Damnit, folks, it’s Sunday and it’s Jack Kerouac’s birthday. He was born on this day 101 years ago.
So get up. Get up and grab one of his books off that old dusty shelf and read a few lines of his spontaneous prose. Read a few of his poems. Turn the music up today, turn it up extra loud because as he once said, “the only truth is music.”
Untangle yourself from the bureaucratic web of the modern world and go sleep in a meadow beneath the immaculate stars. Go ruck a mountain or sit in an alley. Dance like a demented shaman around the bonfires of the world. Go mad for the day. Go on an impromptu road trip. Go moan for man. Do it. Do something whimsical and out of the ordinary. Do something that stirs the blood.
Deep down you and I know that “the only people for [us] 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…”
It’s Jack Kerouac’s birthday, so let’s raise a goddamn toast on this fine almost spring morning for the great On the Road writer! Let’s keep his vagabond spirit alive by living to the point of tears, as D.H. Lawrence once said.
Fuck it, man, toss all your worries and apprehensions into the blazing furnace. Burn away all the senseless obligations weighing you down. Do it. You only have a few breaths on this unforgiving planet, go all the way. Forget yourself. You’re only a finite vessel in the blip of time so you might as well pour it all into the sea of the sublime!
And regardless of it all, “it all ends in tears anyway.”
I was lucky enough to visit Kerouac’s old hometown recently. Lowell, Ma where “Papier-mache canals flowed in downtown… men smoking cigars stand by the rail spitting in the waters that reflect the drizzle hopelessness of 1926.”
I sat at his grave for hours reading and pondering and pouring a little something out in honor of one of the few souls who energized me to go all-in in LIFE. I visited a few of the little haunts that he allegedly was a regular at around town. “How Lowell continues to haunt me so, it’s a whole intact Shakespearean universe in itself,” Kerouac once wrote.
A few days after Kerouac drank himself into an early grave, his friend and legendary beat poet, Allen Ginsberg, wrote this in his diary.
He threw up his hands & wrote the universe dont exist & died to prove it.
I’d like to share with you all one of my all-time favorite poems from Jack Kerouac called —
Skid Row Wine
I coulda done a lot worse than sit in Skid Row drinkin wine To know that nothing matters after all To know there's no real difference between the rich and the poor To know that eternity is neither drunk nor sober, to know it young and be a poet Coulda gone into business and ranted And believed that God was concerned Instead I squatted in lonesome alleys And no one saw me, just my bottle and what they saw of it was empty And I did it in the cornfields & graveyards To know that the dead don't make noise To know that the cornstalks talk (among one another with raspy old arms) Sittin in alleys diggin the neons And watching cathedral custodians Wring out their rags neath the church steps Sittin and drinkin wine And in railyards being divine To be a millionaire & yet to prefer Curling up with a poor boy of tokay In a warehouse door, facing long sunsets On railroad fields of grass To know that the sleepers in the river are dreaming vain dreams, to squat in the night and know it well To be dark solitary eye-nerve watcher of the world's whirling diamond
Feel a deep kinship to this man. To get into morning writing, I often listen to this track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTlT1p9eNrw
Kerouac's famous passage from Desolation Angels ("it's the beat of the heart, it's being beat and low...") gets spliced with the music, and the rest of the song is majestic.
Going to take my portable Jack out into the world and write some haikus. Cheers, all.
Oh, and another thing. I gave ChatGPT a task: "Write a 250-word short story about Eskimos in the 19th century, in the style of Jack Kerouac". It failed dismally. You really don't want to see what it produced.