The Power of The Rant and Rave
OK, so let’s start this thing, like driving along the west coast across and through the artichoke capital of the world, near San Fran, where the bridge shines golden as you tiptoe through the city to Marin county, where the birds attack in Bodega Bay and Hitchcock had damsels and dudes in building along the sea as gulls swooped down smashing into phone booths (do we even have those things anymore?) and you stop for an instant and you Howl like Ginsberg in 1955 and there started a mission into the 60’s a bend toward freedom and sipping on eternity and living behind the popular song, when music actually stopped wars and started movements and changed lives, where the past was soldered to a seam that welded infinity to timelines, linear versus that symbol of an eight on its side: Time stops, and you get it, and you live along the azure plains where the buffalo roam and Ted takes care of them all, cradled somewhere near the great plains and serves you a steak in Gillette.
But finally, after years of passing over, look up the word “parsec,” thinking about how the next generations will actually live on Mars, how they will be amazed in a way you can’t comprehend as they stare back at a tiny blue globe, leap past black holes, and some might just understand the reality of dark matter and wormholes and solar sails to the next galaxy that connect future generations to purple planets.
Where have you been all this time? In a cave, in a rave, in save mode?
Come on dude and dudettes, listlessly spin some hyper-local balderdash, conundrums and sleight of hand and tricks up your sleeve as the balloon lady in an IHOP makes dragons and tigers and Mickey Mouse ears for your kids as they eat pancakes as you so purposelessly check your face book and scroll down. The new thing is to “scroll down,” to read the news on Yahoo, CNN, and watch a video, and add to collective boredom, to invent social detachment, to wonder about what Google wants you to.
“And there is a soft scent of perfume in the air with just a hint of despair,” as you light upon the next shelf life of more “groupthink,” ideas that travel fast past LA to Louisiana and back through Mississippi on low-flight propeller planes, because you installed new software on your I-pads, because you need to “howl,” like hurricanes in the French Quarter, and you need to stand for something, and you need to never back down from a sunset or a moonrise or a shooting star again, so leave town because of your reputation and heresy and deliverance, some clear message that you still can be inventive and creative and live this adventure.
Why? Because that is what the hell we do here on blue planet, “earth ship now,” Georgetown, CO, WHERE THE BIGHORN SHEEP GRAZE!
And all that is left are sonic booms, the sirens singing, humming, chanting ohm through the seven seas, as St. Elmo’s Fire ignites those who talk like sailors, and leave all the women on shore, as those sailor’s love for the sea is perpetual.
OK, then watch the damned sunset will ya; there is a sign right over Catalina, between palm trees, signed and delivered on a hydroplane speeding out past the city lights.
There still is meaning in your heartbeat, in the way you swagger through, in that legacy you might have a chance to still leave, footnotes to higher callings, legible notes of a spiritual saint, sages and satyrs, winged beings flying too close, to the sun, a last wry smile as you seek wisdom, bliss, and that caveat inching its way between (swallow hard now) mediocrity and eternity.
Do you still have a choice, why yes?
So what the hell does this all mean, what does it have to do with you? Is there a point to this rant and rave, someone to save, a soul in need, a ideal perpetrated on the masses to keep them in line, a limitation in the language barrier, a slice of pie, a vignette to inspire the mind like Leaves of Grass by Walt, or yellowing poems by TS. Elliot or bad poetry in a sink bars along the coast somewhere between San Clemente and La Jolla?
No, not really.
As the founder of One Business Connection and author of “The Power of One,” Greg Petri is an acclaimed expert at this, that and the other thing. For more information contact Mr. Petri directly at 303-818-2460.