The End of the Road- Bixby Canyon.

It was almost exactly 50 years ago that Jack Kerouac left his mother’s house on the East coast and took a luxury liner to San Francisco to dry out. DTs were shaking his body and he was seeing ghosts.

He was headed for Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s cabin in Bixby Cabin. Beautiful location near the ocean, and most importantly, no booze. Isolation. Just Jack and his muse. It was a good plan.

First, he had to stop off in San Francisco and pull a two-week drunk.

This batch of blog posts doesn’t have anything at all to do with Internet Marketing. It does have a lot to do with who I am, and if you want to play along, with who you are.

One of the questions that I’ve always played with is “what are people for?” There’s got to be a reason for us to be on this spinning ball. I don’t think there’s an answer to the question, by the way, but I think that the process of trying to answer it is valuable.

We don’t know.

We achieve various levels of consciousness pretty much at random, look around, and make choices on how to spend the short, precious time on the globe based on the information we’re able to glean from our surroundings. One clue is to look at how other people spend their time. There are people who live in the same town they were born in, never leave, and die there. I’ve met these people. I lived in a town about an hour North of Houston. When I was young, I thought Houston was just about the coolest place in the world. They had shopping malls and restaurants and nightclubs where great musicians would play. I remember trying to engage the enthusiasm of one of my parents’ friends on the subject and their response was, “I ain’t lost nothin’ in Houston.”

So, their entire inventory of ways to engage the planet and experience it consisted of the information they could get from their home town. And TV, of course, but I’ve recently learned that you can’t trust anything you see on TV. Even the news is complete fiction. There’s only one way to get the facts about what’s going on in the world, and see all the various ways there are to live in it. Go see for yourself.

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Jack Kerouac was my beacon on this trip. The light in the distance. Buddha knows that I don’t want to live like Jack did. He was miserable most of the time, and when he wasn’t miserable he was out of his mind on cheap drugs and sweet wine. But when he was young, he, pretty much by accident, invented a writing style by copying his friend Neal’s conversational style. Thus, “On the Road” was born. What a huge force that was. Probably changed more lives than the Beatles’ appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show.

You wouldn’t have had Ginsberg’s “Howl” without Jack’s influence. Without Ginsberg, think of the writers we wouldn’t have in our Libraries. It’s scary.

Speaking of scary, we stood on the rocks next to Bixby bridge and looked down on the canyon where Jack wrote “Sea.” Jack was scared of the ocean. He was scared of the dark. Jack lasted about two weeks at the cabin.

At night, he’d take his railroad lantern and walk down under the bridge. Then he’d turn the lantern off and transcribe what the sea was saying in the dark. It made for a great poem, but… if you look out at the ocean from under the bridge, it looks like it’s higher than you are. It could roll right over you. If your mind is as pickled as Jack’s was, this could be a problem. Might happen. Better get outta here.

At 38, Jack was at the height of his success hating it. Hippies came looking for him expecting to find the lean, sharp hero of “On the Road.” What they found was an old drunk who looked 60. They brought him booze and stole his first-editions. He loathed himself- massive childhood trauma and a very odd relationship with his mother. A good therapist could’a helped, but real men didn’t go to therapists and therapists were way too quick on the draw with their thorazine, electro-shock therapy and lobotomies. Ask Ginsberg.

Anyway, Jack made it two weeks. His body was shaking with the cold-turkey of it all. He put the food out for the critters and walked the dirt road up the canyon to the road. No sweat. He’d just hitch-hike back to San Francisco.

The author of “On the Road,” the master of the lightning thumb, stood on the side of the road for 14 hours and couldn’t hitch a ride. Nobody wanted to pick him up. He looked awful. They were on vacation. Times had changed. Hitching in the 30’s and 40’s was just another way to get around. Not any more. Finally, he got a lift to the bus station and took the bus to San Francisco where he proceeded to crawl back in his alcohol hole, went home to his mother and seriously went about the business of drinking himself to death.

But, he kept writing. One of the books was called “Big Sur,” and it’s about his time at the cabin. I don’t know that I found the cabin, but I found the place where he wrote “Sea,” and I walked the dirt road in and out of the canyon. I watched the fog roll in from the ocean and cradle the mountains. To me, it was pleasant, but I’ve seen through the cracks enough to know that under the right conditions, the whole thing could get ominous and threatening. No way am I judging Jack. I just wanted to see, hear and feel what he did. We walked into the canyon, looking toward the sea and then away from the sea.

This blog post started out talking about the various ways there are to live a life. I don’t want to live mine like Jack did. But I’m grateful to him for living his- delirium tremens, heartbreak, early death and all. That may be a very effective way of creating great literature. It’s popular- most of the great writers- Shakespeare, Hemingway, you name it- were horrific drinkers and sacrificed their health for their art in one way or the other.

Like I said, that’s one way to do it.

I met a waitress a couple of nights ago who has worked in the same gorgeous historic restaurant for twenty years. She hasn’t written any literature that I’m aware of, but she’s one of the happiest people I know. And, the Big Sur Inn is one of the most beautiful places on the planet, so I can’t really fault her decision.

That’s another way to do it.

And, ultimately, I don’t think there’s a right or a wrong. I do think it’s a tragedy to not realize that it’s a choice. For me to make the best choices I can, I’m going to keep exploring the various ways that people choose to live by continuing my trip south on the Pacific Coast Highway. Stay tuned.

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