SUNDAY MOURNING

I was a teenager on drugs but my parents thought I was off 'em... I was eighteen or nineteen and the peak of my real drug use, when I was fifteen and sixteen, were behind me...

I didn't do as many as before and mostly I was depressed...

And at my mother's request I went to a shrink, a nice handsome guy who played guitar and surfed... He had a meeting with myself and a young blonde girl who was kinda pretty (but not very)... And another kid, very troubled, slightly younger...

During this meeting (the shrink wanted us to meet) the kid had a fit... He pointed at us (me and the girl) and said, "Look at you... You have no problems..." And he stormed out of the room...

So it was myself and the girl, and the shrink, and the shrink went to a popular big church (where my parents go now) and set it up so I would go to this church and meet the girl on Sunday morning... The girl was fine with this...

That was on a Friday... Cut to Sunday Morning: skipping past Saturday Night where I had dropped acid, and as dawn awoke I hadn't slept and felt a mess... But was aglow... Burning-out but still, some fire lurked...

And I drove to the church with the wrong music in the tape deck... I didn't want the right music because that would remind me of the drugs that, the night before, put me in this position of feeling different than the situation entailed...

For I now had to go to church feeling like the result of a lab experiement, and to "survive" the situation needed music to make me feel "normal," and I drove listening to Steve Miller and it was "Take the Money and Run," and the peppy lyrics and hand-claps, juxtaposed with my mangled brain, made no connection whatsoever...

And I arrived at the church early... Walked up to a building and there were some young girls there... Uptight Christian types and pretty, more than the girl I'd meet who wasn't there yet...

These two girls saw me, and my long hair, and my... my my... and I told them I was meeting her... Said the name of the girl... And they said, "Oh, how nice," which I realized meant... I was charity.

Well, I guess I was. But the sound of that, "How nice", wasn't nice... And seemed as though this girl I was gonna meet often met losers at church: upon the shrink's request...

So I left.

I drove home and the tape, on the other side, had slightly better music... Doobie Brothers ("Long Train Runnin'")... But it still didn't fit...

So an hour later... In my room... I put on my Neil Young record with a fifteen minute version of WORDS (mostly an instrumental)... Sounding like a brain-dead bull grazing in a vast field of green... The mantra of those steel guitars were perfect for my shunned soul... A symphony to my plotless pointless life... And I was relaxed, and content...

And perhaps if I had that music on the way to the church, I wouldn't have been so mislead that the realization of being a nice girl's charity wouldn't have mattered like it did.