A short passage from The Dharma Bums:

Everything was fine with the Zen Lunatics, the nut wagon was too far away to hear us. But there was a wisdom in it all, as you’ll see if you take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of on wheels. You’ll see what I mean, when it begins to appear like everybody in the world is soon going to be thinking the same way and the Zen Lunatics have long joined dust, laughter on their dust lips.

I didn’t listen to Kerouac.

At 44, I find myself in the sterile quiet of the suburbs, in the lamplight of the living room, and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it. In many ways, in most ways, it’s a brand new life: new house, new furniture, new rhythm. There is no real abandon; living on the edge means driving crosstown to the grocery store after the gas tank light comes on. Some days I wake up a mess of desire, itching to burst out of the house and sprint in any direction, every direction, toward Kerouac’s “mad ones,” toward ecstatic new experiences and temporary transcendence; other days, I take two naps. I find ways to lose myself from time to time, but only for a moment, then it’s back to it; back to what, I’m not entirely sure. I’ve spent most of my adult life straddling the line between straight jobs and subversive impulses, never fully committing to one or the other, and it’s led me down a non-linear path that I’m still trying to straighten out. Right now I’m experiencing the most traditional sense of comfort in my adult life and some days I don’t know what to do with it. Is it possible to be a Dharma Bum of the mind with a Costco membership? I doubt it. I don’t know what my midlife crisis will look like, but it’s possible you’re staring at it with me.

Jack Kerouac would have been 100 years old on March 12, 2022. It’s crazy to think he was 54 days younger than the recently deceased Betty White and four months older than my wife Erica’s grandfather, who passed away in 2017 at the age of 95. I would have guessed Kerouac was at least 20 years younger than Grampie, but I never did the math or thought to compare the two, as they took very different paths from their boyhoods in Massachusetts – though Grampie, a faithful but open-minded Catholic like Kerouac, had a fair share of Zen in his soul, too. Betty lived her best life. Ditto Grampie. Maybe Jack did, too, but dying in Florida from alcoholic bloat at 47 sounds like a worst case scenario. Regardless, Kerouac left behind a lasting legacy: wild, inspiring words and, despite a sad end in a St. Petersburg hospital, a wild, inspiring life. He remains a totem in mine.

I recently reread On the Road and The Dharma Bums to see what was there for me in my 40s, partly inspired by a comment my friend Marcus made last summer: how Kerouac’s writing, as a guidebook for life, is great when you’re between the ages of 18 and 22, but not so much after that. Mind you that’s not a word-for-word recollection, and I likely lost something in translation, but the point being, here in our middle age, one of my dear friends had a surprising revisionist perspective on one of my favorite writers. I didn’t dust off my Kerouac to counter Marcus and prove him wrong, but I didn’t want him to be right either, though dating back to the start of our friendship in college – between the ages of 18 and 22 – he’s always been a better reader than I, of books and the human condition.

It’s easy to be cynical about Beat literature. While ripe with romantic notions and, at least for the mid-1900s, bold ideas about living an American life on the fringes, the Beat canon offers little in the way of advice (or sturdy examples) for how to put that life into practice. The Beats’ ideal for living, which requires a sort of cosmic barter system – and a lot of free meals and other handouts – falls apart quickly in the face of real life; it was not sustainable in the straight world of the ’50s and it’s even less sustainable now. Stripped of its symbolism, the road – and I’m talking the Endless Road – is a dead end, and maybe that was Marcus’ point. Even if we fight it, or find ways to hack the system to preserve a sliver of our soul, most of us, ultimately, willingly comply with the capitalist-consumerist construct. Viewed in one light, albeit a pessimistic one, we are little more than modern hunters and gatherers, spending our days sniffing out bargains and canned beans in bulk, and to what end? To consume in order to fuel our work in order to consume more. Kerouac and the Beats were hunters, too, but they pursued a pure, existential form of hedonism – kicks, as Jack liked to call them – and it didn’t matter if they were screaming with glee down the two-lane blacktop or sitting perfectly still in a grassy mountain meadow, the purpose was one and the same. Kerouac spends most of The Dharma Bums with his head in the clouds, figuratively and literally, and while much of the book is beautiful, much of it is nonsense, albeit beautiful nonsense – and halfway through life, I’ve come to the conclusion that the world needs more beautiful nonsense to combat, well, actual nonsense. Lately I’ve had my fill of the latter. I imagine you have, too.

Japhy Ryder’s “rucksack revolution” has yet to happen, and may never will. The hippies were as close as we’ve come, but they ultimately turned out a lot like everyone else – even those who held onto their tie-dye and tried to tell themselves otherwise. Yet Kerouac’s Dharma Bum ethos lives on, forever waiting on the page to be discovered again and again, and it continues to inspire wanderlust, rebellion and new modes of thinking for many who encounter it. The Dharma Bums was instrumental in opening my eyes to non-Christian spirituality and the natural world as church, both of which have been paramount to my personal development; at 23, I moved to the mountains of northern New Hampshire, in part, because of the book. That’s what young people should do – read a book that blows their mind, then move far away from everything they know. You can always move back; if and when you do, you’re usually better off for having left it all behind for a while.

Deep into his crisscross continental adventuring in On the Road, Kerouac, as Sal Paradise, declares, “I didn’t know where all this was leading; I didn’t care.” I’ve only felt that way twice in my life: backpacking in Europe the summer of 2002, and the beginning of my relationship with Erica that fall – I was madly in love from the start and it felt so right it almost felt wrong, to be that deep that quickly. I told my friend Andrew it would last forever or blow up in my face in a matter of months, but either way, I was going to see where the ride took me, and here we are nearly 20 years later and it’s still deepening, still screaming with glee down the two-lane blacktop. Right after Europe, right before Erica, I seriously pondered what life as a purposeful wanderer might look like. Going back to an office after that trip sounded terrible, something akin to a defeat, and the Endless Road was awfully tempting. That kind of life is a radical, extreme commitment, a rough go in the age of capitalism-as-religion, and I don’t know anyone personally who has attempted it; I know plenty of people who live unconventional lives that aren’t wholly governed by consumerism, but no one who lives their life completely free of shiny trappings. My life within the construct, though admittedly flawed, is centered around the pursuit of balance. Splitting the difference between the preservation of the spirit and the pleasures of the flesh. Everything in equal measure. You may as well call balance my religion, because that’s the level of thought, devotion and time I put into it. Buddhism often beckons, as it feels as close as we’ve come to the source of all this existential nonsense, but boil it down to its essence and Buddhism doesn’t leave much space for enjoying one’s earthly life. While I’m certainly intrigued by the cosmic merits of detachment and attaining some sort of floating jellylike nothingness the Buddhists call enlightenment, I also like Paris and beer and records and physical intimacy. But like I said, I’m a mess of desire.

At one time On the Road was a target for the banned-book/anti-thought crowd because of course it was. And it is a dangerous book in a sense, because it can easily steer the reader into the ditch chasing stars. But there were several discoveries on my safe middle-age trip down On the Road that had nothing to do with sex, drugs and jazz. One of which was work. I’ve never been averse to it – I inherited from my parents a Midwestern work ethic that I’ve applied to every meaningful thing in my life – and neither was Kerouac. When he isn’t in motion, Sal Paradise is often on the clock – sometimes under the table, sometimes in a proper job – making just enough scratch to fill his wallet and fuel the next adventure. Sal and Dean even talk of one day settling down somewhere and finding houses on the same street. I didn’t catch that the first few times around, the freedom to choose left, choose right or choose to stay put, but on your own terms outside of bureaucratic or biblical absolutes – I like movement, but I’ll admit I like sitting still, too. Yet, I can’t allow myself to get comfortable here. I don’t know anyone who gets inspired by comfort, and what’s a life without inspiration?

The Ohio Turnpike cuts right through Hudson east to west. It’s close to our house, and I frequently run over and under it on one of my jogging routes. The rare times I’ve driven the turnpike since we moved here, it’s only been for short trips a few exits up the road, and it always feels incomplete when I reach the ramp, like I’m turning around to grab my wallet I left on the counter. Turnpike travel should be measured in hours and days, in hundreds if not thousands of miles, and peering down the I-80 corridor on my runs, I think about all that road stretching toward the coasts and every beautiful thing in between across “the groaning continent,” as Kerouac calls it in On the Road, and I temper my urge to steal the keys and drive somewhere, anywhere, toward temporary abandon in the death throes of the American Dream. I can look at my daily surroundings and alternately declare that I want all of this and none of this, and the infinite alluring turnpike lies there in wait, a visual cue to keep my edge, a reminder to stiff-arm complacency and avoid surrender to the squeaky-clean suffocating sham of suburban life.

Maybe I listened to Kerouac after all.

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