Matt Beard

It happened again the other day.  Cruising up the coast for a surf, minding my own business, getting passed by a speeding funeral hearse, and in one instant flash, the course of my life was altered.  No, it wasn’t an accident, at least not of the car wreck variety. It was more of an accident of mind, and it’s been happening a lot lately.  Apparently I never read the life-as-an-artist handbook that warns of all the dangers of inspiration.  I worry that if I keep this up, my creative license may get revoked.

Inspiration is a tragic fleeting moment where a new vision sprouts from the shallow earthen grave of a bad idea.  Often times I cling to the rotting corpse out of desperation, not knowing where else to turn, ignoring the funeral procession, refusing to wear black.  But I play the fool.  Death itself was made for bad ideas. There is nothing creative about destruction, decay, and death.  Turning life into death is the natural order of things.  Do nothing, and you will have played your part in the unmourned dance.

The tragedy of inspiration is that often the lifeless idea is the safe idea.  And when inspiration comes gently fluttering in with the breeze, behind it lurks the force of a thousand waterfalls not to be resisted.  Life itself blasts out a soul-splitting bass-line from the speakers of the funeral hearse.  Get up and dance!  Mourn if you must, but get up and move!  When death turns into Life, it’s never what you expect.

It’s often not what anyone else expects either.  Always surprising, at times embraced, but more often rejected, true creativity has no other path than to walk through these rusty gates.  The lock’s busted, the gates swing freely in the wind, creaking out a strangely melodic tune.  Welcome to the graveyard of bad ideas.  Here you’ll find the world’s best artists dancing on the graves while Inspiration herself does donuts on the graveyard lawn with the volume turned up to eleven in the funeral hearse.

“Welcome to California.  Now get lost.”

Getting lost is an easy feat in the old city of one way streets and construction work dead ends, where the 2 a.m. limousines cruise the darkened streets and the drunk Russian couple leans out the window and invites you to their apartment for crepes and cigarettes and possibly no return.  Nothing to do but surrender to the waves of the pulsating neon narrative rewriting itself in the shade of this towering symbol of prosperity. The Golden Gate.

In truth there is nothing golden about this Pacific sea-faring gateway to the land of wealth and opportunity.  The gate itself is actually red.  The color of caution and rage, a warning shot to all who enter here seeking gold that it will not be easily gained.

Its been this way for a long time here.  Territorial disputes. Warring tribes. Warring nations. Blood-soaked ground.  Quick wealth seekers with gold dust in their eyes. Out of work dust-bowl refugees with only survival in their eyes.

Fast-forward to Silicon-chip greed gamblers. Buy-and-sell-for double real-estate mass-ponzi schemes. Grow-your-own-money-tree under the sheltering shade of medicinal legalities. Securing investments to disrupt our collective social engineering experiment with a handheld bet wagering ever higher stakes. In each of these manifestations of wealth-without-work mass mentalities, the winners are few and the collateral damage runs high.

The Spanish galleons seen on yesterday’s evening news were listing heavily from cargo holds full of dreams to be sold. They still circle the bay today, docking in the dark fog of modernity, selling these dreams to the corporate midnight brokers. They rebrand them and sell them for double on these beautiful streets of ancient brick as the smell of roasting coffee awakens the city daily from these plastic dreams that have been broken and left us broke.

Just like all the other scared souls afraid of losing what never really belonged to them in the first place, there are two things these merchants know very well; first, that broken bodies heal faster than broken dreams, and second, we are not in their dream.

Just how its always been…   “Welcome to California. Now get lost.”