My First Boob, the Loss of Innocence

My First Boob, the Loss of Innocence

by Dave Woehrle

Everyone in middle school has a friend whose parents were never home.

When you grow up in the wealthy Chicago suburbs, it's usually a mansion, a beautifully unsupervised place, decadent, always with a pool in the back and a pool table in the basement.

And this house, unequivocally, was the best place to make out: no time limit, no checking in, no parents, no pressure.

I was thirteen when my girlfriend and I were at this mutual friend's mansion, making out on a couch in the basement after another 8^th grade day.

Making out on a couch, of course, presents challenges you don’t see in movies: arms get numb caught under bodies, someone gets an elbow to the temple when shifting positions, and necks smell weird with saliva on them.

Just a week prior to this make out session, I'd touched her boob over the shirt at the movie theater, where we saw Matthew Broderick in Godzilla. I'd enjoyed the suppleness of bra-ed breast under a tank top, but the movie had, well, a Puff Daddy song in it.

But now, in the moment, in that empty, cavernous basement, it was the real deal. Alone. Horny and wearing my dad's Old Spice, it was Go Time.

I struggled with her bra, so she took it off herself in a wondrously quick one-handed way, and her boobs were suddenly free in her sleeveless sweater. And my hands, sweaty and eager, were free to find them.

When you make out, you keep your eyes closed. When two teenagers open their eyes in such a situation, it's awkward, silly, and downright alarming.

So, in hindsight, in my defense, my eyes were closed.

My hand went in and up into her sweater, like a deep sea diver coming up to water. I found her bellybutton. I played around there for awhile. Then I traveled north. As I went up, we shifted on the couch, switching sides. 

Suddenly, I broke through. The tit, her right tit, was near my palm. Oh fuck, I thought. This is it.

I grasped her breast. My first thought: Wow. This is firmer than I expected. It's like, all muscle-toned. I rubbed it some more. It's was almost bony. I was deeply unsettled at the lack of nipple. I opened eyes and realized I was rubbing her right shoulder. My hand had escaped her sweater shirt thing and I was just grabbing her fucking shoulder.

I thought to play it off as intentional by rubbing her other shoulder in a sexy pre-boob-clutch-massage-way. However, my left arm was asleep beneath her neck, so I was paralyzed, my arm in stuck snaked through her shirt, my hand resting on her shoulder.

She giggled. She knew what I'd done.

I eventually corrected myself and found her right boob. It was the greatest thing I'd ever done in my existence.

I felt it for over twenty minutes until it occurred to me that I could go for the other boob. That was a heavenly realization, a glorious doubling of fondling membership and joy. Frankly, it was a great day.

In hindsight, I don't remember meeting the parents of whoever owned that huge mansion. It was just a place us kids all knew we could go to do questionable things: touch each other, drink Icehouse or wine coolers, smoke cigarettes, and light firecrackers. The mansion was more an idea than an actual home.

Eleven years after my hapless, bumbling boob-grasping, I saw on the local news station a still shot of the mansion in black and white, tilted for effect, with red, stamp-style letters of “Heroin in the Suburbs” filling the screen.

Our mutual friend had run into some legal trouble, apparently. A party had taken a turn for the worse. Several attendees were doing heroin quite excessively into the night. In the morning, they found a seventeen year-old boy overdosed in an upstairs bedroom. Panicking, my friend, along with other junkies, decided to ditch the body in a downtown Chicago alley dumpster.

I saw my friend's mug shot on TV. Her face, the same one that put Tombstone pizzas in the oven so we could eat a meal while watching South Park on a big screen, had recently taken a dead body out of her house one morning to put it somewhere else.

And it was then, only then, that I realized what people meant when they used the phrase “loss of innocence.” It's not about virginity. It's not about casual drug experimentation. It's about seeing a place I’d associated with adolescent, carefree glee, transformed into a place of death. As a youth, I couldn’t fit a boob in a shirt in that basement. Now other teens took a needle to their end a couple staircases up.

A few days after seeing the news brief on TV, I wondered if the dead teen had taken his shoes off on the same rug near the front door as I had done as an 8^th grader. The image of two empty sneakers haunted me for weeks.

This isn't an anti-drug ad. Frankly, there's probably little to take away from my tale of tit and death in the modern American suburbs. It was simply the first time in my life I felt something pure inside me leave forever. 

Life can’t remain a Wonder Years episode forever. Bad shit happens, and it happens to or near people you had homeroom with. That’s a fact, I learned. 

You can only close your eyes for so long. 

The Bite

The Bite

By: Dave Woehrle

I work at a special needs summer camp. A couple weeks ago, on the bus, waiting to go to the pool, a kid clawed my neck, pulled me towards him, and bit my left upper arm. A quarter-sized bruise welted up. It hurt. But it was more shock than pain. It was the surprise, the realization that it’d been years since biting someone to show dismay was even an option.

            After work, I had an afternoon nap. I have insomnia, you see. Anxiety shows up every night to dance the dark ballroom of my mind. Thoughts that happen at three in the morning are not good thoughts.

            Post-nap, I had dinner. I saw a summer storm coming in.

            I noticed a missed call on my cell phone from an old friend of mine.

            I dialed him up and stood barefoot in my parents’ garage. The garage door was open, and I watched the tree leaves in the front yard go silver as the wind upturned them.

            My friend, a writer, a farmer from Iowa, said “Hey, what are doing?”

            I said, “I’m watching a storm come in.”

            “That’s good,” he said.

            His voice was wrong, not his.

            He told me that a mutual friend of ours had committed suicide.

“What?” I asked, needlessly.

“Yeah, he’s gone. I’ve been lying on the floor and crying for most of the day.”

            I was speechless. I stood with my cell phone to my cheek. I watched warm rain flood the street in a single sudden surge. It was a short roar, a few seconds of heavy downfall.

            My friend on the phone, he said our friend got a hotel room in Colorado, a gun, and, well, that was that.

            I paced the garage, smelling the rain, feeling helpless.

            My friend on the phone, responding to my silence, said, “I know. I don’t know, either, man. I just thought I should tell you.”

            The storm outside shifted and a double rainbow appeared in the sun. I’ve never seen a double rainbow after hearing about a suicide. God is an asshole sometimes.

            Because I didn’t know what else to say, I told my friend on the phone about the double rainbow above my neighbor’s roof across the street.

He said, “I wish it would rain here, so I could see that. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen that.”

            After a while – after I walked in circles in the garage, randomly squeezing tires to estimate air pressure for no real reason – we exchanged memories of our lost friend: he’d written a short autobiographical fiction piece from King Kong’s perspective called “Correct Me If I’m Kong.” He’d played Debussy beautifully on piano. He was once in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing in college. After the show, a professor said, “You know, he was the only up one up there that seemed to be having a good time.”

            That’s how I’ll remember him, the man who knew more than most of us ever will, the guy who saw the Big Joke and the Big Beauty.

On the phone with my friend, we agreed we had to look out for each other, to call, to catch up, to remember that the ones we love have to live every day just like us. After awhile, it was clear we’d made each other feel better just by being there, by being and continuing to be, which is so much harder than anyone admits.

            My left shoulder ached suddenly from the bite after I hung up the phone.

It was the pain. It was the realization of the ways others choose to show dismay.

Things My Father Said to Me

Things My Father Said To Me


By: Dave Woehrle










On Snacking:


“You know what I need? My fucking cheese balls. Where are they?”






On Snacking (part 2):


“I stashed them away and forgot about ‘em. Like a stupid squirrel who forgets where he buries his nuts.”


(rediscovered bag of Skittles)




On Snacking part (part 3):

"I don't do 'Mini' anything." (referring to Mini-Oreos)




On Hamburger Helper:

"I'm from a class of people who believe that hamburger doesn't need any help."




On Ducks:


“Did you know ducks shit in the water? I always thought they shit on land. But they shit in the water. Isn’t that crazy?”






On Bears: (first time meeting my new girlfriend, out to dinner at Red Lobster, this is the first thing he says to start a conversation):

“I’ve been dreaming about bears again lately. Last night, I dreamed I was near a stream, fishing. Then this bear comes up, you know? Big old bear and he’s wearing overalls, so I figure he’s a nice bear. Then he growls and starts chasing me and I run down the river shore. When I turn around, he’s in a little boat with an outboard motor, and he’s gaining on me. And all I can hear is the motor and his growling and then I wake up. Seriously. Scared the hell outta me. Something about this time of year, I tell ya, I dream about bears.”





On Cats:


(My father had ACL surgery. He was bed-ridden and full of painkillers.)


Dad: “You know, everybody loves kittens, yet everybody hates cats.”


Me: “What?”


Dad: “Don’t listen to me. I’m all fucked up.”




On Llamas:

"Llamas are spiteful creatures."




On Crabs in Florida:

"They're big. They're feisty. They're fucking quick."




On Memories:

"I swear to Christ, your Ma won't ever let me forget the time I almost shit my pants at Farm-N-Fleet."






On Computers:


“Fuck this shit.”





On Working for a Local Municipality (i.e. the government):

"When all is said and done, more is said than done."





On Figure Skating:


“See dat bitch fall when she tried her triple sow cow? She went ass over elbow on that one.”






On the Discovery Channel:


“It’s a beautiful thing when you slip into unconsciousness for two hours and wake up and still see dinosaurs on the screen.”






On the History Channel:


(mouth full of corn kernals): “You see, Dave, the pilot sits in a titanium tank that can withstand bullets up to six millimeters.”




On the Harry Potter Movies:

"Christ, they're still making those? Harry Potter must be 40 by now. I don't get that stuff. I don't do wizards."




On the film Titanic:

"You know, I've seen this movie a dozen times, and the ship always fucking sinks."




On Say Yes to the Dress:

"These bitches are slamming mimosas, so how do ya trust their judgment?"






On His Feet After Work:


“Damn, I’m gonna have to start putting sauce on these bad boys ‘cuz dere funky as fuck.”




On a Nasty Hungover Dump I Dropped:

"Christ! Did you eat a fucking car battery last night or something?"






On Sunsets:


Me: “You guys should really come out and check out this sunset.”


Dad: “No. I’m watching True Lies.”





On Using the Bathrooms at Pike's Peak in Colorado:

"Wait 'til I tell the guys at work I dropped one at 11,000 feet."





On Kidney Stones and Life:


“I suppose there’s no point in bitching about something you can’t change. But if that were the human way, we’d all be speechless.”






On TV choices of my mother:


"She's watching Dancing with the Jagoffs, so I decided to come down here and clean my guns."





On the primate fossils of Archicebus achilles found in Central China:


Dad: "You hear about that little monkey fossil they found?"


Me: "I did."


Dad: "It lived like 50 million years ago, and the little fucker only weighed an ounce. That's not a monkey. That's a squirrel."


Me: "I heard it was a kind of proto-lemur creature. It ate bugs."


Dad: "Well, I just feel monkeys should always weigh more than a goddamn ounce."






On Life:


“Life is like a penis. When it’s soft, you can’t beat it. When it’s hard, it’s a motherfucker.”

Almost Thirteen, Almost Blue Leaves

Almost Thirteen, Almost Blue Leaves

By: Dave Woehrle

(for Jim Fredricksen)

Mr. Fred was the cool teacher: hip and soft-spoken, willing to laugh and nod. He knew who the Smashing Pumpkins were. He was in a band. He had nice glasses.

Most importantly, he let us loiter and listen to Hendrix CDs in his classroom before the bell rang for first period in middle school.

My friends and I would stand around, punching each other’s arms. We were hopeless hormones, dumb energy in Vans shoes and No Fear shirts. We talked about boobs and skateboards. We were almost thirteen.

I went to his class for third period Language Arts. We had something called “Workshop,” a term that sounded magical yet professional, like we were ingenious cobblers. Most of us sat together in groups, doodling in notebooks, writing raunchy limericks about the newest make-out rumors. Making out was called “Frenching” then.

 Mr. Fred brought in art books on a cart from the library, hoping to inspire. Most of us looked through the art books for nudes. We were almost thirteen.

But I eventually sat alone during Workshop. I wanted to brood and sigh, because that’s what I thought real writers did. I wanted to look mysterious and smart, in contrast to my immature friends, therefore getting girls to like me. I was also almost thirteen.

However, sitting alone and thinking was remarkable. How often do you get to really hang out with your own brain? I liked the freedom to mentally marinate.

On most days, I couldn’t think of anything to write. The blank page laughed at me. Damn, I thought, how do writers do it?

One day I found a collection of Winslow Homer paintings on the cart and began flipping through the images. The colors were deep and rich, peppered with gray men doing gray things on the American landscape out east. I’d never taken the time to really look at any paintings in my life, but now I suddenly had time to absorb something other than middle school’s blind cruelty, the cliques and arbitrary taboos, the shifting goal posts of Cool.

I don’t remember the title, but one painting had a dark shore with dark waves and a boat at the water’s edge. Why this image caught my eye, I’ll never know, but I started writing about it, making up a narrative, how and why the boat was abandoned, what monsters the waves hid, what the air smelled like near the sand, and the man who’s looking for his boat or something more in the expansive Atlantic. Suddenly, I had something to write about, a jumping-off point.

I learned an important writing lesson: make shit up as you go along, write about what you see and feel. It may not be good, but at least it’s something.

Mr. Fred squatted by my desk to get eye-level with me and asked what I was writing. “This painting,” I said. “I like this painting.”

He asked what I liked about it.

I said, “I don’t know. I can’t tell, really.”

And he nodded and smiled, knowing we arrive at the best answers ourselves.

A week later, Mr. Fred brought in an overhead projector. He put up a transparent page with the black letters “My life is blue leaves.” Then he said the words, “My life is blue leaves.” He asked us what we thought it meant. Most of us giggled, calling it nonsense.

“I don’t know what that means. How could anything be blue leaves? I’ve never seen blue leaves. Are they, like, frozen?” someone asked.

But he waited, letting us digest the oddness and beauty of the phrase.

He then explained images to us, the power of words to paint and convey the abstract and the concrete; how we compare things to one another because that’s how we can arrange life in understandable chunks. Words could be life if placed in the right order.

He was probably giving us seventh-graders a little too much credit intellectually, but that respect of our minds made our minds change.

Suddenly, we all wrote more, tried more, thought more.

One of my friends wrote a song about his breakfast of soggy toast. Another wrote about football shoulders pads, how they crunch during a good hit. One girl wrote about her little sister’s tricycle, the wheels and the rust.

I wrote a poem called “Minnesota” about my family cabin up north and turned it in to Mr. Fred after Workshop. The next day, he said, “Dave, I really like these lines: ‘Maybe back home I’m missing something / but I’d rather be here, thinking of nothing.’”

I’ll never forget that feeling: someone reading my words back to me in a delighted tone.

Mr. Fred encouraged details. He encouraged life. Up to that point in my life, I had never met anyone that alive, that curious and open to a world of words.

He asked us to write so we wrote, and he asked us about what we wrote. It was just that simple. No one had ever done that before in my life. Suddenly, what I thought mattered; what I imagined mattered; how I arranged words on a page mattered. Those things didn’t matter before I met Mr. Fred.

We were almost thirteen. We were on the brink of an immensely convoluted era of existence. I can’t imagine going through it without my journal, my place of blue leaves.

I’m twenty-seven now. I write everyday. I even get paid to write for local papers. I write because I was told my words were interesting when I was almost thirteen.

Thanks, Mr. Fred.

           

Eighteen Short Journal Entries From 2010

Eighteen Short Journal Entries From 2010

by Dave Woehrle

1.

A hornet walks the hair on my pinkie toe. I watch. I don't flinch. I'm tired of preemptive strikes, that dangerous enemy called Maybe. Accepting a potential sting, I laugh because his six legs tickle me, exploring toe knuckles, those pink hills, then the small yellow valley of toenail. “No fear, no sting”: it could be on a T-shirt.

2.

Where would we be without malice and neglect, our dark secrets playing poker and laughing cigar breath, celebrating our silences? Like a funeral that doesn't feature rain, but warm June shadows and sounds of distant softball games. Where would we be without cliches? Probably even more disturbed.

3.

The September breeze over the prairie wildflowers near the bike path, like a crowd swaying their arms during a hot, slow ballad. When I woke up today, I thought of the child in the coffee shop, years ago, who asked me if ants could jump, and I didn't know. And I still don't know if ants can jump.

4.

“You can't expect your whole life to be caught in a kiss.”

---Man on MegaBus to Wisconsin

5.

Went to the dentist this morning. No cavities. I wonder what dentists think of having to see

so much nostril depth in one day, a tapestry of boogery nose hair, like wheat fields covered with fat yellow birds.

6.

My father, alone in the basement, cleaning his guns, like me on the piano, learning a song, a sweet distraction, chords being cleaned in their own oil. The mind focused on present activity, not the world itself, with its wind-slapped trapdoors the sound of bullets.

7.

An old man is trying to start his gas grill: there's clicking, a button repeatedly pushed, an adjusting of valves and tubes, a few grunts, and finally, “Fuck it. Where the Weber?”

8.

I walked down to the Scarecrow Festival, the highlight being a Noah's Ark display, complete with music and moving animal parts (the giraffe's tongue being the most frightening). Lots of MILFs in sunglasses. Joe was there. He wanted me to buy him a corn dog. I did not. We walked by the petting and Joe said, “Dude, this is organized torture.” Goats, sheep, ducks, pigs, chickens – all of them being groped by fat, frustrated children who handed out “food pellets,” as parents snapped pictures and fussed with strollers. One girl kept lifting up a chicken and tilting it to look between its legs. She did this several times, wearing an odd grin. I realized, as I watched her stare at a chicken twat, that I never had an urge to pick up a chicken in my entire life. They are hideous creatures. I've never seen a chicken and thought, “I just need that in my hands.”

9.

I'm the worst kind of lazy person because I'm clever. I can rationalize gluttony and sloth with winked, existential loopholes, dark jokes and word play. Now, however, no one's laughing, not even myself. My life coach neighbor had me take the Birkman Personality Test. I was Three Blues, which means I'm sensitive, intuitive, and value abstract thought. Also, I'm very unemployed.

10.

“After the horse thing, I went straight to the whale thing.”

-Sky (on girlhood obsessions)

11.

I admire cities that exist in the shadow of a volcano. It's mentally healthy to have uncertainty geographically personified. Life must be more spicy and humbling when lava looms so close to home.

12.

With a grain of salt, take it all that way, even other grains of salt, sodium as a Who Knows proverb. Sometimes I worry that we live in an age where anticipation dies. We can't wait for sunsets or status updates. The death of gradual.

13.

Carl Sandburg's poetry reminds me of Midwest autumn sunsets, the cold kind, and I think cold weather makes us kind. It's October and it's too brisk to smoke cigarettes and watch baseball in the garage. We take to couches, sweatshirts and college football. We drive out west of town on Sundays, gold fields and new wind and diner windows full of old men slowly nodding.

14.

“The success of the Snuggie really proves our deep-seeded subconscious social urge to wear capes.” ---Alfonso

15.

This autumn saw a new large infestation of red and black Boxelder bugs. Thousands upon thousands blossoming on the white aluminum siding of our house, like demonic freckles. The young ones are all red, small, a blood drop with legs, congregating on fence posts and porches, so abundant you can hear them walk in the grass and leaves. Toads and spiders are eating well, I suspect. And the coming cold will take care of the rest. Nature's fecundity sweeps up the surplus.

16.

Dogs and toddlers can teach us a few things: naps and snacks help. So does running around outside, getting mud on your feet, chasing squirrels, and sniffing a few trees.

17.

“My uncle was tricked into eating a monkey.”

“What? Really?”

“Yeah. He was in New Guinea.”

18.

“I mean I want to dedicate my life to those who keep going just to see how it isn't ending.”

---Ralph Angel

Excerpts from the Lion King Video Game Instruction Manual for Sega Genesis (1994)

Excerpts from the Lion King Video Game Instruction Manual for Sega Genesis (1994)

By Dave Woehrle

Pressing down diagonally on the D-Pad while Simba is running causes him to tumble into a ball of extended teeth and claws, damaging some things in his path. Some areas are only accessible when Simba rolls into them.

Some monkeys get confused when Simba roars and may change the direction of their toss.

Stretched elephant hide can really boost your jump, but one too many times can ruin your ride.

The Vultures love to attack you with a swoop, so try to get up high and turn the tables on them.

The gorilla packs a pretty powerful punch! If only there was a way to throw those coconuts back at him! (Here’s a hint: try rolling!)

To increase the Roar Meter, Simba needs to eat Blue Beetles.

If Timon picks up any of the bad bugs, the bonus round will end.

When Simba is riding the ostrich, duck under and jump over the birds nests. Jump off the ostrich’s back during mid-jump to find extra goodies.

Don’t linger too long on some of the crumbly bones or you’ll be in trouble.

Plain Beetle: Restores half of Simba’s health.

Patterned Beetle: Restores all of Simba’s health.

Circle of Life: Allows one more Continue in the game when all Simba Chances have been lost.

Avoid the dripping hot lava. It’s not exactly a beauty bath.

Remember: You can reset the ROAR, JUMP and SLASH buttons on the Options menu.

A Great Poem

Read this. It's perfect.


Tattoo
by Ted Kooser

What once was meant to be a statement -
a dripping dagger held in the fist
of a shuddering heart - is now just a bruise
on a bony old shoulder, the spot
where vanity once punched him hard
and the ache lingered on. He looks like
someone you had to reckon with,
strong as a stallion, fast and ornery,
but on this chilly morning, as he walks
between the tables at a yard sale
with the sleeves of his tight black T-shirt
rolled up to show us who he was,
he is only another old man, picking up
broken tools and putting them back,
his heart gone soft and blue with stories.


(as published in Delights and Shadows, 2004, Copper Canyon Press)

Joy to the World

Joy to the World

by Dave Woehrle

Sometimes pop songs become so ingrained into our collective cultural psyche that we forget that such tunes actually had to be written at some point. In other words, we need to remember that every song, no matter how familiar, didn't exist until it did. Of course, that's a No-Duh comment, but one must step back and think about where certain songs came from.

The oldies radio station staple “Joy to the World” by Three Dog Night is a perfect example. We've all sung along to this hit from 1971. But one has to wonder about the origin of the tune.

I like to imagine such scenarios. What kind of discussion took place for this pop song to occur? Three Dog Night's Hoyt Axton wrote the song. But how did he introduce the song to his band?

I imagine Axton saying, “Hey guys. I wrote this new thing. Let me play it for you. It's good stuff.”

He sings the first verse: “Jeremiah was a bullfrog, was a good friend of mine / Never understood a single word he said, but I helped him drink his wine / And he always had some mighty fine wine.”

The other band members are mystified. Some questions surely arose. The first verse concerns getting intoxicated with an amphibian. I mean, that's certainly a first.

Some questions I imagine being asked at this juncture: how does one befriend a frog? And how does one know the frog's name is Jeremiah? If you can't understand a single word he says, then how did the identification process take place? Are there frogs with better diction that you converse with? And what do you mean by “good friend”? Do you have other, less-loved frog friends? And you drank “his” wine? How does a bullfrog drink wine? And where does he acquire it? How big was the bottle? And when you helped him in consuming the wine, what was the ratio of intake? Was the frog able to safely hop home? And if Jeremiah “always had some mighty fine wine,” then clearly you've gotten drunk with him on several occasions, so what was the fine wine? A nice swampy, pinot noir?

I imagine lots of shaking heads, the drummer saying, “So, Hoyt, man, like you have to stop getting shitcanned at ponds. This is getting weird.”

Then the incongruity of the subsequent chorus adds another dimension of confusion: “Joy to the world / to all the boys and girls / joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea / joy to you and me.”

Questions: Yes, I agree giving joy to the world is good for boys and girls, but are fish really the next in line? Are mammals exempt? And do the fish have to be salt water fish? Are bluegills not worthy of joy? You have this aquatic theme going here, frogs and fish. And when you say “joy to you and me,” are we still referring to Jeremiah, the bullfrog? What kind of joy is being achieved between you two?

The bassist chewed his nails. He asked, “Are you okay, Hoyt? This is getting vaguely Charles Manson-ish. Wine, frogs, worldly proclamations of joy, I mean, I just worry sometimes, man.”

Then Axton sang the second verse: “If I were the king of the world, tell you what I'd do / I'd throw away the cars and the bars and the war / and make sweet love to you.”

Questions: So if you were king of the world, you'd berid us of cars, bars, and wars? Are cars, bars, and wars all equally evil? Was the Korean War as bad as a Buick or a tavern? I mean, did you get a DUI in a war zone or something? And who are you making sweet love to? Jeremiah? Really? Let me get this straight: in order to properly get off while fucking a frog, you need to become king and destroy automobiles, drinking establishments, and martial conflicts?

The lead guitarist said, “We're not doing this song, Hoyt. No goddamn way. This shit is like the ramblings of a horny and disturbed marine biologist pacifist.”

And Axton had yet a third verse, a comparatively more sensible one: “You know I love the ladies, love to have my fun / I'm a high life flyer and a rainbow rider / A straight shootin' son-of-a-gun, I said a straight shootin' son-of-a-gun.”

Questions: Does Jeremiah know about these other ladies? Are these ladies you love aware of your questionable, lily pad humping past? And how can you be both a rainbow rider and a straight-shooting son-of-a-gun? Did you see yourself as John Wayne on acid or something?

The rest of the band was speechless and bewildered at the end of the song. They saw no future in “Joy to the World” other than maybe evidence in a courtroom after Axton finally loses all his marbles.

But Hoyt Axton was a persistent, visionary songwriter. He knew he'd written a gem. He knew what society needed – drunk bullfrogs and joy – even if society didn't know it yet. And he was right. “Joy to the World” was certified gold, selling over a million copies, after two months on the airwaves. Billboard Magazine ranked “Joy to the World” the #1 pop song of 1971. Think about that.

The moral of this story: always bring booze to bodies of water and let the muses take you where they may. And don't let anyone tell you you're crazy. Hell, Lady Gaga may be working on a song about doing blow with squirrels. It'll be called “Going Nutz” (featuring 2 Chainz).