Genius

Jack Kerouac is my hero. I am currently reading his book Visions of Cody, and though not quite as good as On the Road or The Dharma Bums, it is still excellent. Kerouac is the ultimate bad-ass. He went to an Ivy League school on a football scholarship (Columbia), but then dropped out, joined the Merchant Marines, became an alcoholic and wandered across the US with his other Ivy League dropout friends. His depressing, yet strangely appealing recollections became the backdrop for his books, travel logs of semi-insane, alcoholic, disaffected young people. Here is an excerpt:

"These glass windows refract night too for now I see nothing but the rich dim recollections of what at dusk was a Rembrandt barrel of ale in a Dublin saloon when Joyce was young, the hint so vague it's like people in a dark room wearing phosphorescent rims and all involved in some drama so tragic that the light of day can't shine on it - only the inward light of night - "A holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead so that they may be removed from sin" - from Maccabees. The priest speaking: now he quotes MacArthur Old Soldier crap - mixing theological verities with today's headlines, blah, blah, I now go out, tired, into my own thoughts and have no place to go but find my road."