Random Acts of Journalism

On The Road was so good, it almost made me leave town…You see, I’m already a bit nomadic and i also tend to take on the personality of the books i’m reading. Something about the breathless, frantic way that Kerouac told the story of his travels, the way he spent 10 pages on the misery and 290 on the party, the way $20 in his pocket lasted 3,000 miles…well, it made me want to get out there and do it myself (I guess it’s a good thing i read Fight Club fast, before i had a chance to punch anyone)…He spent time in Denver, my birthplace. He listened to blues in New Orleans, fell in and out of love with little remorse, slept around with little repercussion, hit what i would have considered rock bottom at least 10 times and through it all just picked his stuff up and went on down the road to the next adventure. No concern for money, food, safety or friends or family. Sure, he found friends everywhere he went…almost through a 6th sense of knowing what bars and apartments they’d be in. No email, no cell phones, no texting, no MySpace…he’d just run into friends wherever he went. They put him up, fed him, let him borrow cars, money, daughters, wives; let him and that damned Neal Cassady overstay countless welcomes. Run-ins with cops, drifters, crooks…all of it written beautifully and romantically devoid of any real consequences. Kerouac’s book spans weeks, months and years of travel…it spends a few brief moments on the discomfort, pain, misery and loneliness of it while taking pages and pages of sweeping, spastic prose to tell of the grandiose parts.

I’ve traveled alone. Often. And for the most part, it sucks. Hours and hours of thinking capped off by moments of brilliance and excitement and beauty that leave you lonely again, wishing that you had someone there to live the experience with. Liberating yes, exciting yes, but also often horrifyingly lonely.

For Jack Kerouac, his almost constant companion was Neal “I’m a whiff and a dream” Cassady (you may know him as either Dean Moriarty or Cody Pomeray, depending on what version you’ve read), a friend that probably got Jack into more book-worthy situations than he would have found himself in otherwise. I recognized some of my friends in Neal…myself in Jack, sitting back, involved, but also mentally noting everything that went on around him.

On The Road, to me, was as much as a classic semi-fiction as it was a instruction manual on writing a novel. Legend/rumor/myth has it that Kerouac wrote On The Road in 20 days, while on a Benzadrine binge. He wrote 6,000 words a day, 12,000 on the first day and 15,000 on the last. “Renounce fiction and fear. There is nothing to do but write the truth. There is no other reason to write,” he said.

This is how i want to write my book. Just sit down and do the damn thing. Sort it out later. Make sense of it another time. Just get the story, any story, as much story as possible down on paper. He called it “Trance Writing,” and although i’m sure every decent writer has a place in their brain that they can go and just flow type from their heads…i’m pretty sure the drugs didn’t hurt either.

Some of my favorite lines from the book:

“The road is a path of life and life is a road.”

Calling the great Allen Ginsberg “Dancing Master Death” (Everyone should have this great of a nickname)

“They stand uncertainly underneath immense skies and everything about them is drowned.” (about the majority of American people, who don’t take chances, who don’t go for broke, who don’t throw it all away and start over.)

“It was the end of the continent, no more land. Somebody had tipped the American continent like a pinball machine and all the goofballs had come rolling to L.A. in the southwest corner. I cried for all of us. There was no end to the American sadness and the American madness. Someday we’ll all start laughing and roll on the ground when we realize how funny it’s been.” (Talking about a few nights in Hollywood…kind of prophetic now, right?)

“My mother once said that the world would never find peace until men fell at their women’s feet and asked for forgiveness. This is true. All over the world, in the jungles of Mexico, in backstreets of Shanghai, in New York cocktail bars, husbands are getting drunk while the women stay home with the babies of the everdarkening future. If these men stop the machine and come home — and get on their knees — and ask for forgiveness –and the women bless them — peace will suddenly descend on the earth with a great silence like the inherent silence of the Apocalypse.”

And my favorite:
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars….”

Read On The Road…the original scroll if you can find it. It’s worth it.