Scimitars & Watermarked Doubloons?
What can you do? What do want to do? Who the hell are you anyway? What staggering treachery can you play on the status quo, those “languid and bitter sweet” fiends? Can you take a relentless life that is unwilling to settle, to never pander to the middle class that is slipshod? Will you be daring, audacious, amazed at your own self expression?
It is time to stretch all of your limbs, get thy to a rack somewhere in the middle ages, and find that sweet spot in living: Somewhere between Marilyn Monroe and Marilyn Manson, between difficulty and delight, wavering on the edge of the stupendous and the edgy, lost on those eyes who are not in sheep’s clothing, but are actual sheep; ok, maybe swine slurping up all those pearls when you — threw caution to the wind.
Ok, can you offend the normal? Can you run the ordinary through, with blade and spades and scimitars and watermarked doubloons? Can you write your own paycheck in Halloween blood? In cursive? Does anyone even know how to write like that anymore? Does anyone, instead, have a quill, or be willing to spill their guts all over the leftwing of a disseminating party line?
Come on Joe, do this one thing with fervor and favor, with a kind of satisfaction lost on pop stars and modeling agencies? Go and do what you want and don’t give a damn what anyone thinks. Why? Because audacity is contagious; it gets shit done; it is hugely popular in the land where the King has no clothes.
Also why? Because it’s that guy down the street, the lady behind the Starbucks counter, the smiling butcher’s dog, a safe haven built with straw, all that gummy worm stuff that holds you back, like smoking a Salem at a witches pyre, like curling up the ends of your shoes when you fall from the sky: Believe your seeded imagination won’t take no for an answer.
Come on Mary, get on that ferry, and float to the next island. Become a damsel winning the distress game. Be so outrageous, so farfetched, you erase the lines between reality and surreality. Jump start a new dictum, slang words that splurge on a gallon of Rocky Road in the middle of the night as you write this kind of stuff for wham, bam and thank you…who? Do you even know the end of the sentence coming to a ditch-long discussion in “frog pajamas”?
Throw out all the pleasantries and get to the meat, to the sausage grinder, to the dark side of the barn, those roseate alleyways in January where the dogs fight over leftovers behind the Carniceria.
It is time to break out a new you, to live like a king, to dance with the queen, to fight a Knight, to believe in Camelot all over again. And use that glory, to realize: “Without conflict there is no story,” said the coach of some CU team that claimed its right to be in the headlines. It was handed down by talking heads dressed up with skin-colored make up on TV that looks a lot like under toads.
Ok, so the point? What the hell is the point here? The point is to break out of your shell, and become the pterodactyl you were meant to be. The point is to live so far out on the edge that you cut right through the dogma and fluffy stuff. The point is it’s time to leave the world breathless, in suspense, with a hankering for more, as you live like a legend, you push perceived limits, and you tell it like it is: Hey, I ain’t gonna be like those people: A bunch of fools following fools all the way to the grave.
No fool for you, not today, not ever. For you are the leader of your own fate, the dream maker instigating a revolution, an enlightened xenophobe calling down the thunder in a stranger’s recall vote.
Stretch that dream to fit your imagination. And imagine what life is going to be like when you really don’t give a damn what others think, because you have decided to blow up the status quo and win the race, eat caviar along the Seine, and bet it all on a single throw of the dice: If, and if and only if you would read that Kipling poem again and again so your name will never be on some headstone, saying “He was a nice guy,” unless this is added: “But he drank like a skunk, played poker ‘till dawn and won like Churchill.” — Circa de 2080.
Reach out into your most inspired ideas of what life is going to look like from here on out, and pull a rabbit out of the manger, and ride that damned ass all the way to savior’s status.
Hey, have some damned fun: The day is getting short.