just a story

I’ve been singing to myself the Joan Jett song – “I Don’t Give a Damn About My Bad Reputation”. I just played it on YouTube. Vast punk.

Wow. I recently decided, like 211 seconds ago, if I ever reach enlightenment, I would want this as my Dharma name:

Vast Punk.

Did I tell you I met Joan Jett once? It was at an autograph signing at a music store in Medford, Massachusetts, kitty corner from the Howard Johnson’s on the Wellington Circle rotary there – 28 Flavors. She was with her lead guitarist at the time, Ricky Byrd. I stood in line a while and made it to the front. What I had with me, stuffed in my back jeans pocket, was a paperback copy of the book “Dog Soldiers” by Robert Stone. My signature, as in this belongs to me, is on the first page. Joan’s signature is on the fifth. She wrote “Love, Joan Jett” in a blue marker. She added a small, blue, five-pointed star, the kind you make without taking the marker off the page, you just swish it around in a star shape. Ricky Byrd signed the page, the fifth page in “Dog Soldiers”, too. His signature is nearly faded away. Joan’s is like the day she wrote it, which I’d guess was around 1985, somewhere then.

My copy of “Dog Soldiers”, the one with those precious autographs, sits on the bookshelf in my small San Diego room today, between “The Selected Poems” of Langston Hughes and Thoreau’s “Walden.” If there’s some secret code for me within that, I haven’t grokked it yet. But anything’s possible.

None of this is an April Fools story. It’s just a story.