The White Album - One

A year or so ago I was in a writer's group and I came up with an exercise that involved writing on slips of paper the first lines of every song on The Beatles' White Album and handing them out. The idea is that the paper is no longer blank once you copy that line, where you go can be anywhere, though you should have no connection with whatever narrative might be in the song.

I thought I'd return to that and try to do all thirty odd songs in the next, oh, I don't care how long it takes. I have a few from the exercise and I'll start with a favorite from one of George's songs.

Piggies

“Have you seen the little piggies?” she asked the child. The little boy looked to be about four and enraged over the fundamental unfairness of the world as only a four year old can be. Purple with anger, screaming; perhaps nature’s way of weeding out those of us born with arterial faults before we can reproduce. The boy seemed pretty strong, and inconsolable. But the woman tried, gently pulling him over to the enclosure where a smiling Llama stood by the rail. The beast had a genuine oddness about it that stopped the boy in his tracks. Face still wet, his color returned and he stared at the shaggy chewing orange-brown monster that towered over him. Now the child had that look of awe that Huxley described, albeit in a different context altogether, as seeing “what Adam saw on the morning of creation.” The thought struck me as I watched the boy’s face; this is a brave new world each and every time.