the real origins of 67
can a joke signify nothing? the youth may have an answer: six seven.
they say the youth have gone too far. by changing the nine in 69 to a seven, the youth have transgressed the world of semiotics and we are entitled to an explanation. every attempt to explain 67, however, has been sad and futile. you cannot know an ant nest by questioning an ant. you cannot know an ant nest by looking at the mound. even if you buy an ant farm, you still cannot know by looking. you have to know by being, being born an ant.
on the last day of year six camp, my friend drew kendell had a dream about the 2003 live action remake of peter pan, specifically, the scene at the end where the world comes together to resurrect the fallen tinkerbell by chanting 'i do believe in fairies, i do, i do', only in his dream, they were chanting '11, 14, member of a train. 11, 14, member of a train'.
when he told this to our friends on the bus the next day, we thought it was the most humourous thing we had ever heard, and like the hare krishnas, we began to chant it very quietly under our breath for the remainder of the three hour journey home, and though the rest of our class were ignorant of the story, they began to chant along too, so the thirty of us chanted 11 14 member of a train, the chant growing louder and louder and by the end of the week, 11 14 was a schoolwide epidemic.
assuming that the chant was something sinister, parents began to send in letters to the school, the principal calling students one by one to his office, hoping to find a logical explanation. only, the handful of us who could have explained chose not to do so. we didn’t want to rat on our friend, and so the true origins of 11 14 remained a mystery.
soon 11 14 had spread to every nearby school in the perth hills area. none of these chanters knew what the words meant or could explain why they were funny. the words were funny because enough people had agreed that they were funny. even those of us who had heard drew's story could not explain why it was funny. the only adequate explanation might be jungian. in his dream, drew had somehow tapped into the collective unconscious, drawing from the same universal spring that later sprung the infamous 67. this is why i want to clarify: me and my friends did it first.
written in december 2025