Prelude to a Lick
by Scott Hefflon
illustration by Chris Sherman
April showers bring May Flowers, eh? It’s been stormy as all git out ’round these parts, so we best have some serious bloomage as compensation. I’ll spare y’all the tiresome accounts of bailing out the basement. Let’s just move on to greener pastures, shall we? Watch where you step.
And so, Lollipop Magazine prepares to enter it’s third year. The printed word doesn’t exactly capture the weight of that sigh, now does it? The headlines are screaming, or are those “the voices” again? Three freakin’ years. I’ve never held a job for this long before. Just thought I’d throw that in for some sense of perspective. In one of those not-especially-rare epiphanies of self-pity, I slobbered the following hunk of brain. (Please read with a grain of salt the size of a watermelon.)
There was supposed to be more than this. That’s what I was naïve enough to think, at least. Perhaps I’m glamorizing the past, thinking it so rich in it’s longing to be something it wasn’t; but the fact remains that I feel no closer to whatever the objective was supposed to be. Perhaps the objective was to merely object to whatever was, in order to strive for what will be. Boy, I hope that’s not what I’ve been doing all this time… Being a swashbuckling, larger-than-life “journalist” with questionable social skills and personal habits is kinda hard when there ain’t much going on. That’s the ultimate cop out. Blame the lack of spark on the rest of the world. Is my purpose to wait until someone else comes up with a new thing, merely so I can froth about it for a while? Later, I can credit myself as one of the first to catch that particular wave, and boy, won’t I be hip then? But that is so derivative. I have to wait for someone to have the answer so I can be one of the first in line to applaud them? Where’s the value in that? I’m merely a consumer with connections. I haven’t done anything that someone else won’t be doing later, I was just one of the first. Yippee. That’s no fun. There is a challenge there, of course, but the goal is not nearly lofty enough to suit my ever-increasing need to go Furthur (sic).
After a sadistic little exercise of reading some old published and unpublished writing, I find that it’s always been this way – I haven’t evolved notably, and an embarrassing amount of the printed word is pure drivel. To keep all things in perspective, I can equate the excitingly trite existence I’ve sculpted for myself with the stupendously dreary, yet admittedly more profitable, lifestyles of those I would loosely call my peers. That term alone represents a concept foreign to me. My peers? Who the fuck are they? Have I met them? Did we do lunch or something? That wasn’t a peer drooling beside me last night at the bar, was it? How does one overlook the obvious differences and call both apples and oranges “fruit” without the least self-conscious hesitation? All men may be created equal, but most are so unbearably dull, I don’t appreciate the generalization, thank you very little. But what have I accomplished with my grandiose delusion that separates me so definitively from the rest of the chumps trying to eke out a living at living? The specifics are minor details when regarding the larger picture. Perhaps that’s why I usually choose not to look. Swell. The broad-minded (just ask him) thinker realizes he rather likes having his head in the sand. The view is rather nice, isn’t it?
Ahem. Three years, perhaps, takes its toll. But as long as there is a fee attached to this trip, why not see how far this road goes? I’ve got some change in my pocket going jing-a-ling-a-ling. I’ve got an ungodly amount of music to fuel the stereo, and a carload of people to make the ride more interesting, so, to cop yet another phrase, “Hey! Ho! Let’s Go!”
Lick Me.
