Almost Famous

Well maybe not almost, but we take our baby steps every day.

So I just finished watching the film Almost Famous for the first time. My damn fine friend Michael Bielaczyc has been taking me on a visual exposition of his muses, motivations and artistic rations. I loved the film. I am sure there are any manner of ways to pick it apart, but watching it I found myself in so many of the characters at so many points. I am left feeling some profound feelings and thinking some profound thoughts; much like a ponderous Wild Thing but I'll leave the teeth gnashing and eye rolling to you.

Since I have a mic and you don't, I am going to talk about me and what I do.

I am a monument to folly. I am a storm-blasted limestone pinnacle that is shaved into the most peculiar fashion. I am a sum of my faults and a testament to weakness. I am a terrestrial furnace housing a blazing inferno. The artwork I create now will be the crayon cast-offs I abandon for the historians. Not because I want to be famous or I crave the affirmation. I will make brilliant and beautiful things because I dream them and they demand to be made. Do any of you know what I am saying? Honk your horn if you do. Do you ever burn with an unrequited passion for nothing more noble than to capture a ray of light in blues and reds? As a newborn painter I look around me with untrained hands and newly unshuttered eyes.

I Desire.

I Crave.

I Burn.

I Create.

With all of the pitfalls that have accompanied my existence lately I have dimmed the lantern of my soul and plodded along a shrouded path. I feel like I have lost myself on a rocky beach and it is all I can do to hold onto my girls and my footing; like hiking in the woods and never looking up for fear of stumbling on the exposed roots. I have justified my melancholic flare-ups with morose acceptance and mutually assured promises with myself for the future. It is my need to protect and provide happiness for my children that has lent my tired body purpose and vigor.

Perhaps I will settle back down with the weight of the humdrum. But for this moment, I feel alive and tinged with electricity. I want to reach out that spark and power one of you devices out there; to awaken your Quantum Inertia engines and get you spinning.

Life is an absolutely unmerciful and pitiless bitch if you let her be. So don't. Let that hate and bitterness go and embrace the life you have ahead of you. Forget Valentine's Day; embrace the ones you love today! Take hold of the people and things dear to you and own that moment NOW. Listen to an amazing album and remember the first time you experienced it; the wonder that each note or lyric held. Reread a passage that made you cry or memorize each stroke in your favorite painting.

I recently realized how much I still carry everyone I have ever loved with me. The betrayals and disappointments all fade with time, but I still carry the promises I've made, verbal and emotional, with me to this day. It is these delicately corded knots in my weave that lend my spirit depth and breadth.

Find YOUR entrance to the sublime and draw on it like a kerosene lamp. Burn yourself up late into the night with your Muse and refill at the well often. Don't be a slave to yourself or to others.

You cannot be anything more than you are at this very moment. If you can't find resolution with this fact, then MAKE THE NEXT MOMENT BETTER.

We are all beautiful and wondrous little shits that can be more than we are today; and that is the joy of living.