The Fuel and the Fueled

“Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel.”

-Hunter S. Thompson

This question of fuel, fueled by a big glass of red wine conversation with a good friend, has laid me down here, back at home, sleepy but unwilling to relent to my fingers magnetic on this keyboard, unsure of what they’re doing exactly, not knowing the final product beyond the momentary impulse, paranoid about the process of writing. But there is no process, only impulse, flow, and Fuel.

Thompson was right. Inspiration is dainty, delicate, and fleeting, like some frequently evicted Tinkerbell, difficult to see, impossible to sync without the odds overwhelmingly in your favor, and even more difficult to define without faltering into God-like signifiers. Fuel is more like it. It’s tangible, finite yet recyclable, constant, surrounded in corruption yet free from distortion. Its availability can alter the world economy, but in its most valuable incarnations it’s priceless. And priceless fuel is all around us...it's now cheaper and more dynamic.

Creativity is the only fuel that can also be fueled. By what, exactly, we may never know, but I can feel a Renaissance coming, a Beat Generation, some kind of movement we’ll soon realize within, driven by reciprocal, duality fuel, the very same fuel that intersects at the corner of sound, picture, madness and manic emotion, flowing with impulse words falling onto a keyboard, with no right turn or stop light in sight.

I didn’t have the pleasure of knowing you, Hunter S. Thompson, but it's quotes like this that get me every time. You’re right...inspiration is for Jesus and the Righteous Brothers. But you limit yourself by limiting Fuel to Music. Fuel is everything you’re willing to take in to be on your way…to Vegas, to the truth, insanity, the fear and loathing of gun that ended your life, and with it your words. Although they were fueled, these living words of yours also provide necessary Fuel for whatever Beat Renaissance is dancing on the edges of now, practically inevitable now that creativity has merged with materialism and consumption. Wait for it...