Roads

On the Road: All that noise, all that profanity locked in one quiet mind in a tiny silent room, thoroughly engaged and unbeatable for the moment. "A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world."
I haven’t read On The Road to the point where I fell comfortable talking themes and discussing the intricacies of characters’ personalities and what makes them tick and how that means one thing or another. In fact I might repost this if I don’t get to lazy. There’s a lot to say about a book that defined a generation, even if it doesn’t mention much explicitly. I will have to read it again, and travel all the roads to all the random unfathomable places searching for whatever they didn’t find. Hopefully not in this terrible mock-Kerouac prose that I’m writing in because I can’t get The Road out of my head. For that I apologize. No one should try to impersonate this man.
God what a writer. God what truth is in every weird passage of strange imagery that newly interprets the American Experience from his distinct tinted vantage point. He seems to me to be one of those authors that write incredibly true things. He is authentic and that is part of why he is great, though he doesn’t claim to be anybody or represent anything. He just travels with the reader, examining life from the only point of view that can be justifiably called real anymore: close, personal, drunk, with a conscious bias that tries to unwrap itself from his experience but whose presence makes the story human, relatable, and representative of the American soul torn between wonderment and disillusion. I may be spouting rambling bullshit right now, but I don’t think so.
I didn’t choose the quote above because it’s the best one, or the most characteristically Kerouac, which it may be because I’ve only read a little. I don’t know. But something about this book makes me think about all the roads I’ve traveled, the places that were and are to me currently, and makes me question how real they or anything else in this life is. Do I have a home? Did somebody just make that whole concept up? Do I have any concrete certainty outside of immediate experience? Am I safe and should I be comfortable?…or is all just passing scenery for my life as a tourist (or a traveler), like a pretty girl/ boy you want to talk to who always happens to be running late in the opposite direction.
Maybe you’ll catch them one day, or maybe that was it. Maybe there’s some kind of hand that knows how and where to move things that were meant to be. I can’t tell sometimes—am I passing the world by, or is it moving in the opposite direction away from me? My feet answer because I go forward one step at a time