Inspiration can come from imagination or it can come from the most innocuous things and at other times it can come from the bottom of a bottle or glass late into the night in a dark bar full of people with checkered pasts and soon to be checkered futures...or sometimes it’s the imagination that gives birth to the baby that becomes your story or at least becomes a welcome distraction...sometimes, it can be your best friend...there’s no limit as to what you can come up with...I’m sitting outside and what was a sweltering day has now become cooler and overcast and it’s starting to rain and I just moved my chair so I can feel the rain because I was under a tree...the rain and me are good friends and it’s hugging me now with every friendly drop...I love the rain...maybe because most people don’t like it...always the contrarian am I...I’m looking over the top part of my wooden fence at my neighbors metal pool enclosure which has seen better days and those days were a long time ago... the screen is torn in places and is hanging down with a sad neglected droop, some screenage is missing altogether, the metal frame is tarnished and looking ancient...if I peered over the fence, I would see that the pool water is greener than the weeds in the lawn...it’s really kind of an eyesore and a shame...but if I use my imagination, I can pretend I’m looking at the frame of a temple built long ago, yes...somewhere in southeast Asia...Buddhist maybe...yes, Buddhist I decide...this temple is one that is crumbling and falling victim to time...yes, it is one that has been abandoned for ages and is forgotten, of course no one knows why, it all adds to the mystery of it all...it’s a relic belonging to another age...that’s what I like to think it is anyway...a place where monks meditated and chanted 100,000 moons ago...I walk on the other side of the yard and I see my replica of Stonehenge that I made after we had a tree chopped up after a hurricane pushed it over crushing part of my fence, which I haven’t fixed yet...Stonehenge...I don’t know why I made it...I think Stonehenge is a mystical sort of place although I never was interested enough to actually do any research on it and find out who built it or what it was for...I’m not sure anybody knows anyway...my imagination tells me that is was some kind of powerful spiritual place where the paranormal was normal...that’s more interesting probably than the real story…located near Stonehenge are the three pyramids of Giza, which in reality are some pieces of broken concrete I once picked up at a friends’ house...my pyramids went up in about five minutes...an engineering marvel...the house across the street from me has sat empty for a while...slow real estate market?...no, the house is haunted...there was a suicide by the previous owner and his troubled spirit haunts the premises and scares off any would be tenants...strange noises at night...unexplainable events...maybe there’s some kind of poltergeist behind it...I’m looking at it now while I write this and it looks foreboding...and sometimes imagination is your best friend and it puts an arm around you and gives you a warm embrace and tells you that things are going to be better...it got you through many a day after school when you were growing up playing alone in the backyard and like the times when you were in high school and you listened to music in the basement on Saturday nights and pretended that you were popular.
