Sunshine, the fill-in-the-blank sentence about the Beatles songs got me thinking about this story….

Hope you like it.

Merlin was a funny guy. As a confirmed antique hippie, he had survived Haight Ashbury and tricky Dick. He was a veteran of the psychic wars. That’s how he referred to the times he had been tripping on LSD and mescaline. Somehow he had gotten clean, gone on to business school and joined the rest of the rat race.Even though he had become part of the establishment, he still retained some vestiges of the old days. He wore a suit every day, but he kept his long hair tied in a ponytail and wore his John Lennon glasses, not caring whether they were in style.

After a recent layoff, he had started a little store front business in San Francisco a couple of blocks from Chinatown. He called it Hoodoo Voodoo and it featured retro and new age products. It was frequented mostly by teenagers and twenty-somethings. They came for music, t-shirts and books. He had decided to leave the drug paraphenalia out of his inventory. His Timothy Leary days were over. No need to get himself or anyone else in trouble.

He had two regulars, Johanna and Mark. They were a matched set: Venus and Mars, yin and yang. They went together like peanut butter and jelly. He enjoyed their company They were sooo into the latest fads. He smiled to himself. Everything cycles, he thought. Go far enough and you come full circle. The future was retro with bell bottoms and classic rock. Go figure.

The bell jingled and Johanna came in. She was a Venus in blue jeans with her hip huggers and long blonde hair. “What’s up?’ asked Merlin. “Oh, I just wanted to see if you had St. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band somewhere in your music. “Are you kidding? I have almost everything the Beatles ever recorded. Take a look”. Just then, Mark appeared. The three of them talked about music and drank espresso for a while. Then Venus and Mars were on their way out the door again. Mark was singing the lyrics to Across the Universe. In his mind’s eye, Merlin saw visions of Johanna and Mark at Haight Ashbury singing Beatles songs. Yeah, he thought. Venus and Mars are alright tonight. He closed his eyes. The two times melded into one until those voices of a past and voices of a future were one and the same.

one day, i stumbled upon a question on yahoo answers aksing:

☼ wants to know….Can you write a little story that includes these ” V ” song titles?

I’m going to go through the alphabet.

Nope. This is not homework…Just some wholesome ,creative FUN on YA.

1. Veteran of the Psychic Wars

2. Venus And Mars Are Alright Tonight

3. Voodoo

4. Venus In Bluejeans

5. Visions of Johanna

6. Voices Of A Future

so i just half-assed a story and cut and paste the question

-the end

My dear friend Avery, well, he and I… we were high school sweethearts. He and I courted for three years…. yeah, things got pretty serious. But then one day, I don’t know WHAT happened… I called several times and left him messages, prayed like Daniel prayed three times a day that he would call me, but he never returned my phone calls. I dunno… maybe somewhere… somehow… we were drifting too far apart. I always thought that there was good chemistry between him and me, but perhaps I missed a clue… a tell-tale sign that indicated that the glue between us was losing its stronghold. Oh well. Maybe he thought that I was too much of a daydreamer. But that’s who I am, whether he can accept me or not… I am a daydream believer…. I believe daydreams can and do come true. I always hope that he will call… the daydream believer that I am. And in my mind, I wonder…. “Do I ever cross your mind? Ever??” At night, when the air is still and silence pervades through the night, I cry endlessly… such sorrow… such sadness… But no, don’t ever let the sun catch you crying, but if it should, those tears will in the end once again show the glimmer in my eyes…. my eyes shining ever so brightly, twinkling like stars, as on the day I first laid eyes upon my dear Avery.

ONE DAY IN OLYMPIA

Zeus paced the floor of Olympia. “Damnation!”, he thought to himself. Thunder and lightning ripped through the land of mortals below. He was the king of the Olypmians and a VETERAN OF PSYCHIC WARS! But Venus and Mars really had him psyched out! More thunder crashed and lightning flashed. Venus and Mars were under his rule. He had to bring them back under his control! Another loud clap of thunder and flash of lightning had even him blinking. He had to calm down before his anger did some really serious damage to the mortals below. It was only one of them causing him problems at present. Johanna!

“VENUS AND MARS ARE OKAY TONIGHT,” he muttered to himself as he paced to and fro. But that very well may not last. Just last night he’d seen VENUS IN BLUEJEANS strutting about Olympia like some mortal bimbo from below! And Mars wasn’t any better. He was having VISIONS OF JOHANNA, that blasted mortal VOODOO woman he was going gaga over!

The thunder and lightning started again. This time, he heard voices reaching up from the land of the mortals.. “Oh, Great Zeus! What have we done to offend you?!” He struggled to bring his anger under control.

Had they been bewitched, he pundered. Could Gods be bewitched? Were they becoming weaker as the people began to disbelieve in them? Were these the VOICES OF THE FUTURE? Were the gods becoming more mortal?

Tune in next week, same time, same station when these questions will be answered. Until then, be sure to buy QUICKIE MUNCHIES, the go anywhere in a hurry fun health snack! See you next week!

We sat in the back of Chip’s van, passing a roach and wheezing disjointed laughter at one another. These were the days just leading up to Woodstock. Days that marked the high point of my life.

Six of us were crammed into the cargo area. Up front, Chip drove and his girlfriend Rae rode shotgun. We were quite the collection. With the exception of Chip and Rae, the rest of us took took stellar nicknames which made a roll call that any astronomer would be proud of.

I was Aurora, named after the bright Aurora borealis belt that brightened the sky because of the way the light would shine off of my gaudy jewelry. My boyfriend, who this night sat to the right of me, was Polaris, named for the brightest star in the night. Venus, in bluejeans, sat across from me beside her brother Mars, so named because of his flaming red hair. Pluto and Haley (after the comet) rounded out our group. We were the voices of a future yet to be shaped.

“Venus and Mars are alright tonight,” Polaris said, casting a glance in their direction. “Not too funky if you know what I mean.”

“Yeah. We’re grounded man,” Mars said “Runnin low on hash, you know?” Mars is now an attorney for Baker, King, and Marsh. You know. The big firm in Chicago?

“I may have some peyote left,” Polaris said, coughing out a lungfull of grass. Polaris is a professor at Berkley these days. And no I won’t tell you his name.

“No way,” Haley said. She, the marketing Guru for a large frozen foods company in the midwest right now. “The last time we did mushrooms, I had visions of Johanna, Idaho. I’m never going back there,” She shivered.

“Besides,” Venus added. “We’re doing pretty good on this skunk weed. Let me hit it again.” Venus is a veteran of the psychic wars, manning her own 900 number and appearing on talk shows to explain why her system is better than Dionne Warwick’s.

“So are we going to New York?” I asked.

“Chip’s all for it,” Mars replied. “So we’re in man.”

“Groovy.”

Pluto shifted and turned his gaze out the window, watching the endless cornfields roll by. He had become even more introspective as of late and spoke very rarely. Pinned to his jacket was a voodoo doll, eyes xed out, grinning maliciously at the rest of us. The cat was weird, you know?

I Look back at that, the high point of mine, and I’m sure almost everyone else’s within that van, the highpoint of our exsitence. And I think of Pluto, the one blemish on the record. The exception to the rule.

Do you want to know what Pluto’s doing these days? Do you want to know his name? I bet you’d recognize it in an instant. Even if I told you that the man we called Pluto is dead right now, you would recognize his name without any trouble at all. He too was a Chicago man, our Pluto. But Chicago would love to forget him.

Pluto’s name was John. By itself there’s nothing special in that name. It’ the most common name in the English language. But it’s when you combine that name with a middle and last name that John no longer becomes John. He becomes John Wayne Gacy, Chicago’s biggest nightmare.

And THAT was our Pluto…..

*Man “V” was hard. I was having trouble coming up with ANYTHING. I deleted two stories before this one…lol. Just to let you know, I’m skipping “X”.

i guess you could say i’m a (line) VETERAN OF THE PSYCHIC WARS. i never practise (line) VOODOO but i do often have (line) VISIONS OF JOHANNA that tell of (line) VOICES OF A FUTURE. I’d say (line) VENUS AND MARS ARE ALRIGHT TONIGHT because of the lunar cycle (line) and VENUS IN BLUEJEANS.

what exactly do you mean by “little story”…. do you want a story, (no matter the size) with those thrown in somewhere, or a story using only those titles… or rather, those titles but with little of any other words as possible??

nope I can’t