If he was Kerouac, this is the part where he would begin feverishly typing on 120-feet of taped-together sheets of paper, forcefully fed into the protesting, clanging typewriter. Ofcourse, it had to be a noisy process. His fingers had to match his legendary decibel-defying vocal chords. It also had to keep up the momentum of the pendulum, which kept swinging abruptly from the frenzy of pause-less, frenetic living to the slow drag of the obsessively examined stray thought in his head. He always preferred the former, but right now the compass needle aligned grudgingly with the prickly comfort of that proverbial bed of nails. If he cared to listen, maybe he’d even hear Bono drumming his forgotten hum, somewhere along the diminishing creeks that coursed all through his being.
He’d been a little late to this mad, subtly insightful party. The kind of party that you cannot believe you hadn’t heard of and arrived at sooner. And then once you’re there, you wonder how you could have missed all the many references buried everywhere that could have led you to it over the years. So when he got there finally, he took his time. These days, he liked to savour it slowly. He wanted it to live with him and become a companion for a while. Through a phase. Or the flavour of the month.
Bursts of a gurgling stream of consciousness. Maybe he’d shake things up a bit and change it all. Maybe he wouldn’t change a thing. Pages of this brand of spontaneous prose. He paused for a while to ponder if he’d want to scratch out the misogynist undertones that kicked up dust everywhere on old Dean and Paradise’s crazy coast-to-coast criss-cross across the great awning continent. The thought made him chuckle. Damn. If only it wasn’t suddenly fashionable for everyone to be a feminist right now. But stripped of it, the original roll of manuscript still had enough dope to intrigue. Its heady range momentarily breathed life into his steadily aging bones and rapidly graying hair. There were the absurd bits that bewildered him, while he found resonance with some other parts. He raised an incredulous brow in some portions while on other occasions he wondered what the classic fuss was about. It wasn’t really the sex, drugs or automobiles that piqued him. Possibly, it was the notion of a kind of freedom that you were allowed to touch and feel only when you had absolutely nothing else. Or maybe it was just the rare magic of a beautifully strung together sentence, buried in the midst of all the insane antics, that exhilarated him in its simple thought.
Ofcourse, once it was over, he could not help but dig for more. He was terribly curious about the subplots. Each of the scattered very many. What happened to every one of them? Was all of it real? Exaggerated reality? Or plain fiction? Each stumbleupon answered a few questions but always threw up a few more. It also scratched off the sheen a little bit. The myth of the glorifying media raised a sheepish finger as well. But he still hadn’t finished trawling through half of this tiny triangle of history he was trying to pore over.
When he thought about it, everyone wished they could have tiny elements of the ‘great amorous soul’ that Dean Moriarty personified so glibly. Except that his own road tended to throb to a different bop of *Relax. Grow thick skin. Shed in moment of vulnerability. Get hurt. Repeat.* He paused again, this time to tug more forcefully at the mind-numbing twines that threatened to bind him back into the utterly senseless cycle. Instead, he wanted to try his skip down a million roads and paint a million pictures in the sunshine. But this was the space where the colours always seemed to be running off in different directions. Where the hues took forever to find an intersection, only to slowly blot into the art of imperfection. The trouble was not his fear of letting go of his dizzy kicks on the road. The trouble was finding meaning when he was off the road.
“You spend a whole life of non-interference with the wishes of others..and nobody bothers you..and you cut along and make it your own way.. What’s your road, man? — holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?”
-Dean Moriarty/Neal Cassady
my indelible ink 