So, as I keep pushing toward some sort of semi-final draft of the manuscript, I’m just going to keep posting stuff that I don’t hate, but realize I need to focus, focus, focus… what? Yeah, focus on moving the plot of “Swamis” forward, faster.

To set the scene here; Ginny has invited Jody to her eighteenth birthday party at her parents’ newly acquired property in Rancho Santa Fe. He is very anxious, and has many good reasons for being so.

The smell, sweet, pungent, somehow almost harsh, was unmistakable.   

“Last year’s crop was good,” one of the guys by the barn said, inhaling, holding it, before blowing the smoke out. “But this year’s gonna be mo’ betta’. Mo’ mo’ betta,’ Mon.”

It wasn’t a real accent, it was an affected, put-on, party accent; fake, put on Jamaican by the first converts, the first of generation of (Bob) Marley-ites.    This party accent was pushing against the Beatles-influenced fake British from when I was in junior high (1964-65), which had bumped up against the beatnik jazz-speak older kids were practicing, that competing with the fake down-home folk lingo/rhythm. 

Meanwhile, kids from and in the mid-west wanted to talk like west coast surfers.  It was considered cool to talk like you were already half-stoned or wasted, but you still had something possibly clever, or, better, semi-profound to say; or, at least, something that might be perceived as clever or profound to those more stoned or wasted.

People were ‘experimenting’ with drugs, as if they were scientists.

I can’t get too judgmental; I modified my speech patterns because of TV characters, reporters; Tommy Smothers and Walter Cronkite and… really can’t list all the influences.  As in my surfing, I copied, emulated, folded things into my own… own style, persona?  Yes, everything about me was affected, put on, not real.

This was some of what I attempted to fill my mind with as I backed the Falcon into a spot.

It wasn’t really working.

SO- Working my way to another brief visit with “THE END.” Thanks for reading.