Member-only story
Hey Jack Kerouac…
A letter to Jack Kerouac on his 96th birthday.
Hey Jack Kerouac…
It’s been too long, too crazy long since we met, so mad man long since you wrote that book, the book, and a crazy dozen more, words pouring from the Underwood like a flood on a land that had never seen a flood and had no idea what to do with them except hold on white knuckle tight and hope for a respectable end and put on our happy sad faces and go to church in the morning —
— and answer to the God we knew was still there, somewhere, watching us.
Sweet ‘57, the kind of sweetness you can grab just once when the chain breaks and you run (man, run!) like the wind through the trees, howling a mad gale in our mad heads, too fast and too far for anyone else to hear or know or understand, our own mad storm blowing our own mad way, down that white dotted (faster, man, faster!) black asphalt strip of that maddest of all mad American roads across the boundless never ending grain waving middle toward the hills that…
