Screeeech!  Shreik!!

So let's drag our heels here for just a sec, back up and pick up the snout of this psychotic episode that gave birth and mirth to this blog.  But first let's pause briefly  to give credit where it's due by putting  two hands together for one of my cultural heroes:

And then let's reach a hand down to lift up those following along who might be struggling a bit with making sense of what this is really all about.  Let's help bring folks up to speed, which in my current state is a slightly tapered but still pretty damn speedy 35 ml per day dose of prednisone, careening me forward like a passenger on a jet boat, flames blazing away behind me from its afterburners as it races me ahead down the brainway toward this fast-emerging style my drug-revved brain is inventing and revising and rerevising so fast that I can't even keep up myself and quite see where we're going; but my still-manic, arrogant, presumptuous brain fancies we're experiencing the Birth of a Cool Movement - a hypercool one really, maybe even a new art form (see, I warned you about that arrogant, egotistical bit.  It's not my fault though, I keep saying.  It's just the prednisone madly barking away so don't blame me. And in the back of my mind the whole time I have these two epic cultural touchpoints from when I came of age half a century ago: One's On the Road, the autobiographical work that's recognized as one of the greatest works of literature of the 20th century and helped give birth to the Beat Generation.  On the Road was published in 1957, the year that Elizabeth and I moved back in with our parents and younger brother Stewart after living with Gramma Woodings and Uncle Harry in Bremerton for that first year after the family moved back to Seattle from my new stepdad's childhood home: Charleston, West Virginia.

It surprises me now to see that the book came out when I was eleven years old, because I associate it with when I read it which was a decade later - just about the time I got drafted into the military during the Viet Nam War and life whipsawed overnight into a new direction again.  Sort of like what's happened to Rocky and me this last half year, really. 

Heart

0

Comment

0

Link

Log in to comment or reply

  But that's not when the book was written, and it wasn't written in one sitting while Jack and Neal Cassidy drove west across the continent for some reason I'd totally forgotten about because I haven't read the book since and so I've forgotten the realities I one knew.  In my mind's eye the book was written on scrolls of toilet paper as Jack sat there shotgun during the drive, and at the end someone got ahold of it and published it.  And for the last few days I've been thinking I understood for the first time how that all came down, and assumed Kerouac was a sixties figure on an acid trip and I was going through a similar experience myself, making comparisons with Jack and imagining my unreadable walls of text as rolls of toilet paper making their way upriver toward Oregon City and points beyond.

Sorry 'bout that.  Blame the drugs, blame the passage of time since I read it, blame my assimilation of facts and fiction built up over the years about what really happed.  It's sort of like a game of Telephone, where along the way at each relay point something shifts a bit until at the end there's been a transmogrification  of the original facts to something truthier.  That's how you get folks telling you Bacharach was born a Brit, or Evans was a prodigy from Wales.  Happens over and over again.

The short story though is same same but different.  Jack really did write the whole thing on a continuous scroll, but it wasn't TP.  Here's what happened, from what looks like must be the real story:

Typed out as one long, single-spaced paragraph on eight long sheets of tracing paper that he later taped together to form a 120-foot scroll, this document is among the most significant, celebrated, and provocative artifacts in contemporary American literary history.

He wrote it over a period of twenty days on his Olympus typewriter over a period of 20 days in his apartment in Chelsea - apparently he just woke up on a Chelsea morning and the first thing that he thought was that he should sit right down and start writing one of the great books of the century,

And it was written much earlier than I thought - in 1951, so it wasn't even about the sixties like I've come to believe, me playing auto-telephone with myself over the years and gradually inventing a new origin myth that I've been spewing around for awhile.  1951, a year when my life was just beginning really - I'm 5 years old and just about to enter first grade in my new home in Charleston, after my new family moved east to dad's home after he got out of the navy where he'd been stationed at the Naval Air Station ever  since he enlisted at the age of 17.  When he got out he married his Arthur Murray dancer, swept her, a divorced woman with two kids, and took us home to introduce his new family to his mom - Gramma Anderson, a conservative Baptist widow who'd raised dad alone because his father died when head was so young that dad has only a few photos and handed down memories of a man he never knew.  So there's a doorway into a dozen or a hundred stories not yet written down and a restoration if long-lost memories, but let's stop and take some ground here.

So, maybe not toilet paper and a pencil, but really what's happening here isn't all so different, just a different medium.  And if Jack took three weeks with time off for good behavior, I guess I can take a break and go get some black coffee and refuel.  When I come back I'll try to get back to what I thought I was here to talk about: how I started spiraling out of control in those first days before getting hospitalized.  I came to talk about the siege, and ended up pissing my time and space away on a metaphorical roll of toilet paper.  Sort of like that other cultural figure I was about to mention: Woody Guthrie's son Arlo, who came to sing about ending the war in Vietnam but ended up talking about life as a jailed litterbug instead.  So it goes.  See ya after the break.