this is what we’ve come to
But here we are, a new day, a new beginning, this is this. Hemingway, Kerouac, Joyce, Delaney, eggs and bacon, toast and coffee, fish and fishing rod. We all have beefs, even the vegetarians. Your brand new day is another’s life on mars. Rotate, spin, chuck and roast. Spit and kettle, spindle and thread. Needle on haystack, wire on soldering iron. Rake the leaves and repair the mower, throw your pies to the wind. Ya no puedo mas, tronco. Roma, Madrid, Praga, take your pick and stamp your passport as you fly through customs to catch the connecting flight that somehow is always twenty minutes away from you in the opposite terminal. Jump on the train, hop on the bus, leap over the metro turnstile because you gotta run, you gotta move, you gotta get to where you got the feeling. It’s October in the railroad earth, it’s a little alley in San Francisco…you feel the rush, you feel the urge to hop it, jump it, it’s like adrenalin, but you gotta realize it’s mixed with melancholy too. A sentimental glee, that eventually catches up to you, and lends you a certain sadness. Of what was, of what you wish would be again, of what you want to capture- that which never existed in your time. It’s the rush, the joy of that first fine rush of sun to peek into your face through the morning curtains that hits you like a great scoop of coffeejolt gladness, that you wish to grab onto for the first time, everytime. Is it all done? Has it all been experienced for you? Is nothing new, is nothing newly sacred and ripe to pluck from the cold mountain wind-tremblin tree? It was old Johnny-Jack that first woke you to the possibilities of that bohemian life, that bebopcharlieparker-hip-to-the-hep-to-the-wise-sage-ginsbergian life that you longed for, longed to reach for and touch or, if nothing else, brush up against in a desperate search for the re-innocencia of a life long gone, a life never to be repeated, a life that, if you really want to know about, you can only experience through the pages of old books, and relive through the mind of a novato, a newbie, a fresh tabularasa unformed glob, open to whateverwheneverwhoever and listen to the breeze that whispers that which is going on in this life, among this people, between your ears and before your eyes. Don’t sit and fret and smoke and puff and cough and pine over that which might have been, that which once possibly was, but possibly was in your mind, but then again possibly not in the reality of that past timeline. Remember all of this, this life, these times, your history, your past, this present, our future. We need not sit and contemplate and daydream about the better times that were, but instead look ahead to the times that lay before us. Better than before? Possibly, but what is certain is that we cannot sit in the past corner, duncecap on our head and mourning a fate that has not yet happened. Our life is informed by the past, before our time and in our time, not just what we experienced, but what we longed to experience, what we longed to be. In our twenties, we searched for the equivalent of that life on the road, those subterranean blues which somehow were much more romantic than the reality of those protagonists. That bluemountain dream which eluded everyone became a gray reality as we all reached thirty and beyond, an unavoidable mess of adulthood, where complications became part of everyday life, where Sun Ra becomes Philip Glass becomes Madonna, circa “Ray of Light”, from the simple primitive jazzy beats to a hard technothrob, from the simple cigarette-stub-in-the-mouth-finger-snap to the wiccan-whirling-dervish of that life which has spun out of control. Can you feel it? I’m feelin’ it. Feel it and grasp it and don’t let go, don’t forget that feeling, those feelings, none of them. Think of Dean Moriarty.
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