Spit Out the Clothes: An Ordinary Journey Through the Extraordinary 1960s

Description

If you can remember the 1960s, you were not there. That often quoted mumbo jumbo metaphor does some justice to delineating the turbulent decade during which Mark Ahrploen was observer and participant-marching in the public parade that changed the world. Although there was so much that transpired in that decade, this novel is about Mark Ahrploen's odyssey and personal progression during that decade. Some reviewers have defined the 1960s as an avalanche of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Undoubtedly, there is a good deal of truth to that statement. However, in Ahrploen's journey through this time that definition became a revolutionary era masquerading as a decade, Ahrploen often felt that the order was more than accurate-sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Sex was first and as often as possible. Drugs were only ancillary, experimental, and infrequent with Ahrploen. Popular music helped orchestrate many of Ahrploen's rocking and rolling experiences during the 1960s-the tantalizing temerity of a constant triad that rewound the world, and helped nurture and grow Ahrploen's character, chiseling knowledge into his consciousness. Ahrploen wondered why Fellini, the remarkable Italian cinema maestro, never made a movie about the 1960s. His 1960s films, particularly La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2, were about motion, the motion of the camera and the gyrations of the characters in his films that danced and darted in front of his legendary lens. Then again, Fellini may have been secretly celluloiding the 1960s, with all its madness and swirls, infusing his cinema stories with laughter and tears. His signature film scores put the Sixties on the dance floor of history, spinning, and spinning, and spinning. Fellini, like the '60s, made it clear that you didn't have to understand all of his work, but he did want you to see his mind zipping by at 24 frames per second, persistence of his visions. Ahrploen, with Fellini as sort of a surrealistic cinema mentor, wanted to understand his own mind and motivations, his own projector rolling round and round, year after year in the 1960's, filling his youthful theater with many stories. There is really no finite definition to describe, comfortably or uncomfortably, or to nicely encapsulate the 1960s. Many who were alive during that time identify the decade on their own terms, in their own unique way. And that's what Mark Ahrploen has done in this book-his definition, his terms. Leon Trotsky said, "Only a participant can be a profound observer." That defines Ahrploen more than defining the 1960s. He was there. He did all the things mentioned in this book. He needs no embellishments on his canvas of colors and perceptions save for a modicum of fictional brush strokes now and then. It is up to the reader to quantify the now and the then. No fiction is reality, but then again, no reality can be 100 percent fiction. If there was a Zeitgeist flying through the 1960s, according to Ahrploen, it was discovering sexual freedom, not solving political murders, checking moon-landing preparations, joining civil rights marches, chilling out with the Cold War, and playing tag with Selective Service draft boards. Sex marched naked and loud, jumping off Playboy pages and Grundy cages into a very fluid world where wet was the pleasurable watchword in a sticky decade. Ahrploen's high school graduation ceremony is about to commence. Quick, grab an empty chair. You are outdoors. It is summer, 1961. Pick up the program placed on the chair. Soon it's gonna rain. It could be a big storm. Right on. Wow. Heavy. Cool. Let it all hang out. Groovy. Let the etymology of the Sixties bug your entomology. The only guarantee is that metaphors definitely will be mixed-very mixed. Don't reach for a Rosetta stone. You may already know the lingua franca of the 1960s. Tune in. Turn on. And-hold on Timothy Leary-Drop in.

Mike Harris has been a writer, editor, and publisher in Silicon Valley since the days of the IBM Selectric II. He has created and shaped copy for print and the web, working for companies such as IBM, Reputation.com, Yahoo!, UNISYS, Avant! Corporation, Magellan GPS, and Oracle, among others.