Punk rock has the term straight edge which makes it different than other make art and change the world for the better movements.

Straight edge means doing no drugs, legal or illegal, no cigarettes, alcohol, or street drugs.

The boozy beatniks and the druggy hippies probably had people in their midst who did not do drugs. However, there wasn't an inside the movement word for it. Straight edge says you aren't drugging, and you are punk.

An artist is a better seed if sober. A seed is right down there in the soil and right there having the soil rich water run by. So the seed takes than and grows to be what that seed is supposed to be.

Living life at a chemical removes means the seed that is the artist isn't learning and growing right there in reality. The products isn't as good. The product often isn't finished. There's this art drive to rub against reality and take inside reality and push it outside like a birth to make outside reality different.

If you aren't fully present to either the inside or the out, that drive isn't there. The book, song, album, picture isn't done. Outside reality stays it's same old self, as the drinking or drugged one gets stupider.

Why today? Why am I saying this today? I've started reading "The Maltese Falcon" a good Dashiell Hammett novel I haven't read before. I am thinking how very bad his books that aren't good are: "The Dain Curse," what a turkey. I'm thinking about how few books he wrote.

Yes, his health wasn't good; he had tuberculosus. Yes, his health and stick-to-it-ivness were not good; he drank a lot. There are missing books. Missing good books. His and others. He really wasn't straight edge.