When I get to the end of my barman work week, I take myself out for a walk.  I cross the bridge past the mosque and walk down a grassy hill beneath a grove, down past the embassy residences and into the forests of Rock Creek Park.  It's cooler down here, and it feels like stepping back in time.

Bullied by all the vanities and the drinkers, having busted my ass to make it happen, ends of weeks spent exhausted, prone on the couch weary and hungover from the inevitably of joining in with what you can't beat, I go for my walk, and think sometimes what this city would be like if the human activity would recede and the forest take her back.  I sit on rocks overlooking the stream, as if dumbfounded by the week  and how far it took me away from a considered life of letters, taking shelter in the jungly majesty of nature and man's basic loneliness in the world.  I like it by the stream, balanced on rocks, comfortable furniture.

I think of Kerouac sometimes, poor old ruined Kerouac, but before all that his gentle life he wanted away from the crazy excitements he chronicled in order to find a place in the economic world, the time in North Carolina, living with his sister, reading and thinking Buddhist thoughts and being, as he put it, St. Jack of the Dogs.  And I think of the things that he was susceptible to.  Poor old unemployable Kerouac who never the less worked quite hard and a long time at the very dangerous job of being a railroad brakeman.

Inevitably I am dragged back to the city, called by hunger, to go amongst all the people who are happy with the city and themselves on a warm moonlit Thursday night, in synch with the world.  Places are crowded.  I go sit on a park bench and write the last of my thoughts of the day before going to the tea house just before it closes to order carry-out, then going home to my cat who has cancer.


Poor Kerouac, who fell into the role of a kind of priest father accompanying all the wayward, conducting the great body of mythos in his work, not unlike Whitman, falling into the role because of his literary and spiritual interests, leaving him amongst the outsiders of society looking unconsciously for their own mythic understandings...  the unfortunate side-effects being the excesses, the unnecessary comforts of the lost, ultimately his own slow but massive alcoholism...  clear in his moments as when he wrote, "I think of Dean Moriarty... I think of Dean Moriarty," finding a way to express things in the most final way we humans have, in the ancient but abiding myths of passage as a Joseph Campbell would present to us in lieu of their active presence in our lives today.

Whitman attended the sick, the wounded, the grievously wounded, losers in the economic battle of the great civil war, therein finding a way to express the ideals of Christianity.   So, too, would Kerouac, almost  a hundred years later, express forms of spiritual ideal in the company of economic losers and outcasts, finding himself a part of them.  Twain himself--a writer can hardly avoid it--would as well fall in with entertainingly covering the world of outsiders on journeys encountering the hypocrisies of accepted society as if they were the modern equivalent of the trials of Odysseus, as well bringing us a sense of myth and ritual.  They are three writers essential to American Literature.