IN WHICH THE AUTHOR WRITES IN THE BLUE NOTEBOOK

I am in the twin bed of my college dormitory, alone, listening to a CD at a respectful volume. In my lap is the blue notebook in which I write this. I came to, as they say, sitting upright like this with the notebook in my lap and the pen in my hand. After flipping through the used pages—homework assignments, notes, bits of contextless writing, doodles—I have come to the following conclusion: this is the moment I wrote a several-page long diatribe distancing myself intellectually from the work of Jack Kerouac. This is the writing I would look for years later as I tried to formulate a parallelism between the development of myself and my work with that of Kerouac and his writing, each culminating in a way with the production and release of the long-awaited On the Road film in 2012. 

The parallelism might look something like this:

1940s-60s 2000s-present

Kerouac’s life <--->   My life

^                              ^

l                    X                        l

v                             v

Kerouac’s work        <---> My work

Of course the primary means by which I am able to interact with Kerouac’s life is his work so the relationship between his life and mine is fairly imaginary, but the mythology of a writer such as him—as primarily constructed by himself in his work—persists by this notion that his work leads to his life just as his life (which provides him with the content for his writing and the verve by which to express it) leads to his work, a continuum exists that less interesting authors break, segregating the life lived from the story told, a segregation, I would be quick to point out at the time, which is now, that is illusory.

This was 2005. September, maybe October. I had no phone or computer. No calendar. I imagine I knew what day it was because it followed the one that preceded it.

I don’t remember writing in my bed apart from that one instance. Perhaps this moment in which I am sitting right now was a farewell to that era of my life. I would type on computers first and take out that first handwritten step. I would embrace academia and throw out sloppy spontaneous prose. Above all I would create hyper-self-aware critiques on expired clichés, weak writing’s creations of supposed profundity, the conventions of so-called meaningful writing. The only sincere writing that would exist for me would describe myself rejecting sincere writing. I would respect literature but live on kitsch. I don’t know exactly what I was thinking because I am here as myself from January 17, 2014, years later, a different person, thinking, you are fulfilling a role you cast for yourself a decade ago. you ignore how you have changed, how you are changing, the constant process by which you avoid the inevitable. In all of the stories you are told to follow your heart, be true to yourself, and the reluctant writer triumphantly begins writing, writes successfully by the end. A crowd cheers in the film adaptation. your story is told and it won’t get any better. you’re trapped in your 11th-grade delusions. you refuse to grow up. You have let a teenager you knew ten years ago define you. Express yourself and unlock happiness. if you want to be a writer then write a story people want to hear. It doesn’t matter what other people think, be yourself. Be true to yourself. Be proud of yourself. the supposed meaning you have constructed of your own life and work is a series of coincidences that your mind pieced together in moments of hysteria or some other altered state. It will all make sense in the end. it is all for naught. You’ve let your future pass you by.

The Kerouac diatribe I remember writing is inconsequential. I felt he muddled my project with his misogynist tropes and adolescent worldview, equation of substances with adventure, boundary-pushing, creativity. The work suffers by the means by which it is created, by which its creation is defined. I felt personally insulted that if I wanted deliberately to live in a way that I thought would yield experiences that I could turn into writing, that I could write in the midst of these experiences, have the experience bleed into the writing, a kind of conceptual art project, it would reek of Kerouac. I wrote about it for pages. Some lines, I’m sure, may have been good, but it was better that they were lost forever, that, instead, this is what is written, and that this is all that will be read. I’ve made sure of that now, that nine years later I will find this page and type it on a laptop as part of my great book about that part of my life I spent on the road or whatever.