Yea, we liked to get fucked up and do fucked up shit but there was a method to the madness. When Mom brought Mark and I shelf paper to protect the shelves she was afraid we'd ruin the wood by not drying the dishes well. 1. We didn't have dishes and B. If or when we did have dishes I just threw them away because they'd get too gross to wash.
What else was there to do with the shelf paper but put it all over the walls and draw artwork on it with sharpies. That apartment was pretty crazy and anything went but I thought of it as a place of ideas.
Garrett, who we knew since....forever, used to come over everyday and work on his masterpiece behind the front door. He stood up there for what seemed like months drawing the craziest picture I'd ever seen.
When it was finished Gary wrote "Imagination To The Nation" at the bottom. It sort of became my motto. What does "Imagination To The Nation" mean though?
I think of it as a wish. What's one of my 3 wishes? That we all used our imaginations more and took our dreams more seriously. Get off your ass and give the craziest fuckin idea you have a shot. Maybe everything depends on it.
The best minds proved man couldn't fly. Professor Langley's flying machine went to the bottom of the Potomac River but the Wright brothers got us to the moon. They had a childish faith and imagination where they could see a human being flying like a bird.
So take a shot at something stupid. You don't have anything better to do. Write something, build something, invent something. Our faces are stuck in our cell phones and we stop dreaming and start watching. We have endless entertainment but not a lot of originality anymore. We've gotten lazy.
We take being alive during this time for granted. We have the LUXURY to try new things. All this shits new. Cars, air conditioning, fancy record players, but what are we doing with it?
I know I can do a lot more and this question eats at me. Almost everyday as I'm getting older the first word in my mind when my eyes open is "fuck" followed by, "What have I contributed?" What have I done to inch this planet forward just a bit in my unique way? Have I leveraged my time, talents and resources to make a better tomorrow?
No. I have not. I"m a dipshit. I'm trying to slowly get better and make a conscious effort to recognize the miracles all around me that I had absolutely nothing to do with. I flip a switch and a light comes on or heat comes out. I don't know how either.
Maybe I can acknowledge these miracles all around me and try to use them to aid me in the attempt at creating something better.
So what do you create? That's up to you to decide but the questions that always pop up in my mind are 1. "What am I afraid of?" or B. "What's the most impossible, stupidest idea I have?" Then go and try that because shelf paper belongs on the walls and people belong in the air. Fuck a dried cup Gary needs this shit for a masterpiece.