The Inspired Never Die

I am the Lizard King and I can do anything. I am Lono. I’m watching this man pass by. He does this a lot. He walks around the block, which is a circle that my parents live on. I see him like clockwork in the morning everyday just about within the same few minutes. Then on weekends as well with his wife (I presume).
Do I have purpose? I have ideas and imagination and expectations and goals but do I have purpose and if I do is it my own to fulfill or is it some higher forces? I am driven by something but I’d hate to think in some unexplainable, unseeable power that predetermines our destiny. Can there be destiny in an ever-expanding universe?
I am, for the most part, a third finished with my life. I figure once I get to my 60’s it won’t matter anyway. If I haven’t reached my pinnacle then what purpose did I have? I’d be winding down in what most call the golden years and I’d hope that it would be on the porch I imagined be attached to the house I cooked up as the place I could call home after long jaunts to foreign lands in search of the Golden Palaces of ones Imagination.
I write. Movies, a novel, outlines for novels, short stories, poetry, blogs, articles and essays. Pretty much run the gamut of intellectual stimulation when it comes to writing. I read. From Stephen King to Chuck Palahniuk to Poe. Nonfiction. Books about herpetologists and their last days on earth. Journalism books (namely Hunter S. Thompson—the guy I always seem to come back to*). So many things interest me. It’s what a writer does besides write. You have to read in order to learn and to sharpen your own skills.
I am an artist. I paint and draw and although I’ve never personally thought I had mastered or even began to tap into the wells of my inner painter I do know I can handle a No.2 Sable brush with Cerulean Blue or Vermillion or Cinnabar or Cadmium Yellow. I know I can handle pen and ink.
I even taught myself graphic design. I can create logos and magazine layouts. I can concept and design simple web pages. This is what’s been paying the bills for me the last few years. These are the things I do to fuel the dream of being a writer one day for National Geographic or any magazine for that matter. Direct mailers for real estate corporations in California are what I do to keep the hope alive for one day selling some script I wrote about P.T. Barnum some years ago. Tradeshow exhibits are what I design to keep the inspiration up to one day sell my novel and pass along the knowledge I gained throughout the years of writing it so that younger writers can follow similar paths to success.
I have launched my own line of handcrafted men’s tee shirts with hope to expand into a more sophisticated line of clothing that can encompass the journeyman’s ideal. I have an eye on handmade leather belts, signature pocket knives, hand cut scarves, a functional travel and expedition line, a line of swimwear, etc. I even have my eye scanning, way out there on the horizon a boutique spirits label. Small batch, artisan whiskeys, rums from the Caribbean, and Tequilas and Mescals born from the deserts of some ancient lands.
Seem ambitious? I’d say I have my hands full. What inspires me? I guess it doesn’t really matter anyway. What matters are the actions you take to get there. I am no fucking slouch but at times I can be bitter and brutish. My girlfriend likes me but like many other that know me more likely have me around because I’m humorously malignant or in other words an asshole or in more words than that I say what you’d like to say but just don’t because the current state of political correctness frowns upon it.
This is my manifest destiny. Where does it end? And once it does and I’m long gone John will it continue to purvey? One could only hope. So I ask myself do I have purpose? I guess as much purpose as the guy who walks around my block everyday. The same block and houses. Little change in way of occurrence. None in scenery. His one goal and again I presume would be for exercise but perhaps it could be to just be, not in front in of the television. If I had to place the bet it would be the exercise. Either way, in some small way, he has purpose. For him it’s his will to shed a few weekend beers. To check out the neighborhood he lives in, maybe meet another walker or two just for that salutational passer-by, wave. Perhaps he fits into some grander piece of the puzzle. Perhaps he plays a role in some game the higher ups have been playing since the dawn of man. I imagine the game of chance. A kid running to the bus stop, not looking both ways before running into the street. A man in his car on his way to work fumbling with his coffee. At the last second this man, our walking friend is the hero of the day, at the last second grabbing the kid before eminent doom.
For me it’s to see him walking and wonder about purpose. To realize purpose and how I fit into this big life. To watch this man in his pursuit of happiness and the American dream and gain the inspiration to continue on with my own.

*Is there some divine driving force with him? Is he my hero? Idol? Inspiration? I thought so at some point and still hold him high on that kind of a scale but I have grown older and wiser and believe it’s more now, and I don’t want to sound like some freak and talk about other planes where people who share the same souls walk or some fucking fanatic who masturbates to old episodes of some celebrities reality show while polishing another rocket of sorts, but you have to give all this some thought. We are all inspired and even Hunter was and the way he wrote and expressed his love for certain books like “The Great Gatsby” for example would give a glimpse into his inspiration or perhaps he, at one point in his life, was fanatical about Gatsby or for that matter F. Scott Fitzgerald. Its no big secret we all share the same will to live and instincts but one has to wonder why every human that ever lived or died has completely different fingerprints. It goes along with the idea of the universe. It’s expanding into. Infinite and most can’t fathom that. It’s just too much to have to conjure up from having nothing to reference. These are things that are just so beyond the capacity of normal, everyday thinking. These things bare too much weight in the scheme of work-a-day routine. You have to understand that although we all have a soul and that soul, like fingerprints, holds different attributes than all others, they do share similarities and that those similarities fall into categories and those categories fall into classes and so on down the taxonomy line to specificity. Now I’m not saying I’m the next Hunter S. Thompson or the next great thinker of the times I am saying that I may be swimming in the same pool in some primordial soup. The same pool the mudskippers swim in. Those walking fish that pop out on the shore of corrosive waters waiting for their time of evolution. I can only hope I’d be so lucky.

June 08