Jack Kerouac - Blog Posts

“It’s complicated.”

“Perfect. I love complicated.”

- Kill Your Darlings, 2013

I smoke marijuana every chance I get.

I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.

When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.

My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble. -Ginsberg

here’s all

these Millbrae and San Carlos neat-necktied producers and

commuters of America and Steel civilization rushing by with San

Francisco Chronicles and green Call-Bulletins not even enough

time to be disdainful, they’ve got to catch 130, 132, 134, 136 all

the way up to 146 till the time of evening supper in homes of the

railroad earth when high in the sky the magic stars ride above

the following hotshot freight trains--it’s all in California, it’s all a

sea, I swim out of it in afternoons of sun hot meditation in my

jeans with head on handkerchief on brakeman’s lantern or (if not

working) on book, I look up at blue sky of perfect lostpurity and

feel the warp of wood of old America beneath me - Ole jack

TWO KINGS

“I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop the machine of thinking and enjoying what they call living, I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds.”

— Jack Kerouac

“I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.”

— Jack Kerouac

How to Meditate by Jack Kerouac

“-lights out-  fall, hands a-clasped, into instantaneous ecstasy like a shot of heroin or morphine, the gland inside of my brain discharging the good glad fluid (Holy Fluid) as I hap-down and hold all my body parts down to a deadstop trance-Healing all my sicknesses-erasing all-not even the shred of a ‘I-hope-you’ or a Loony Balloon left in it, but the mind blank, serene, thoughtless. When a thought comes a-springing from afar with its held- forth figure of image, you spoof it out, you spuff it off, you fake it, and it fades, and thought never comes-and with joy you realize for the first time ‘thinking’s just like not thinking- So I don’t have to think any more’”

This poem displays Kerouac’s practices with Zen Buddhism and meditating.

Beat doesn't mean tired or bushed, so much as it means beato, the Italian for beatific; to be in a state of beatitude, like St. Francis, trying to love all life, trying to be utterly sincere with everyone, practicing endurance, kindness, cultivating joy of the heart. How can this be done in our mad modern world of multiplicities and millions? By practicing a little solitude, going off by yourself once in a while to store up that most precious of golds: the vibrations of sincerity.

— Jack Kerouac, Good Blonde & Others (Grey Fox Press, January 1, 1993) (via Whiskey River)

I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, established-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginningless emptiness. Pitiful forms of ignorance.

'On the Road' by Jack Kerouac 

What is the feeling when you're driving away from people, and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.

'On the Road' by Jack Kerouac