The Checkered Mind

the air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great, that I thought I was in a dream

over the weekend i finally finished reading On The Road by Jack Kerouac…and never have i been more determined and excited about getting my carcass over to the states

granted, i need to learn to drive first, but the idea of hitting the road with a few good friends (hopefully), a small sack of necessities and a guitar in the back, with little aim but to mooch all over the american country doing whatever, whenever, makes me go all giddy inside!

although based in the 1940′s and 50′s, Kerouac’s account of his mad, unplanned, eventful trips, sensationally jotted down in his racing, frenzyish, ‘beat’ style of writing, has made my head go all in a tizzy, and ive spent hours recently just dreaming of fantastic, idiotic and beautiful moments to be had ‘on the road’ next year!

here’s a couple of awesome excerpts from Kerouac’s passionate and unstoppable work…

At dawn my bus was zooming across the Arizona desert – Indio, Ely The Salome (where she danced), the great dry stretches leading to Mexican mountains in the south. Then we swung north to the Arizona mountains, Flagstaff, clifftowns. I had a book with me I stole from a Hollywood stall, Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier, but I preferred reading the American skyline as we went along. Every bump, rise and stretch in it mystified my longing. In inky night we crossed New Mexico, at gray dawn in was Dalhart, Texas, in the bleak Sunday afternoon we rode through one Oklahoma flat-town after another, at nightfall it was Kansas. The bus roared on.

Great Chicago glowed red before our eyes. We were suddenly on Madison Street among hordes of hobos, some of them sprawled out on the street with their feet on the curb, hundreds of others milling in the doorways of saloons and alleys. “Wup! wup! look sharp for old Dean Moriarty there, he may be in Chicago by accident this year.” We let out the hobos on this street and proceeded to downtown Chicago. Screeching trolleys, newsboys, gals cutting by, the smell of fried food and beer in the air, neons winking–”We’re in the big town, Sal! Whooee!” First thing to do was park the Cadillac in a good dark spot and wash up and dress for the night.

Dean stands in the back, saying, ‘God! Yes!’ — and clasping his hands in prayer and sweating. ‘Sal, Slim knows time, he knows time.’ Slim sits down at the piano and hits two notes, two C’s, then two more, then one, then two, and suddenly the big burly bass-player wakes up from a reverie and realizes Slim is playing ‘C-Jam Blues’ and he slugs in his big forefinger on the string and the big booming beat begins and everybody starts rocking and Slim looks just as sad as ever, and they blow jazz for half an hour, and then Slim goes mad and grabs the bongos and plays tremendous rapid Cubana beats and yells crazy things in Spanish, in Arabic, in Peruvian dialect, in Egyptian, in every language he knows.

And for just a moment I had reached the point of ectasy that I always wanted to reach, which was a complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiance shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn’t in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but didn’t remember because the transitions from life to death and back are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it.