Procrastination is a skillset I acquired early. I realize now that I may never get around to writing that book...
but then just the other day I was thumbing through one of the several books of Jim Morrison's poetry & writings on my disheveled bookshelf and saw this quote once again:
"I always wanted to write, but I always figured it'd be no good unless somehow the hand just took the pen and started moving without me really having anything to do with it. Like automatic writing. But it just never happened."
Y'know, Jimbo was a huge influence on my development as a writer; and a reader, and a thinker, back in highschool. Before I had ever gotten high myself, I was "stoned immaculate" immediately upon hearing The Doors' primal shamanic jazz metal. The band's influences 'opened the doors' to me musically to begin to appreciate jazz, blues, flamenco, Bertoldt Brecht, bossa nova --- and towards prog rock and psychedelic (all still before I had smoked a joint.)
Morrison, on the other hand, got me into poets and writers like Rimbaud, William Blake, Jack Kerouac and Friedrich Nietzsche. Jim's favorite book, 'The Birth of Tragedy' soon became mine, and laid the foundations for my theological project, God is a Mushroom! in the duality of Apollo & Dionysus --- as well as inspiring the Bacchic satyr revelry celebrated on my beer blog, The Discriminating Wino.
Kerouac inspired me to write the tale of my life, as it was happening, which filled many notebooks and has gone through several versions --- not drafts but actually total rewrites of events burned into my mind, of those High School Daze --- but who'd wanna read a story about some high school kid in 2000 taking a bunch of acid and watching George W. steal the election, then getting kicked out of school for writing Lewis Carroll poems from Looking-Glass House in graffiti on the stall doors of the boys' room, and sitting at home stoned for three months watching Joe Rogan duct-tape the world back together on NewsRadio reruns and laughing so hard I was still heaving uncontrollably, breathless when the show came back from commercial break, from something funny the late, great Phil Hartman said...and Man, speaking of writers that show had the best!
Then, in a paradise stumbled upon one day when I took enough medicine to stop a cough for two weeks I discovered R. Gordon Wasson's Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality. This has inspired over two decades of my own research and speculation, culminating thus far in God is a Mushroom!
Willaim Blake's poetry, especially the Songs of Innocence, informed the simple English pastoral cadence that permeates much of my own poetry; particularly in the collection All Seasons.
watch me reading Blake
Rimbaud's influence was different --- though no less decisive. Aside from being one of the most masterful artists of his craft, Rimbaud left us his life and his madness as a measure for any future poetic genius of total decadence, along with the phrase, "A systematic derangement of the senses in order to achieve the unknown."
Achieved...
