A note to n00bs and historians

In case anyone is coming here expecting the truth - which none of you can handle anyway - you should know you'll come away sadly mistaken. Or at least 50% sadly mistaken.

You'll need to get on boots - tall ones - before wading into this cow byre of memoir. In the modern parlance, this is known as Creative Non-Fiction. Thirty-five or so years ago, Bill Cardoso dubbed it Gonzo Journalism to describe the style of reporting used by the (now) late Hunter S. Thompson.

Now, what Vance and I did - at least in the original book - was to create a melange of words, drawings, and photos that reported on our progress. Progress was ostensibly meant to refer to achieving our goal of raising the money to go to Memphis. A close scholarly reading of these manuscripts, at least at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, is more likely to reveal a Progress towards the frightening world of adulthood; a world some of us didn't actually enter until at least our 40s. Even then, it was more of a vacation destination.

The continued remaining Moonpie documents are a portrayal of a wild, even vicious time. Our paths diverged and converged over the years like a double-helix strand of DNA. The diverging was especially true of Vance and I. Other friends, Martin, Jones, Blane (Vance's brother) Schactner, Lewis, Corbin, Lampson, the Eskew brothers, etc, seemed to stay in a revolving circle of contact and friendship. I guess. I've been back in this town since 1982, and I've only run into any of them once in all that time, and that was a deliberate meeting, so I really don't have much of a clue as to what goes on a round here. But those people, those are the people who became the Stormtroopers. Vance and I seem to come back into contact with one another about once every seven years.

But, as is my wont, I digress. My point is that the creation of the Moonpie experience was based on making shit up as well as reporting it as it happened (with a buffer of eight hours to sleep off whatever was consumed while "it" was happening.)

One further note is that we've all done our 50 trips around the sun. We're getting up there. Memories do tend to fade out. Or we remember a better way for things to have happened... "Dude, I had hair down to my ass and one night I drank an entire keg of beer and smoked a half-pound of weed, ate sixteen tabs of acid, and snorted a dozen lines of blow and then got it on with ten teenyboppers named Gretchen. I shit you not."

Here's your grain of salt, chums. Take it while reading.