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July 11, 2011
On The Road
...I'd often dreamed of going West to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off."
- Jack Kerouac, "On The Road"
I wake up this morning and the alarm's going off and the sun is shining and I think 'Oh man. I overslept." But it's only 6:00 a.m. I didn't oversleep. I don't want to get up though. I don't want to get out of bed. Don't want to go to California today, but then I think...what's the big deal? It's only for 4 days. And it's not like I'm going to anything if I stay here except hibernate.
So I drag myself out of bed. Throw some clothes in a little handbag. Connect my new UPS to the network before I leave the house. Clean up a bit.
Why is it that I'm so bad about procrastinating? Why is it that I get so much more done when there's a deadline involved. Why is the sky blue? Because it is.
I'm re-reading Kerouac's On The Road and it's brilliant, of course. It makes me want to travel. And one thing that I'm picking up now that I'm re-reading it is how sad he is when he's on the road. It's a recurring comment made at least every 5 pages or so.
"Happiness among intelligent men is the rarest thing I know." - Ernest Hemmingway
And it's funny to read about Kerouac's travels across the country because he did it all on a shoestring. He never had more than a few dollars in his pocket at any point in time. He hitchhiked across the country, or road buses when he could afford it.
But reading the book really does make me want to travel again. I mean, not that I'm not traveling. All I do is travel. But more, I'd say, he makes me want to drive the dirt bike up to Alaska. Makes me want to leave tomorrow.
Some of the quotes I like from the book so far:
"...outside of being a sweet girl, she was awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things."
"...and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because 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..."
"...and this was really the way that my whole road experience began, and the things that were to come are too fantastic not to tell..."
"...I was a writer and needed new experiences..."
"...and in his excited way of speaking, I heard again the voices of companions and brothers under the bridge, along the wash-lined neighborhood and drowsy doorsteps of afternoon..."
"...I was a young writer and I wanted to take off. Somewhere along the line, I knew there'd be girls, visions, and everything; somewhere along the line, the pearl would be handed to me."
I'll stop there. These quotes were all lifted from the first chapter. This book is indescribably brilliant. I wonder how many people have sat down and tried to re-create this magic...to re-write their own story using "On The Road" as their model. I bet a million people have tried and failed.
So I roll out of bed and try to cobble together the things I'll need on the left coast, and things I'll need along the way. Boarding passes. Keys. Boots. Jacket. Passport. Credit cards. Cash. Building passes for another time zone.
I roll into the early morning truck and down the rocky mountains toward the madness of Denver as the traffic starts to build.
Skipping through the stations, I'm trying to find something I can listen to. I end up listening to the Train song on my CD though and wishing I could be on the road. Not bouncing back and forth in a 737 with winglets, but balling across the highways like Kerouac. Thumbing across the plains.
Some might think my life is crazy, but it's fairly predictable. I bounce back and forth between California and Colorado like a ping pong ball in a dryer. I ride wheelies through the city on a dirt bike with no license plate. Go off-roading through the Golden Gate National Recreation Area like I own the place. I wander around the mission and the tenderloin shooting graffiti and the homeless.
But there's not much variation, really. I'd say I'm fairly predictable and boring, at this point. I remember when I met Hunter S. Thompson at a booksigning in Denver. He had them bring him scotch and then he knocked over a roll of paper towels like he was furious, but then when the roll of paper towels hit one of the girls at the book signing, he was apologizing all over himself and you could tell it was all act.
Thats sort of how I am, I think.
I act like a rebel, but I'm far from it, really. I'm more like a retarded, bourgeois pretender, I think. More like Holden Caulfield or Ignatius Reilly than Sal Paradise.
30,000 feet below me, the country scrolls by. Today, I'm sitting on the starboard side of the plane just because I like to switch it up a bit. Sal Paradise is rolling across the high desert down there far below me, and I'm switching sides of the plane to get a different view. That's my rebellion. Ridiculous really.
I should sleep, but I don't really feel like it, so I'm reading On The Road and glancing out the window, watching the Rocky Mountains pass, then the high desert. Gradually, the precipitation tapers off and now Lake Powell and the Grand Canyon. Finally, Nevada with is just so barren and lifeless you can't know. Looks like the moon would look if only it were the color of Mars.
Finally, we pass into California, and then gradually down into the Los Angeles basin. You just can't know how bad the air here is. But you could walk on it. I'm sure planes have accidentally landed on the smog, only to realize their mistake, and take off again to land at LAX or OC or Burbank.
We touch down at John Wayne Airport in Orange County, and I plan to change sides. I want to sit on the port side for the second leg into San Francisco, but they come on and say we're delayed several hours due to fog in San Francisco.
So I deboard and wander around the John Wayne Airport in OC. I'm staggering through this dismal little airport and my sister texts me and says she finally made it home from their 1 year round the world odyssey. And they're so happy to be home you can't know.
How funny it is that we have such a poor idea of what might make us happy. I think happiness is more of a miracle than it is science. Collectively, we spend a lot of time trying to think, rationally, what should make us happy. But I suspect logic has nothing to do with it. Happiness occurs at a much lower level in the human brain. It comes before logic. Before thought. Long before reason.
Reason is something we apply to emotions after the fact. A band aid on a scratch.
Attraction is the same way. You can sit around all day and try to think, logically, why it is that you're attracted to someone. And you may fool yourself into coming up with a solution..."because they're good-looking". But this is all nonsense. It's just logic trying to paper over something it can't begin to understand.
You are happy because you are. You are sad because you are. You are attracted to someone because you are. All of this occurs at a primal level that evolved long before the logical section of the brain existed.
At OC, some guy is hugging all over this girl and I can see that she's going to leave him. She will. Even she can't tell yet. But I can see deeper in the stone than she can chisel. He's too open. Too sincere. He likes her too much. It'll never work. She'll crush him in the end. Of this I'm certain.
No woman really wants a man that's attracted to her. If there's anything I'm sure of...it's that. If I've learned anything on the this planet, it's that people want what they can't have and what they can have, they certainly have no use for. I'm as sure of this as anyone's ever been certain of anything in the history of time.
And I'm sorry for them both, that they're so happy, because I know it will end. It will all come crashing down like a chandelier in an earthquake.
I'm sitting next to them for hours. This is how I get to study them. He's geeky and she's beautiful with some ridiculous French accent and she's so young she still has baby teeth I figure and I know it will never work. It's none of my business, of course, so I say nothing. It's not like they're asking for my permission to be enjoying themselves in this continuous public display of affection.
But I'm shaking my head like my grandmother watching a toddler disapprovingly. It's all in vain. All for naught.
Hours later, we take off for San Francisco.
The woman in front of me is beautiful and staring out the window at the scene unfolding below.
Casually, I keep her abreast of our location as we perambulate north along the left coast.
That's Catalina Island. Pismo Beach. Big Sur. San Simeon, Hearst Castle. Santa Cruz, Four Mile Beach.
I point all of these things out to her. Her husband is right beside her but I don't care. I'm bored. They're from Ohio and they've never seen California before and I think about that. I think about how much time I've spent out here. Driving up and down the coast on two wheels and four and I think...you know...maybe I'm closer to Sal Paradise than I'd suspected. Maybe on the Ignatius Reilly to Sal Paradise scale...maybe I'm a little closer to Sal than I'd realized.
Posted by Rob Kiser on July 11, 2011 at 11:51 PM
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