Creativity or How I Learned to Love the Job

Reading has always been a doorway to inspiration. I've found some of my favorite works and authors through suggestion or books gifted to me. They run through the heavyweight gamut of Hemingway, Camus, Conrad, and even my beloved Kerouac. Kerouac was something that happened to find me through bizarre circumstance (that will have to be saved for some tell-all memoir in the Autumn of my life - if I am fortunate enough to foresee such a turning of leaves). Therefore I will over-simplify the emotive complexities and say, a book of crazed exhaustion and paranoia, led a bright-eyed boy into a life fit for advances, rejection, inebriation, and a particularly distasteful madness that wound up documented throughout pocket notebooks and blurry bar nights. Vague for those that know not of this twenty-something battle of multiple personalities, but descriptive enough for the individuals lucky enough to be in the trenches of eternal youth to remember and nod with heavy hearts... but I digress.
This open door was none other than Big Sur. It was my introduction to a soul that I knew as well as my own... and too perfect a introduction, for 'ol Jack's signature piece, On The Road, would not have sunk it's teeth in as deeply as the wounded nature of Big Sur. With this connection to a lost and confused self-destructive manic, whose love of the world matched his love of love - I burned through the other literature pushed out by an eternal rebel with an eternal battle... fight the things that you love but never forget why you love them. This torture and turmoil followed his life and found it's way into the narrative of his words. The books read like streams (though the poetry was not poetry at all - something more bop-disjointed and less enjoyable). After a number of years, I had exhausted all of the material that this life was able to birth onto printed page. Years press on and more pages are found. Those following the grand drunken messiah found methods to organize the chaos left behind by their master. Posthumous novels whose meanings were port wine blurry were offered as a continual parting gift. His personal thoughts and journals were put up on auction and printed for the eager eyes - though not quite fit to be consumed.... and this my friends is where I have taken a moment to curl my toes in the grass.
The phrase, kill your idols comes to mind. For these secrets of our heroes are more damning than the actual evils (or rumored) than we could ever imagine. It's the moment in which we pull back the curtain and see all of the wires, tin foil, and unwashed dishes that the wizard left behind. When we die, the impending doom that should overtake us all is that our personal affects will be there to carry on a legacy that we may have never intended. Like an Estate sale, people dig through your goods like vultures and once the scraps have been picked they dig a little deeper until they can harvest and sell your very soul.
Through these series of edited notebooks and personal thoughts, I gained a bit of understanding - no matter how much magic had been washed down the drain. It brought a new beginning of scribbling through my personal pages and even so much as to revisit some of my old inked madness - dusty news notebooks sealed in a box intended to be released on the day of Apocalypse. And like the Book of Revelation, this box held the secrets to the end of the mind... a swirling maze of shoots and ladders that documented a mind embattled with the unanswerable questions of the soul. So many questions that the faces of strangers mirrored... everyone lost in the shadows of life. Seasons change and we stay the same. These questions have awakened something sinister. My writing has returned. The bubbling pit of madness/sickness is opening its berth, steaming the stem of the brain back into action. The coma of complacency is beginning to thaw and I could not be happier, yet more afraid of what it may bring. My filters will falter. My opinions will cut and stab, but there are times in which we must be slashed from our shackles and violently shaken from our hypnosis. The time has come. Grab your hammer, take some rope... we're going to burn the whole damn thing down. Revolution is upon us - the regime of comfort must die. Time to slide into madness... and thankfully I'll have enough of a warning to document it for good measure. Sounds like a road trip is in order.