I lost it.
You lost what?
It. I lost it.
What?
It.
...
I no longer believe the reality my senses give me. I don’t think I was born in America. I don’t think I am my parents’ son. I lost my driver’s license for six months in 2006. I lost my train of thought in this sentence. I no longer believe in the potential unification of all things. I lost it, it swirls around me, but not benevolently, I thought I had IT, I thought I could get IT from people who put out that they had IT, they were just putting it on. I was put on. The depth isn’t achieved in a freewheeling, cigarette-smoking, unconscious explosion of the fingertips, it is thought carefully spread across a canvas and reformed logically. Let yourself go to the chaos, but leave the tape recorder running. Put a spoon in your mouth in your backyard on a sunny afternoon and fall asleep and wake up and consider your vision and create AND THEN revise. Someone once told me that Dalí would access his subconscious this way, or maybe I read it, but I tell people this and I don’t remember why or since when. I lost it, though I don’t know if I ever had it. Or was that what it was to begin with, admitting I didn’t know? What was it that I discovered to begin with that sent me on this great journey of uncovering it after it?
I have inherited a laptop with a broken battery. It is not designed to be forever plugged in but now it has to be—if it becomes unplugged it’s over, like a 20th-century desktop computer, TV, etc. This part that you are reading now was four paragraphs—that now no longer exist—about an internet-based writing movement called alt lit, Alternative Literature abbreviated with no capitals, because it is an internet-based writing movement. I wrote it in the moments before I fell asleep in bed, but I felt like I was typing and not writing, yet I felt satisfied all the same for I was getting it down, and that’s what matters.
The computer slipped from my lap, pulled on its cord, and disconnected itself, instantly shutting down before I thought to save it and that is why you are reading this and not that. Perhaps that is for the best. I got down what I wanted to say and found what I needed to say in the process. The writing was lost, I travelled back south to finish building a bocce court, it turned out the On the Road movie didn't come out for another week anyway. So when I came back I saw it nearly immediately.
The Jack Kerouac character in the movie looks a lot like traveling poet/performer/internet media mogul Steve Roggenbuck. The former refers to himself as Sal Paradise in his work and the latter as steve roggenbuck, without those pretentious and divisive capital letters. They both intentionally misspell, the former because of drug-fueled, life-loving, jazz-inspired urgency, the latter does not take drugs but loves life and...I’m not sure...and I don’t want to say simply the internet...I have trouble categorizing his work, partly because it purposely defies categorization, partly because I don't find it pleasurable nor rewarding to stare at my inherited computer screen and scroll through his gifs, videos, etc. and so I have trouble doing my homework, as it were.
I feel alienated by them both, and my academic background has trained me to feel superior to them, to tend toward traditionally brilliant work, toward Proust, but I only got as far through Swann’s Way when I was 19 as Dean Moriarty did in the On the Road movie, and I wrote a beat-ish story about it called “Portrait of the Artist reading Remembrance of Things Past.” Also I decided not to go back to school; I rejected academia, as roggenbuck did, deciding to “LIVE [HIS] LIEF” and travel and write on his own terms, knowing that he has been privileged enough and doesn’t need anymore white, bourgeois propping before he can create, just as Kerouac decided, just as Sal Paradise decided, just as I decided. I describe it in stuffy academic language, that I have conceived my destiny to depend upon a separation from bourgeois morality and an embrace of freedom. "We only live once, " Sal Paradise explains in the page I randomly turned to. WOLO.
When I typed about steve roggenbuck I hit several points important to what I am trying to say here. I remember them all, as far as I can remember.
On that same train ride from Los Angeles I remembered him, I remembered my friend Jaymee sending me a link to him, that there were other people in the world giving up on the system, writing on their on terms, living on their own terms, and succeeding, thanks to the internet, I could reach out to them and make it happen. It was around this same time I was staying in Carlo Marx's apartment in Berlin and was google hanging out with Jaymee and our friend who has the same name as me and I thought I invented YOLO. "You only live once," I typed as we looked at each other (the sound didn't work)—"YOLO!" (“You laugh out loud” would be "YLOL," if anyone was wondering). When I came back into the country I realized YOLO was a massive internet meme that had nothing to do with me, and was the cornerstone of steve roggenbuck's credo. I tried to get into roggenbuck's videos a few months later in St. Louis, so I could reach out to him and make it happen, but realized it was sunny outside and that I hadn't finished a Hermann Hesse essay that I had been enjoying, so I went outside and finished reading it.
When I got back to California and was staying with my Marylou in Santa Cruz I showed her the young man's videos and she told me to stop them as they were freaking her out. He walks through the woods looking down at his handheld camera intensely ranting about YOLO and other things as increasingly dramatic music ascends in a never-ending crescendo in the background. It's really not my kind of thing. But I believe in the internet as a means of bypassing the corrupt publishing power structures that create a false hierarchy of "genius" and "talent" and leave certain works and voices behind.
But that's not really what this is about because I am not successful, and even if this did reach peoples' eyes they would ask well what is this about, get to the point, find the fucking blue notebook, etc.
I am not really interested in getting to the point. I am not my own ad man trying to sell my book to the public. I am writing something that I hope can only be summarized by the exact words from which it is composed.
Perhaps that’s absurd and lazy. Perhaps I should stop using indefinite articles.
Perhaps.
I thought on that train, putting down On the Road for the hundreth time since I started it, Is steve roggenbuck still out there, traveling, sleeping on sofas, remaining passionate, driven, productive? Because I was done, I was ready to stop. To stop moving, stop taking notes, reading passing landscapes, taking the world in. I was ready to start writing, contextualizing, revising, and I hadn’t thought of him in months, but of course he was still out there, spreading YOLO across these United States, like Johnny Appleseed with a smart phone, and gifs for seeds, photoshop for water, and wifi streaming down like sunlight.
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