Inspiration isn't a tap you can turn on. It comes when it wants to, and usually from a direction you weren't expecting.
Take Miami Vice. A show I wasn't allowed to watch as a kid, because my parents felt that drugs and gunplay weren't suitable evening programming for a nine-year-old. Looking back, my parents weren't always wrong. Still, that Miami burned itself into my memory — assembled from fragments, from things you pick up when you're too young to be included but old enough to be curious. Men in suits without ties. Fast cars with even faster silhouettes. Ocean. Sunsets in a shade of red that should probably be illegal in real life. See for yourself:
Credits
Music: Switch 625: Def Leppard - High 'N' Dry
via Thergothon1
The nighttime driving, freshly polished bodywork, reflections in the lacquer, the whole world rendered in high gloss and somehow melancholy all the same. That's the image that won't let me go. Not the plot, not the dialogue, not even the characters really — but that aesthetic of controlled shine, which somehow manages to feel both incredibly cool and incredibly warm at the same time.
And those '80s beats you can't quite take seriously and yet can't get out of your head, because they hit exactly the right note for whatever you happen to be feeling in that moment.
I was born in 1976. Miami Vice started in 1984. I was too young and yet that aesthetic left something in me that's still resonating today.