Liquid Gold

It has been quite a while since I’ve been writing, and I’m gonna be honest. I really miss it. Working at Wells Fargo has been great, and is definitely a blessing, but my brain is becoming a financial sponge, filled with meaningless numbers and equations, while all of my creative juices are sitting dormant collecting dust under my bed. I lifted my mattress today just to make sure the bottle of creative juice was still there, and sure enough, under my bed, behind the professional athlete dreams and vocal talent, there it sat. The 10 gallon glass bottle filled my with creative juice. Every time I see it under there, it’s still hard to believe that a 10 gallon glass bottle can fit under my bed…hmmm…maybe that explains my lower back pain.

10 minutes passed and I finally moved all the other junk out of the way and pulled out my bottle of creative juice. The window was open just a crack in my room, and I was thankful for that. Digging under the bed made me break a sweat, and the soft breeze sifting through the window-screen, really took the edge off. So, I sat there with the bottle of creative juice sitting between my legs, and I just stared at it. I’m not sure all of you know what creative juice looks like, so let me fill you in. When a powerful mind, like Einstein or Alex Trebec, uses creative juice, it is supposed to look like pure liquid gold that has just been squeezed from a solid gold orange. (I can see hear your brain working, trying to imagine this.) However, over time, when your brain is used for different purposes and the creative juice starts to get stale, it turns into crusty brown syrup. Needless to say, my creative juice was so stale that it was ready for a triple stack of pancakes.

There I sat. Still staring at my 10 gallon bottle of stale creative juice. I had to take a step…maybe even a leap…My stomach somersaulted as if I were about to delve into an old relationship, one that I’d cheated on and left behind. One that I’d been inching further and further away from. Part of my head or maybe even my heart, made my hands twist the cap off of the bottle, hoist it up to my lips and powerfully begin to chug. Drinking your creative juice can be a painful experience. It takes a while for all of the juice to circulate through the brain, and for your body and bones and skin to remember what being creative feels like. Oh yeah…and have you ever tried to drink 10 gallons of maple syrup? I didn’t think so.

1 hr later

Well it’s been about an hour. I thought I was going to die for the first 15 minutes, because I had 10 gallons of sludge coursing through my brain, and the intensity of the headache I felt reminded me of the first time I heard a Miley Cyrus song. But now, It’s hard to put into words, the way I feel. If I had to describe it: imagine the joy that a Yodeler, who has just seen a Billy-goat hurdle a 5 foot stream flowing through the Swiss Alps, would express. You would hear yodel-le-hee-hoo’s ring from mountain tops! Part of me wanted to throw up, bottle the juice back under my bed, and accept that my brain was meant to be a mortgage garbage disposal. But as soon as my creative juice fully circulated through my veins, and the memories of joy and the freedom that writing and being creative gives me were projected on the 65” Plasma screen in my head, I threw the 10 gallon glass bottle out the window. Looking back on it now, I probably wouldn’t have thrown the bottle out the window, but rather used it to hold spiced holiday cider, because the bottle broke the window screen, plummeted two stories, hit, and killed the neighbors cat named Kitty Perry. Whoops. Like my dad always says, “the only good cat is a dead cat.” Try telling that to Ms. Donahue next door.

Today I took a stand. To prevent future staleness, I put a chip clip on my “potato-chip-bag” life. I used a Ziploc to preserve the freshness I had left. And I got rid of the huge lump in my mattress that the 10 gallon glass bottle was creating. Mark my word America. Never again will the underside of a bed be a place to hide my creative juice. Instead, I want to infuse every pen, and pencil and piece of paper that crosses my path with so much creativity that if you were to wring out that piece of paper, you could fill a 10 gallon glass bottle with pure…liquid…gold!