Library of Inspiration: The Iceman Cometh

They’ll read it, they’ll read it. And they’ll love it. No doubt. How could they not? There is a legion of fans waiting to be born, starving for this shit. Ode to pipe dream number 232.

But sometimes it’s so hard to focus. Stop Making Sense. It’s those jackasses in the apartment above. You pay half your salary to rent the bottom floor of two-flat in a quiet neighborhood but it blows up in your face. New neighbors take over the second floor, and you are now a hostage in the drama with their music playing at collegiate decibels. A stream of visitors, and their clompety-clomp disregard for life as you once knew it invade and conquer all semblance of tranquility. Home Sweet Home, once a refuge and a great place to work (away from work of course), is now nothing more than a dumpy room at a frat house. An expensive headache. The dream of buying a home has never tasted so good, and yet, the truth of that—it ain’t gonna happen—sucks the life right out of you.

Larry Slade: To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It’s irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.

Maybe so. Maybe so. Our pipe dreams do pump the pulse, but at what cost? They just force us to try and keep pace with hybrid days that bask in the vogue of fuel efficiency. Days motor on without end, monitoring the current state of our failures. Gloating. Dreams are nothing more than bystanders to that parade, eventually evaporating in the sun, leaving nothing behind but a towering wasteland of guilt. The middle age siren sounds off. Life goals are hidden under piles of senseless shit in a basement storage locker. There is no reason to hunt them down. It’s easier to pretend they were never there at all.

Theodore ’Hickey’ Hickman: I know you become such a coward that you’ll grab at any lousy excuse to get out of killing your pipe dreams. And yet, as I’ve told you over and over, it’s exactly those damned tomorrow dreams which keep you from making peace with yourself. So you’ve got to kill them like I did.

New dream. To find a happy medium between the dream and the reality. To find a way to be inspired by the visions of how we wish things could be as we navigate through the trivial realities of the way things are. To live under neighbors from hell with a trickle of hope that one day you will come home from a hard day’s work and be able to close your eyes and make peace with it all. That one day soon, David Byrne will be a ghost of the past. Graduation Day. The only thing you will hear is the tranquil stream of serenity as you sigh in the ultimate relief that it all came true.

One day soon. One day soon.

-G