old dog

Today I feel like an old dog. Tired. I see the beauty all around me, but I'm not leaping into it like a puppy with my tail wagging. I'd say this was just another mistake, but it's a feeling and feelings aren't mistakes, they're just passing clouds. Clouds that carry us along beneath the sun. And we can choose to let them pass and enjoy the ride, or ignore the clouds and be dead inside.

When I look back at my drunken past, sometimes I only remember the glow of inspiration. The fire of creative desire. I used to crank out the songs and poems in my notebooks without even a dash of hesitation or self doubt. There was no end to the pictures I wanted to make and I fueled their creation with all the chemistry I could devise. No fancy elixirs or inventive alchemy required - your common street drugs and liquor store hooch worked mighty good - mighty good.

That's the distant glow of my pure artist past. It haunts me like a beautiful lie, like a glorious lover's deception.

But the romantic view is as true as any other and today I wonder how I strayed so far from that better path.  I had my sparks and creative joys sprinkled about in there, but mostly I feel robbed of my passion, far from the path I once followed so fearlessly. Once I was unafraid to make mistakes, because back then, my mistakes were of the living, not the creative, kind. The kinds of mistakes that got me arrested or caused me to OD. That had me naked down the street or up a tree. The kinds that killed my friends and my dog, but they were not creative mistakes. I mistook the mistakes of famous artists I admired (Bukowski, Burroughs and Hank Williams) for recipes for creation. But at least I knew what I wanted to make. The art came out of my heart. There was no calculating what the networks were buying, what the readers would spark to. The only opinion that mattered was mine. That was not a mistake.