“Bored” to be Cassady?

Posted at December 23, 2010

Cassady with Kerouac

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…..

Howl, Allen Ginsberg

Recently re-read Jack Kerouac’s beat masterpiece, On the Road, for the umpteenth time. I never get bored reading that book and imagining myself in the front seat with Dean Moriarty, balling the jack over ribbons of lonely highway in search of something uniquely human. Moriarty, of course, was Kerouac’s literary personification of a real person named Neal Cassady. Cassady, of beatnik fame. Cassady, the chofer who always drove “Further.” Cassady, who inspired Ginsberg’s ”Howl.” “Cowboy Neal,” who was always at the wheel, of the bus to never-ever-land. You know there are certain emotionally-depraved words in the English vocabulary that I am just not that fond of (don’t much like their Spanish counterparts either). One of those words is “bored” (or, in Spanish, “aburrido”). Why? To me to say that you are bored means you are relinquishing your own responsibility to live an interesting life. Rather, what you are doing, basically, is demanding that life entertain you and that, at least in the moment, it is just not living up to its responsibility. So you are just, well, “bored.” Was Neal Cassady ever bored? I doubt it. He was always too busy drinking (or drugging) to the dregs, vomiting in the gutter, rising to scale mountains of ecstatic experience and then plunging to depths of romantic despair, only to live to repeat the cycle once more. Destructive, well, yes, but bored, hell no! He would have none of that. Life was just too damn interesting to allow such a depressed and defeated word to enter into the vocabularly of his existential existence. To be bored is to be dead, and Cassady refused to succomb until he counted that last railroad tie. What’s my point in this eve of Christmas 2010 post? Get up off your ass and wipe the very idea of being “bored” from your cloudy window “pain” of consciousness. Do something. Think something. Be someone. But, for crying out loud, don’t be BORED.

Get Up, Get On
don’t hesitate
cause if you do…
you’ll surely meet your fate.

Take a clue from
Cassady’s jive
and don’t be bored…
be ALIVE!

Stumbled upon this rare clip of Cassady with Allen Ginsberg, ranting about the evils of militarism, or communism, or some ism (who the hell knows). Just dig that gone cat who couldn’t sit still long enough to be bored. Go, Cassady, Go!! and away he went….