Spooky Impulses

I remember that I used to like to sort pictures when I was a teenager. I can’t remember any of the classification schemes I used then, but I remember that I had massive piles of pictures cut from magazines, primarily of girls, that I would evaluate and sort out, trying to put similar pictures together. I tended to sort things by mood though, as I recall.

I had no idea how early that impulse began. When visiting my mother yesterday, I was confronted by incontrovertible evidence that from an early age I was an amateur lexicographer.

Just before I left, mom dug out a “Dictionary of American Slang” that I created with a friend when I was eleven or twelve years old. It was a collaborative project with my friend John Pipkin. The sources noted were “movies, TV, books, and conversations.” It included several drug and alcohol slang terms, and had a section of illustrations cut and pasted from magazines with nominal captions.

My girlfriend took one look at it and said:

It’s a map of your whole life!

One of these days I’ll have to borrow the thing and scan it. It really is a wonder, replete with embarrassing typos.