Editor’s Note: Each day, inching toward one of the several election milestones, I glory in the association of some unrepentant Authors In The Yard. Marlow has a shot at it today. Go, Doctor.

– Vic

Author’s Note: To lighten our moods and prove that we mechanical pencil pushing Socotra House journalers are not always ill tempered, I prescribe this as a one-time treatment.

-Dr. Marlow

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Socotra House Journalists

We elder Socotra House scribblers formed long ago in some fashion a Country Boys Existentialist Club.

“Sheeee-ittttt” was our publisher Vic’s response when he found out our history when he returned to full duty last spring.

Although notoriously unreliable, field reports suggest we were known way back then as “The Bakersfield Boys” and that we shared a cell block in a Midwestern state penitentiary for thought crimes we did not commit or, at the very least, willingly admit while under duress or the influence. During those days, in addition to our thesauruses, we packed brass knuckles and wore titanium codpieces; and, when we were lifting weights in the yard, we wore chain mail diapers to discourage non-medical pokes about our 6’s. We protected each other. We were nobody’s bitch.

Point Loma, one bad mutha (shut your mouth!), did his stretch with us for beating a child molester to death. The others will have to relate their stories due to declassification and statutes of limitations issues. When we first formed this Club in stir, crowds would gather around us and join in discussions about the meaning of life, whether our perception of reality could ever be anything other than a subjective interpretation of an objective reality and whether God is present in all things and any attempt to discern His immanence is a noble enterprise or just self-delusion and an attempt to bring the concept of God into a cold, hard, and random universe.

Sometimes Club sessions got a bit heated. Our French speaking member and convicted, high speed, reckless driver was lauding the merits of Camus and “The Plague,” when our Greek speaking, three-strikes bank robbing member cut him off by saying, “Camus was a hack, just like Kerouac, and neither of them could hold Sartre’s jock strap.”

The high-speed driver yelled, “That pike-eyed Frog!” And that was it. They squared off and threw down, and a guard came over waving a copy of “No Exit” around. Instantly, two-man teams were quickly formed, and the game was on: a timed quiz show. It was later broadcast in state and federal prisons all across the nation and several enlightened county jails as well.

When things got close to fist city out in the yard, the screws chose the topic and at those times the categories were all related to “Solitude vs Isolation” with the hottest discussion centered around solitude being a voluntary choice whereas the Arpanet’s isolation was forced upon the individual, and the winning team received extra books on the weekly checkout from the burgeoning Philosophy section from the joint’s library that also had a classic collection of Penthouse and Penthouse Letters, notwithstanding the dog-ears on some of the late 1970s issues.

Sometimes one of us and maybe a guard or two had to step in and whisper words of wisdom and repeat, “Let it be. Let it be” when our burly member doing time for causing grievous bodily harm to some American Nazis he caught desecrating a relative’s Star of David tombstone — anyways, he was locked in a never ending spiral of mutual annoyance over who was right, the milkman driver or the milk and yogurt processor who kept extending the expiration date on the milk and yogurt containers. They were arguing whether Existentialism necessarily was all about the death of God, or whether the increasing reports of near-death experiences and out of body experiences (NDE and OBE) could allow for the existence of a deity.

So, we boys have had quite an interesting time in the House of Socotra revisiting all those ancient times during these past eight months of Plague and Politics, or whatever else you want to call it.

These current and those old times of isolation would have been much easier on us all if we had legalized dope long ago.

Socotra House Country Boys Existentialist Club members back in the day

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