I’ve been tagged again. This time by Nic the Writer. If I break the tag chain, will my turtle die? Hmmmm, something to think about since I don’t have a turtle.

Okay, five more interesting or unique things about me. Sheesh. I had a hard enough time coming up with the first five.

1) I wrote my first short story at around the age of ten. As you might expect, considering how long ago it was that I was ten, it was a cowboy story. And of course there’s a gunfight and someone dies. Some things never change. I still have the story, having recently come across it in an old trunk I’ve been hauling around for years. All things considered, it’s not badly written, a little short on detail, maybe. And the plot’s a little thin. Hopefully I’ve improved in those areas since that time.

2) I was once the lead singer in what I guess you would call an air-guitar band. This was during a three month vacation at the psychiatric facilities of Oakland Naval Hospital. Every afternoon a group of us would meet on the front porch, crank up the stereo and sing our lungs out. As the administrators of the facility frowned on anything that might be used as a weapon, we had no real instruments but we made up for the lack with imagination and youthful vigor. This was a time when I could slip through the vocal scale like Roy Orbison and hit those three octave high notes like Frankie Valli without a break in my voice. Today I’d be lucky to pull off a Nick Massi low note.

3) A friend and I once tried to run over the leader of the Nazi party in Michigan when he and a bunch of his jack-booted friends showed up at an anti-war rally out side Chrysler’s Mound Street truck plant. I can’t for the life of me remember the guys name now but he showed up all George Lincoln Rockwell, decked out in his SS uniform, waving his Nazi flag, all his little brown shirts tagging behind like mutated ducks. Before we had a chance to get to him, the anti-war protesters mobbed them. It was at about that moment that the riot police showed up so my friend and I, having a rather large quantity of smokeable substance in our possession, split.

4) In my early college days, I worked as a street counselor at a place called Shelter. We were all twenty-somethings then; long hair, ragged clothes and a bad attitude toward authority. Again it seems that some things never change. Shelter was open 24/7, staffed entirely by volunteers. We worked with kids in their teens. Suicide hotline, runaway center, drug counseling, birth control and abortion counseling (pre Roe v Wade), bad trip guidance at rock concerts, walking stoned kids around and around until they got a little less stoned, making sure the cops didn’t bust kids that had gotten too stoned and ended up in the emergency room. It was a wild place that the cops were none to happy about. They were always trying to plant drugs on the premises in order to shut us down. We always managed find the drugs first. The cops always had the best drugs. Every week we put out a “Drugs on the Street” report; what was good, what was bad, what to run from if it was offered to you. Most of the drugs on the list were, of course, field tested first. If you’re going to supply information, it really should be accurate information.

5) Although I’ve attended hundreds of anti Vietnam war rallies, was a card-carrying member of the SDS and Vietnam Veterans Against The War, partied with the Weathermen in Ann Arbor, ferried many a draft dodger over to Canada and was peripherally involved with the Winter Solider’s Investigation, I have, until very recently, never been inside a Vietnam memorial. Though I could get myself to them, I just couldn’t seem to bring myself to actually enter them. The one recent exception is the memorial at Angel Fire, New Mexico. A friend wanted to see it and so we drove up there. I hung back in the parking lot for awhile and then found myself circumnavigating the structure several times. Finally, after assuring myself no one was around, I forced myself to step inside. Too many weird feelings in there. I couldn’t stay long.

Well, I’m not sure what caused this 60s/70s nostalgia trip but I’m glad it’s over. As far as tagging someone else, I’m going to make like Stella here and not do it. That will either make me immune from further tagging or else my turtle will die.