered after a couple of joints. Grammar suffered too, and consistency was never a fine point anyway. Surplus words, words repeated because at the time they sounded good or felt good in the mouth, abounded.
Briefly there was a suggestion that we put together a bound volume of these mutterings. But by then we had moved on to even more absurd activities
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.At one point, management at the hose factory decided each department on all shifts needed to do warm-up exercises to minimize the chances for work-related injuries.
Little did we realize in my small department what brilliant satirists we were as a group of five men. We’d built these outrageously funny story lines, each adding his bit till we were laughing so hard, the exercises came to a halt.
While most departments stopped exercises because they took time out of the work (So they said! – they just didn’t like doing them.), we continued them because it was the most fun of the day. We thought we’d make great television writers for “Seinfeld”, but what we really got out of it was working as a team and not thinking about it that way.
Write a post about it. It sounds like you guys had it together.
I wish I could recreate one of those sessions, but they were spontaneous and quick paced moments decades ago. We should have smoked a joint and recorded them. LOL! By then, though, smoking in the offices was against policy. Well, tobacco cigarettes and cigars anyway.
Don’t you wish you had saved these little gems? Hilarious!
Best forgotton!!!!
That’s a fun game! During my weed interval I wrote poetry. It was terrible. I quit smoking weed. One of the idiotic thoughts I had and wrote down in that time was, “My hand is God.” I no longer think that is so idiotic. I think it might be true considering all the cool stuff my hands have done over the years, including writing idiotic poetry so, man, all I can say is like, far out, you know? I mean like that’s just far out.
Like you can cool it with the jive now, Martha. Ya dig?