Sardine Factories in Monterey
Today, make a list of everything you want to do, steps toward your dreams, then throw it away…and play hooky. Skip class. Go skiing. Eat pie. Recite poetry to a beautiful waitress living in the mountains….for it is not what you think you will do that is important, rather, what you actually do, what dances will you do, what songs will you sing, what back roads will you take to personal awakening—for this is what holds weight, gives you the passion of a full moon over midnight, a sun shower in the misty autumn.
Who are you to play it safe, not to chip off the chaff, to recoil into the shadows where the fanged snakes forget to bite off more than they can chew?
Today, is your orchestrated moment, your incredible entry, where you and the world give up the good fight and find a beach to tan on before the bonfire starts up somewhere near the emerald triangle, not near Bermuda, not even an isosceles, so you can slip into something more comfortable, like adjectives and similes and gowns of gold and drink milk and honey and fight your way through the butterfly onslaught—looks more like a mosaic of locust covering the last great drought in some well-written novel by Steinbeck where everyone leaves town for the coast to work in sardine factories in Monterey.
Today is your day to hightail it down to the river and get naked, to swim out of your own slipshod and jimmy-rigged half-inspiration that follows you around like affection-starved cats locked up in the basement.
Where to go from here? Listen to your heart, to your six year old fart right before sleep: “Pull my finger.” Pull out your last big trick and make the crowds sit in awe and wonder: How the hell did he do that? Where did the white rabbit come from, and who rides the white horse anymore anyway? Hey, that looks a lot like Adam West in tights or Edgar Allen Poe smoking opium before getting ready to write machinations and details of full-blown intoxicated prose, twisted verse like a lime and a Carlsberg beer at the beginning of the last century below Gargoyles at Notre Dame in Paris. Before this one. After dawn. In some lost era. Before phones and cars and horses under the hood.
You are the master of your own enjoyment today. “Run like hell to the edge of our prescribed perspicacious bewilderment”—for life is more about sitting around and saying, “What the hell is really going on here?” than “I just crossed that off my task list and now I am ready to go grocery shopping for toothpaste and eggs.”
Be an anomaly, a crying out loud protuberance on the road to discover. Stay amazed, in piqued awe, in states of higher awareness that transcend politics and fundamentalists who preach and pray and prey on the evil from the blood rocks outside Moab where the water spirits thrive on the edge of the Colorado River.
So the point: Go out into your ordinary world today and do something miraculous, spectacular, remarkable, then footnote it in the diary of a wimpy adult.