Man, Desolation Angels is getting under my skin. These days I just want to grab a backpack and walk outside and keep on walking and scour the earth in search of adventure and enlightenment. There is Kerouac in me. That perpetual outsider status. The oddball-goofball friends that somehow seem to be better anchored in this world (“Julien,” “Irwin”) yet still retain alien-like qualities, as if the old bum Kerouac was the last real human among us. His time and place differ. In Jack’s books, you meet an old and content Henry Miller and an old and content Salvadore Dali, and Jack is the one wandering around while they eat their grapefruits and drink their wine and seem just fine with everything, the great struggle of adjusting to life, the artist’s struggle, digested and defecated from their bowels in the form of paintings and writings and renown. But Kerouac never got there. His alcoholism killed him. Or he killed himself. What do you do when so many of your heroes had miserable endings?
north! 