The Wrong Paths We Take

 written 2003

I was in the bathroom and I started Fred Setterberg’s The Road Taken and I felt the twinge of nostalgic time traveling he was rendering on the page and for a moment I wished I could jump in the conversation with my similarly rustic road reminisces. However, once I was done in the bathroom, I wondered whether or not, upon further reading, I was being suckered into denying my past like many post- Sixties tomes seem to blather on about by wishing I had become a Christian, a Hindu or a scientologist, or a businessman, or an earnest entrepreneur, or by wishing I hadn’t wasted my time fucking around with my instincts and had gone on to get my doctorate or even my masters in something beside Anthropology, or wished on myself any other of the jobs my generation finally succumbed to in the name of “survival,” meaning accepting the prevalent middle class Darwinism, giving up entirely and guiltily on the one and only time I cared what happened to anything besides myself.

Right now, after listening to the fear ridden post-9/11 American pleas for order the only thing I hear about the Sixties is that the troops didn’t get any respect and we could have won that war too if we had only persevered with more surges and better use of the air force. The making up of History is the perfect pre-apocalyptic hobby.

It took me this long to realize that I could never have been such an anti-capitalist and yet, become an economist like the ones who become apologists for every mistake and devastating decision major banks and corporations create through the philosophical likes of Ayn Rand whose philosophy is much closer to running this country than Jack Kerouac ever was.

That’s one thing I can say about Kerouac which no historian can deny, he didn’t have “political” aspirations. I remember seeing him on the Steve Allen Show, and he was drunk and sullen, basically inarticulate.

We writers chronicle, we don’t lead. We aren’t responsible for who picks up on our wordsmithing. Kerouac chronicled not only what every middle-class white boy in that period fantasied about what they really wanted to do and thought they should do, but what every itinerant farm worker or real dharma bum looking for work felt as they passed through this land in the post-industrial society. Kerouac’s work chronicled the illiterate, semi-literate or inarticulate who were out of work, out of sorts, who crisscrossed this country and helped make it whatever it is today, both good and bad. He also introduced the post- war generation to the possibilities of “nihilism” as a way of life.

America doesn’t appreciate its writers that poke at the downside of the american dream. It’s ironic that Steinbeck was practically stoned in Salinas and now he has a monument there.

I love the way America treats its story tellers.

Anyway, I’m way ahead of myself or at least my reading of The Road Taken.

I’ll let you know what happens. Don’t sit on the edge of your seats though, the long ride on the wrong path is hell on your back.