[MD] Grace beats Karma pt. 1

[John Carl]

"For a time I held a unique position: among the hundreds of isolated
creatures who haunted the streets of lower downtown Denver there was not one
so young as myself.  Of these dreary men who had committed themselves, each
for his own good reason, to the task of finishing their days as pennyless
drunkards, I alone, as the sharer of their way of life, presented a replica
of childhood to which their vision could daily turn, and in being thus
grafted onto them, I became the unnatural son of a few score beaten men."


And thus Neal Cassady starts his story, The First Third.  The first third of
his life, that is.  The one third he completed and could look back on and
explain.

He was a deep and profound thinker, the famous N.C., with piercing insights
into his own life and the life of those around him. It's a shame his only
published work was set in the context of homeless, nameless broken men.  In
its clarity of thought and simple expression his book shows us what we
missed out on when Neal committed himself, for his own good reason, to
finish his days as an impoverished meth addict, alone on those San Miguel
railroad ties.  Just imagine if he'd been able to complete and write his
Second Third, featuring Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs and more.

My friend Bill had met his famous grandad within days of being born.  At the
hospital, they let moms rest a bit longer back then.   Neal stopped by to
visit his oldest child and most troubled relationship, Kathy.   While the
world needs its shaman-heroes,  girls need their dads, especially during
those awkward teens years.   And while we read Kerouac today and can
understand its characters, the action took place in the fifties and early
sixties - the truly Neo Victorian age of American culture.  If you grew up
in that time, with those kind of social conformity pressures and your dad is
some sort of fornicating,  pot smoking, free love experimenting, country
hopping weirdo, you don't care if he's a dynamic world changing shaman hero.
 All you know is he's missing and your pissed.

Fathers, be good to your daughters.  That's my advice.  They have their ways
of revenge.

Kathy got hers by first marrying somebody as opposite from her dad as she
could find and second by ostracising the memory of him from his one and only
grandson.

Of course Neal one -upped her by dying within half a year, but older folks
always get the last word.  It's a rule.

The first inkling Bill had that his grandpa was famous, was getting invited
on the set of a movie featuring Nick Nolte playing his grandpa and Sissy
Spacek playing his grandma.  Bill wasn't as impressed with meeting movie
stars as he was with getting to ride on the train. He did say that were both
real nice but he especially liked her.  They were shooting a scene on a
train, featuring Neal working as a conductor (which he didn't do in real
life, stoopid hollywood) passing some woman reading On the Road sorta softly
smiling to himself.  Ah the vagaries of being anonomously famous.

I saw the movie, Heartbeat.  I thought it kinda sucked.  They were big on
the whole episode with Jack and Neal sharing a wife in shifts while working
for the railroad in shifts, and thinking about it, I guess it would be hard
to explain to a young child what it was that made his grandpa famous - when
what made his grandpa famous  was his degenerate moral behaviour.  I guess
the ostracism of young Bill from stories about his grandpa wasn't just a
revenge issue, was it?


Anyway, Bill has had a life long fascination with trains, and he is
red-green colorblind.  Those are the two main things he has in common with
his famous grandpa.  Or not so famous. Everybody who wrote about Neal used
pseudonyms  and thus you had to be an enthusiast of literature history to
connect the dots and know who this man was.   But everybody's heard of Nick
Nolte.  So that defines famous.

Sigh.  Neal was a hyperkinetic, smoothly skilled juggler of ideas and mind,
his restless spirit making connections in the ether while his bodily grace
always right in the moment of being appropriatly there, and yet suprisingly
there at the same time.  You know what I mean?  I don't either.  I'm just
trusting the descriptions of those who knew him and I can't conjure Nick
Nolte conjuring Neal.   But social fame does not follow intellectual
excellence.  In fact, I think something different occurs.  I think when a
new set of  ideas are so good and so timely that they get almost perfect
social acceptance, that they quickly become what "everybody knows".  And
nobody specific gets credit for what everybody knows, unless they have just
the right PR.

IMO, something similar happens with Pirsig.  Ever since I read him, I see
signs of him all over.  Authors I know have been influenced but they don't
really talk about it.  They don't comment that Quality as an idea is
important.  Everybody knows what Quality is.  So we don't give credit when
it's pointed out.  Even though that pointing was vital.  I go around feeling
like Dan described with an attitude "How can you say you liked this book and
not get a reverent tone in your voice and genuflect?" It's not just a "good
read".  But hey, that's just my subjective judgement I guess.

Most of the following years of my friendship with Bill, he'd include me on
all his projects and jaunts.  For a college class at UC Santa Cruz, he went
and interviewed his aunt and uncle and mom.  We went together, driving in
turns for six days of our own on the road, on the 25th anniversary of Neal's
death, to count the railroad ties out of San Miguel Allende's station and
see where the number (according to legend) that was Neal's last words took
us, and talk to more people who lived there who knew Neal then, including
the Dr. who saw him at the end.  Many stories I've always wanted to share,
and did try at one time.

It was on a long ago and far away experience for me called "Nerdnosh".  It
was an exhiliarating thing then to see the magic created around strangers
just telling their stories.  Magic indeed.  Tell your stories children, was
our mantra.  My wife even contributed a logo for a t shirt and it was all
gonna be big big big someday.  I dropped out when  a personal tragedy in my
life  made me retreat and back off from everything for about a decade - quit
my  web programming job with the biggest marketing company in town and
retreat to the hills and hunker down a bit.  Just be with my family, cut
wood, carry water.   Be a dad for my three remaining daughters, having lost
the littlest one to a drowning accident.  I felt like I had permission to
just hide and so I did.

So... tell your stories children, I've been admonished.  I've been bottled
up a bit, actually.  Since the whole blogosphere has blown up into a world
wide phenomena, I feel like getting back in the saddle again.  Telling my
stories, to my children.  They are out there.  My three remaining daughters.
 They are in their own rooms at the moment.  We will interact, we will
communicate, but I don't tell them my stories.

See, they all have e-mail and face book and that social networking stuff,
and me, who along with Al Gore practically INVENTED the internet, I've been
so out and out reactionary that I haven't even written to them, the ones I
retreated from virtual reality for.  They're there!  I gotta go get them.  I
started by cc'ing that story I wrote last week, about how I met Bill and
thus their mom.  The story, from their point of view of their coming into
being and now the story goes on.  I'll cc them this one as well.    If my
only audience in the whole world is my own daughters and people of quality,
people who get it, the AW GI cult, then I'll have everything a writer could
want.

Now, spacing... pacing... that is the thing. Once a week works for my
particular muse,  ZAMM was to me an amazing thing when I read it aloud
because it granted something profound in its spaces.  Great ideas need a
little room to grow in your brain.  If you try and cram in too much, you get
overload. A true teacher knows this.  So we'd get some metaphysical marvel
followed by some commentary on the passing scenery, and I gotta say, some of
that passing scenery was my favorite parts.  Digression from the great
idea??? Never.  All of Nature is the greatest idea, and we are but passing
expression of what she wants to say through us in the moment.  But I notice
nobody around here ever quotes the parts that are just passing scenery...
containing magic sometimes.