Skip to main content

The Hidden KISS -- Invitation to Write #53

For Writers:

I couldn’t believe that my mom spent $300 on a CD player. It was the Sony Boombox I had been asking for, and for Christmas 1987, it was mine. Or so I thought. Actually, mom had intended it to be the “family’s present," but I quickly claimed ownership by stealing it back to my room.

One of the first CD's I ever bought was KISS’s Crazy Nights. I played it constantly, and for whatever reason, KISS was a band I really could identify with. So did my neighbor, Jason, and he always bought Metal Edge and magazines of that genre. We'd pour through the pictures of our favorite bands and look at the t-shirt ads. That’s when I decided to do something daring. I would buy a KISS t-shirt.

My parents wouldn’t approve, I knew, so when the shirt arrived in the mail, I started wearing it in secret. I also started washing my own clothes so that mom wouldn’t see it in the laundry. At school, some of my teachers were surprised to see me wearing a t-shirt that only "druggies" wore, but I was proud to break the stereotype.

Soon enough, I grew careless, and mom found the shirt. My parents sat me down for a chat, asking me why I’d wear such a shirt. Simple: I liked KISS. No other reason than that. The secret was out, but to their credit, they let me keep wearing the shirt.

What secrets do you keep hidden? Explore one through writing.

“A writer should have this little voice inside of you saying, Tell the truth. Reveal a few secrets here.” - Quentin Tarantino

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Jesus and the Inconvenience of His Word to American Christians

I'm not a preacher, but if you follow the teachings of Jesus, it was he who said: Do to others as you would have them do to you. That's from Luke 6:31 , and reading all of Luke 6 isn't a bad way to spend five minutes of your time.  https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke%206&version=NIV I guess a lot of Christians understand the Golden Rule and practice it in their daily lives. Others, however, especially political Christians (and specifically those promoting Christian Nationalism) seem to ignore the Golden Rule. They don't care about humanitarian issues. They claim they either don't exist, aren't the problem of the United States, or are the fault of the victims. They counter with distractions like, "Why do you care so much about THEM when you should be caring about the REAL people who matter?" Sorry, but I don't recall Jesus ever dividing people into those who matter more and those who matter less. Of course, Jesus also said not to j...

Microblogging? The Future of Writing with ADHD

Bill Bennett is a very common name. Right now, I'm reading a book by the Australian film maker Bill Bennett. He hiked the Camino in 2013 and then wrote a book (and made an Australian movie, not available in the U.S.) about it.  Seems he kept a blog about that hike, too. I went to look for his Camino blog, and found he started one years after the hike, but he didn't post regularly... His last post from 2022 announced his had Parkinson's and had kept the diagnosis secret for 4 years.  Now that almost three years have passed from that post, I wonder what's happened to him.  Blogs are weird. They just sit there. Anyone can stumble upon them, and read them. So I decided to keep looking for his Camino blog.  https://billbennett.blog/home/ *** And I found another Bill Bennett, this one from New Zealand, who keeps a microblog. It's current and updated. "What's a microblog?" My wife asked. Well, I said, it's a small blog. Just a sentence or two for a post. ...