Inspiration often mumbles some kind of inside joke, laughing at me until its vexation shouts out perplexing antidotal hyperbole to which I’m hopelessly immune. So, I retreat inwards until retrospection knocks at my door. I welcome such interruptions; my enthusiasm sometimes engages too strongly. But today there are no knocks, no doorbells ringing. I need a distraction. Television? Bungee jumping in Borneo? Interpretive dancing inside the château de Fontainebleau? Yes… something French—exotic beyond Paris, crêpes, Joe Cocker singing as Brie cheese plays havoc with his enunciation. France has inspired many, but how? tennis? soccer? swimming the English Channel backwards? nude lawn bowling with Carla Bruni? Oh très beaucoup déroutant! Then I remember something I read: Absinthe captured the imaginations of some of the world’s most famous (and infamous) artists and writers, from van Gogh to Hemingway. I’m no van Gogh or Hemingway, but I’m an artist (non-famous) in need of inspiration from the Green Fairy… and it’s French! Très faiblir!

Procuring the Green Fairy is once again legal, so I contacted the twin owners of the Psychic Wine and Spirits Shoppe, Jimmy and Joey, via Ian Anderson’s Two Short Planks. Las maravillas nunca cesarán? Those wizards of wine already had my absinthe selected when I arrived. I didn’t ask questions; my nervous nature nourished a giggle or two from the twins. Karen, their bookkeeper—my sister-in-law, rolled her eyes at my purchase. I asked her what could possibly go wrong. She thought about it for a moment, but bless her blonde heart, that was too long of a moment. She offered me a bite of her donut; I refused politely. I had some inspiration to indulge in.

Connecticut sunshine is somehow different when reflecting off the green-brown waters of the Hockanum. Perhaps it’s because of the shade of the surrounding oak and maple trees making nice with the red birch saplings reaching into the rippling river for nourishment. I sat in contemplation content sipping my absinthe, when a blue heron emerged from the thickets of the cardinals’ domain, reminding me that the Adirondack chair I was sitting in was in fact a beige Lazy Boy recliner I often thought about buying. Impressed, I sipped more absinthe, nodding my thanks to blue heron: the cardinals oh so confused started dancing to the sultry beat of a yellow finch band. From inside my house, I heard the Cowboy Junkies singing A Common Disaster on iTunes. But I didn’t power up my MacBook or my iPod. Annoyance abounds when intrusion messes with my distilled, highly alcoholic buzz: the anise-flavors derived from herbs, eucalyptus, rosemary, coriander, sage, anise, fennel and the flowers and leaves of the grande wormwood tend to mute when disturbed. So, I floated inside.

Sitting at my teak desk, flummoxed yet intrigued, sat a young Hemingway; his dark eyes surveyed my MacBook; F. Scott Fitzgerald slapped at the young author’s fat chubby hands. “Ernest,” the jazzed author mumbled in subliminal calculus laced with misanthropy. “Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane... There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.”

“The problem with some people is that when they aren't drunk, they're sober, ” Hemingway answered back.

“First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you,” F. Scott said looking at me; I powered down my MacBook. The absinthe abducted queasiness.

“Darlings please…” this large man said, motioning with a quick flit of the wrist. “One knows their minds as easily as one knows their bonnets. One can always find them. There is no mystery in any of them. They ride in the park in the morning, and chatter at tea parties in the afternoon. They have their stereotyped smile, and their fashionable manner. They are quite obvious.”

“I thought you were dead,” Hemingway said.

“Blows your mind, doesn’t it my dear Ernest.” The large man looked at me; he reached out to shake my hand. “The name’s Oscar.”

“Cool,” I said.

“Wilde,” He said.

I sipped more absinthe.

"What difference is there between a glass of absinthe and a sunset?" Oscar asked me. Hemingway and F. Scott waited for my reply.

“The color?” I asked.

“Ezra… Oh Ezra…” Oscar called out. He smiled at Hemingway; Hemingway flipped him off, aged quickly, and then cursed Spencer Tracy.

“All that I desire to point out is the general principle that life imitates art far more than art imitates life,” Wilde said.

A harsh female voice sang out from the dining room. “It served as a muse for Degas’ L’Absinthe and Picasso’s Glass of Absinthe. Also, according to popular legend, absinthe began as an all-purpose patent remedy. It cured everything from warts to hysteria.

“That bitch… tootles,” Oscar said; he poofed into the ethereal.

Ezra Pound appeared, pointing at my absinthe: he mimed needing a sip; I obliged.

 e.e. cummings flew by in lower-case style. “unbeing dead isn't being alive.”

“When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action you should take—choose the bolder,” Pound said.

“You referencing absinthe in the metaphoric?” I asked.

“Or opium. Got any?”

“Ignore him,” a diminutive woman said walking through a harsh hookah cloud reeking of tobacco and bacon: her mustache distracted me. “This has been a most wonderful evening. Gertrude has said things tonight it will take her ten years to understand.”

“To the moon Alice…” the dining room voice sang out in B flat.

Ezra bogarted my absinthe. Outside, the moon broke free of the indigo night confusing the crickets feeding on the backs of bullfrogs. The July snow melted. Mellow was yellow.

“Time out here,” I said, making the “T” motion with my hands. “What’s with the hookah? I don’t smoke.”

The mustache lady touched my hand. “Inspiration is not what the Green Fairy offers.”

She said her name was Alice and she synopsized the lost, by saying the “Lost Generation” was lost in that the values that its members were being taught didn't fit the reality of life. They helped to establish many of the styles and themes that are still used in literature today.

“Huh?”  was all I could manage to say; my mouth numb, my throat parched, my brain craving Whoopie Pies.

“If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works,” a man said; his body obscured by hookah smoke; his logic lucid.

I walked through the hookah’s grey veil and said hello to a reticent John Dos Passos. He was munching on a Whoopie Pie. T.S. Elliot laughed from where I don’t know. I found inspiration in that laugh.

The Lost Generation