Incendiary

I'm so furious words fail me, I want to destroy something precious, unique and beautiful. I want to create, and in the same breath, destroy something good and pure. I want to stand, silent as the world mourns the passing of some great work of art. I want to burn and sack the Louvre, bomb the Smithsonian. If words cannot contain this rage, it must be the world's to deal with. I want to laugh, scream and cry atop the burning wreckage of the world. I want to drag everything down with me into madness and despair, I want to see the pure of heart lying and cheating and killing. I want it all to burn away, become sterilized by the flames of my furious hatred. I want all that is good and right in the world to be dragged, screaming and bleeding, into the light of petty, brutish, ugly, pointless aggression.

inspiration

"Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

this would be a good title I suppose

Living vicariously through strangers

Mayhaps upon a Springtime's eve.

Why is it that those we leave behind can still hurt us? I thought that you were gone from my life but then you came bursting back in, hair ablaze, eyes shining with that glimmer of insanity possessed only by you and Death himself. I wanted to forget you, to neatly cut you out of my life, to sink into a pit of amnesia that part of myself that was happy with you.
That's a lie. I could never do that, I'm too scared. Scared as I was to say those 3 little words, I'd shout them from a mountaintop for all to hear if only you were but a mile closer. For more, I can't imagine any end to the lengths to which I'd go.
Perhaps it is merely a manifestation of that sad, dark part of my brain, the flip-side of the coin that makes me who I am. Maybe I shouldn't love you, maybe it makes no sense at all. Maybe I barely know you. Maybe you despise people like me. Maybe I have become all those things you liked that I was not.

Maybe I don't care.

45

I was wondering, say Death were to come to you and say this: " You are going to die. You will die exactly 45 years from now. You will die poor and alone. What you do up until death will have no effect on this. You will have a happy and fulfilling life for the next 44 and one half years. Goodbye"
How would you take it? Would the knowledge that you would live a great life outweigh the knowledge of both the time of your death and the unfortunate circumstances surrounding it?
I guess what I'm getting at is, knowing that something is doomed to failure, could you still find satisfaction in the process of doing it? Were your life doomed to eventual failure, could you enjoy the intervening years?

Workspace

Just a clarification, This is not my Blog.
This is a workspace for me to draft new work.
My hope is that by starting with a rough draft I can improve the clarity of my thoughts.
So, again, this is not my blog, you can find that at: randommusingsfromatroubledmind.blogspot.com