The Boogie Dog Variations

Or, Prelude to a Strange Word Document ...

I came across an odd little file on my laptop last night. Entitled “Boogie Dog” and created on March 3, 2004, I stumbled across it scrolling through a Word doc search (I have over 450 such files on the laptop). It caught my attention, I must admit, though I have no recollection of creating it nor do I recall where I could possibly be going with it. Probably just jotting down some weird stream-of-consciousness ramblings. So I thought: Why not have some fun? See what I can do with these 219 words. Okay. Here’s the original file:


Did anyone at the Manhattan Project know? Hard to tell.

Sibelius knew. Know how we know he knew? The crescendo heard twice in the first movement of the Second Symphony. Now that is the sound of . . . that.

Charles Main. Who is Charles Main?

List of bests: Best line from a poem? “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” Eliot. And yes, we know Steve King used it in one of the Gunslinger books.

It always lasted twenty-six hours. Who knows why (maybe Dirac, or Heisenberg, or any of those other young tigers), but I never did get used to those clocks he made for us, whose faces went up to thirteen instead of twelve. “Thirteen o’clock!” he’d cry. “Hurry, now! Halfway there!”

Recipe for a Mind Experiment – Pour a half dozen hippies in a metal bowl. Stir in two brilliant but immature theoretical physicists. Add a girl (always a girl, for spice). Add illegal drugs, and the undesirables that brings with it. Like six degrees of separation. The traffickers. The mob. Then – the government. Shake well. Oh, and add a pinch of something explosive. In this case . . . quantum mechanics. Believe it or not, yes?

Remember: Hippies hate water. That’s why we hunted them down. And they also have sticky fingers.


Apologies if anyone’s offended, especially those last couple of sentences. Believe me, that’s a snippet from a song that was popular among my travels in the late 80s-early 90s.

Over the next couple of days I’ll see how creative I can get with this. Let’s call it the Boogie Dog Variations.