Last Day in SLO

In honor of my imminent departure, as I start my drive north into Oregon, I'd like to quote a bit from a book I picked up last night, Jack Kerouac's Lonesome Traveller (1960). He writes about traveling in CA, Mexico, NY, Morocco, Paris, and London during the Fifties, including his time as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak. I'd forgotten just how fine a writer ol' Jack could be... I found out recently that his mentor, Mark Van Doren, was also one of my mother's.

Here's a passage from the introduction:

"SUMMARY OF PRINCIPAL OCCUPATIONS AND/OR JOBS: 

Everything: Let's elucidate: scullion on ships, gas station attendant, deckhand on ships, newspaper sportswriter (Lowell Sun), railroad brakeman, script synopsizer for 20th Century Fox in N.Y., soda jerk, railroad yardclerk, also railroad baggagehandler, cottonpicker, assistant furniture mover, sheet metal apprentice on the Pentagon in 1942, forest service fire lookout 1956, construction laborer (1941).

PLEASE GIVE A BRIEF RESUME OF YOUR LIFE

...Had own mind. - Am known as "madman bum and angel" with "naked endless head" of "prose." - Also a verse poet, Mexico City Blues (Grove, 1959). - Always considered writing my duty on earth. Also the preachment of universal kindness, which hysterical critics have failed to notice beneath frenetic activity of my true-story novels about the "beat" generation. - Am actually not "beat" but strange solitary crazy Catholic mystic...

     Final plans: hermitage in the woods, quiet writing of old age, mellow hopes of Paradise (which comes to everybody anyway)...

     Favorite complaint about contemporary world: the facetiousness of "respectable" people...who, because not taking anything seriously, are destroying old human feelings older than Time Magazine...Dave Garroways laughing at white doves... "