Introspection

I think I have it.  I think I know what I am going to write.  I get that first kiss feeling and put my fingers to the keyboard, although sometimes I prefer pen to paper.  It matters in the moment.  It's that impulse.  That naked outside by the poolside on a sunny day feeling.  Smoking a cigarette without regret of the consequences.  There are always consequences, aren't there?  I am not sure anymore.

I put my pen-tip to my tongue in my mind in my position of thinking while I type at the keyboard at my fingertips.  Jimi Hendrix and Hunter S. Thompson.  I am trapped in a different time, in another place, in my mind.  Was I really born now?  In the future that Science Fiction authors used to envision?  Haven't we at some level made it to that point?  There are resonances of dystopia all around us.  "Do you want a dystopia, sir?  Erase dystopia from the dictionary."

As the semester draws to a close, I sit here, oddly relaxed, entering in and out of oblivion.  I am watching a documentary on Hunter S. Thompson, and it is both inspiring and disturbing.  That's how Dr. Gonzo would have wanted it.  That was how Raoul Duke wanted it.

I don't want my life to be like that.  Aside from recognition, what did it get him?  I look up to him as a writer, but I can't accept that being creative and expressive necessarily leads one down that road.  Same thing with Kurt Cobain, someone should have told him (and probably did), "Buck up man, you're a rock star now."  I am sure that it's fucked up beyond what I can possibly imagine, but seriously, if you can just chill out and ride the wave down slowly, you will enter into a new sort of cognizance, which is only possible through time.  Through relaxing.  Through not letting the things get to you. You move on.

You grow up, you learn to deal with life in a different, invigorating way.  I can't imagine the type of things they went through.  Even though I feel close to them as a fan, I only know them through the things they wrote. The stuff written about them.  While some might argue that is the best way one can truly know anybody, as through language is how we define our world, I am not so sure that is even that accurate.

There has to be another middle ground other than suburbia.  Something not so soul-sucking.  I don't want to just accept my materialistic programming and try to make money as my take on religion.

That's why I write.  Not because I hope to be a bestseller, because it is what renews me, over and over again.  I sit down at the keyboard, close my eyes, take a deep breath, and I am reborn unto the pages.  That for me is enough.  Enough to keep going.  To keep hashing it out, to keep making the effort to keep going, to keep living and breathing and learning and making new connections with people.  It is easy to be pulled into the dark void that seems to be opening up below us, but, like Wile E. Coyote, as long as you don't look down, and keep looking ahead at your goal, you are not going to fall.  Whatever you do, don't hesitate, don't stop, keeping going, keep looking ahead, and breathe.