Dreaming of Dean Moriarty.

Since finishing university I've been in a slump, that is, in terms of output of any kind. Creatively, I hadn't written anything since a series of short stories I was planning, which degraded and stagnated out of sheer apathy around 3 years ago. This slump remained until I read the seminal work of Jack Kerouac, the king of the Beat generation: 'On The Road'.

Mentally, this book is extraordinary. The back of my edition quoted Bob Dylan saying: 'It changed my life like it changed everyone elses'; "This", I think I spoke out loud, "This must be an exaggeration. I'm a quarter of the way through and I don't see how anyone can say that reading this is a life changing event." For the next two days I couldn't put it down- I had it with me in the bath, on the bus and everywhere in between. When I finished the book I was blown away. Now, I don't mean to over sell it, for although the prose style is very (very) fresh, it is only kind of imaginative (though contextually it would have blown more minds than mine when first published in the 1950s), and though the content of the book is solid and interesting, I could not pin-point what it was that made me feel so strongly about it upon its ending. It took some time for me to realise that this book is a fucking conductor. It tranfers energy from one thing to another- from the book to your being, and it makes you happy that it did so; you won't even notice until it's too late. The night I finished the book I was literally too energetic to stop moving, too energetic to stop speaking so fast that my thoughts barely kept up with my mouth. It was incredible. I wanted to do it; I wanted to get out into the world and to stop caring about all the bullshit that we've been fed since childhood- 'Consume - Work - Consume - Work - Die', working for the priviledge to continue consumption.

It makes you think.

Following that little revelation (alongside reading 'The Dharma Bums', and Hunter S. Thompson's 'Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas') I hope I've broken the funk I was in, and as of yesterday began writing a project I hope to bear much (cynical) fruit in the future: a treatise on the state of Britain in these troubled times, part Gonzo and part Surrealism I hope it will make enough sense for people to get something out of it, even if they don't enjoy it. As a society we're too caught up in pleasing ourselves (the narcissistic, hedonistic, sedimentary bastards that we've become) to realise that life isn't all enjoyable, that people shouldn't have everything they desire, and that the right way is often the hard way. In times like these anything to wake you out of your funk is something to cherish, and the most I can hope for, ladies and gentlemen, is to be the facilitator of that awakening.