Happy Birthday, Jack Kerouac!

By: Erik Rittenberry

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