It's difficult for me to listen to Kerouac now

[revolutionR]

I am finding it difficult to listen to Kerouac now
I mean I always loved the jazz flow sound he had
but the world he was writing about no longer exists
the feeling he had for the common American day
of people moving through huge blue skies
or dark alleys where sights and sounds jived
with the great expression of teeming life
where every human was a point of interest
and the future was now, and something was
always happening that made it all holy
those jazzy stars hanging in the immense night

where a poet could get honestly drunk
where the beat was the heart of the city night
and every word the beat writer wrote shined
with the moon and fish swam in the ocean
and trains passed in the huge landscapes of the mind
the wine flowed like the Mississippi river like old man
river, and the road was there to be on it
in this beautiful home of the brave
and here is to the tired and hungry and downtrodden
and the negro musician that gives jazz and blues
so poets can find their voices on city corners
on the railroad tracks in old Mexico and in the Frisco nights
reading in the bars, under those magic glittering stars
and then later ride the bus back
to their pad, but man it's hard to listen to Kerouac
anymore, because that world don't exist anymore, daddyo

[dune]

Nope, doesn't exist. No dollar meals. No $25-a-month cold-water flats in "Frisco." It's absolutely astounding how cheap it was to cross the continent back then. Long gone. Long gone. But the poetry, the jazz, the blues of course... Another story. And the idea of the road, the search...

[revolutionR]

Yes, it was cheaper to live, when I first moved to Santa Cruz Calif. I lived in a little cottage with my musician friend, my rent was 25 a month. Years later living in San Francisco rent 500
for a mother in law apt. Now you can't live in either place , maybe rent a room for 800. It is not just Kerouac's America, the America the hippies lived in don't exist anymore the , yes we knew things were messed up, Vietnam and the police ect. But it was still in some ways an innocent time. I was a hippie but I became a poet because that was the path I took to try to educate myself. I read a lot of books I wasn't just reading poets but my thrust was always poetry. What I mean is the beatniks were kinda digging on the existential thing, I mean they knew that things were messed up but it became a hip thing to know, know what I mean? The hippie thing seems to been in some ways influenced by secret agenda, like where did all the LSD come from all of a sudden.I was a teenager that did not like authority, whatever the reasons for that, I was drinking a lot at 15, 16 and suddenly literally over night the kids were smoking pot and and then LSD was suddenly all around of course a lot had to do with the music
Dylan, Donovan, the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Hendrix, and the Doors and so on. The point is that beatniks were mostly into jazz, they did not have psychedelic rock music, jazz is very conducive to poetry, which is very obvious with Kerouac. Bob Dylan was a kind of exception
he was into poetry, but he applied it to folk music and then rock music. But when I think of Beat writers/poets I think of jazz which was to begin with black music, and so the beatniks
were influenced by the meaning behind that music, which came out of the meaning of slavery.
So aren't we all slaves to the ruling elite, and hasn't that always been the real issue underlying the human condition. So when you listen to Kerouac you hear his praise of the American spirit, the on the road spirit of freedom, of adventure and discovery through exploring the senses with writing about what that freedom is like, because in America we can
do that. But underlying his words is a jazz sense of slavery, a sadness pervades Kerouac that even he wants his freedom at the same time he has a catholic sense that he is a sinner, so he drinks a lot to blank it all out. Jack's venture into Buddhism was a attempt to add another element to his writing that would relieve his catholic conscience, but he was too much a product of the fifties mind set, if it had not been for jazz Kerouac would not been able to pull it off, he did pull it off, but he was seeing his world fade before his eyes, the world of the America he believed in. I'm sure he always had the Kennedy assassination in the back of him mind somewhere. And he was right the America he believed in was fading, but did that America ever really exist, or was it that there were shades of a kind of dream America that were still a possible America, but it was not the America that had been already been taken over by the banksters. So on the road, and then all the hippies going to San Francisco with flowers in their hair, the last days of a dream America. Now with the internet
we are on the cyberspace highway, there is tons of information about what the cabal is trying to do with technology, we can try to ignore it, but its there. There is tons of information about extraterrestrials, for instance Eisenhower met with them, all you have to do is type into the search engine, and go from there. What did Kerouac know, did he ever see a UFO driving across America,
who knows.

[dune]

Good observations. In my big "roadgoing" journey 10-12 years ago, bright light, dust and windblown desert silence were the main things to ride with me, mostly Nevada and California. The soundtrack, when there was one, was heavy on dubbed-out roots reggae echo and pulse-- in my mind's eye I imagined it rippling and ricocheting out across vast open rock surfaces. And that is slavery-born music as well-- in the wake of Jamaican independence in the '60s-'70s, a call to liberation, spiritual reconciliation and re-connection with a homeland culture and identity long stripped away.

I was caretaker at an old placer gold mine in the Mojave desert for awhile. The miner who lived there for 40+ years claimed that he (and two other miners) saw a saucer-shaped UFO one time. He said it came down pretty close to the camp and hovered for awhile (he died in 1996).

Ah, my mind is wandering again.