It's been a rough couple of days at the Shelter, what with a couple of new ladies coming in, a girl of about 20, 4 months pregnant, with a broken arm, fresh out of prison, and a black girl, also quite young, whose attitude can only be described as abysmal. Between them, they've started at least three fights that I know of, and caused Staff to cancel Smoke Break and close the TV Room, thus depriving the inmates of two out of three of their last allowable addictions, making everyone even more stressed, and so on.
I don't smoke, and have little use for watching BET. Instead, I've been reading some Jack Kerouac.
I think that something has been lost over the past fifty years...I can imagine him trying to sell the idea of "On the Road" to any current publisher...
In order to make the guy current, he'd have to be a vegetarian widowed father of two, who criscrosses America in a retrofitted Airstream trailer. Instead of his drinking and now and then drug use, he'd be "recovering"...the wild parties of "Road" would be replaced by a heartwarming scene when he talks Neal Cassidy into going to an A.A. meeting where Jack confesses his trauma at losing his brother at an early age. The casual sex would be replaced with an episode when he picks up a young girl hitching and, after listening to her girl problems, counsels her to have safe sex...with someone her own age. Burroughs would be doing quite well, on atypical antipsychotics and methadone...he's even writing a newsletter for his fellow dual-diagnosed sufferers at his sober house! Just about the only people whose lifestyles would pass muster are Allen Ginsberg (married to Peter Orlovsky) and Gary Snyder (borrowed from "Dharma Bums" and minus the Yabyum orgies). Mardou Fox (from The Subterraneans) and Tristessa will get a thorough sanitizing, as positive Women of Color role models for the daughter, and to give Jack a possibility of getting married again, but those are details. Pork and beans? in a can? Buried in a waste pit in the woods? Hopping a freight train? Not our Jack...
Coming up, Puff the Magic Dragon, The Movie, complete with fart jokes, strong little-girl character, love theme, and uplifting moral message...