Seventy-eight years ago, a 25-year-old kid with a notebook and a bad case of existential itch packed himself into a car headed straight for the raw, writhing guts of America.  That kid was Jack Kerouac, and what he did that summer wasn’t just a road trip.  It was an existential tantrum dressed up as adventure – a booze-drenched fever dream of freedom with jazz riffs for punctuation and a reckless sprint toward something like divinity.  Or maybe the whole thing was just a desperate stab at drowning out the noise in his own head.  Either way, what came out the other end was On the Road, a book more combustible than a jerrycan of gas in a bonfire.

Picture it, dear reader.  July heat, just like the kind baking wherever you are right now in the northern hemisphere.  The kind of heat that makes the pavement shimmer, as if the road isn’t  just something to be traveled but something alive and pissed off, daring you to drive faster.  Kerouac had the windows rolled all the way down, likely because the car was either without A/C or it was simply harder to breathe in when the windows were shut.  And there he was, pinballing across the country with the verve – and perhaps hygiene – of a man who needed this drive not just to live but to avoid imploding.  There’s probably a word for the energy he was chasing, but it’s not in English.  It’s a headspace between euphoria and collapse, where everything burns brighter and breaks harder.

And the kid?  He scribbled through it.  Through the truck stops and motel ashtrays, through the miles of asphalt stretching out ahead like some cosmic dare.  Jazz on the radio, junkie poets for company, and God knows what in the flask riding shotgun.  Kerouac wrote like a man possessed – not by demons, but by something much scarier: hope.  Not the easy Hallmark variety, but the bone-deep, terrifying kind that makes you wonder if somewhere, out there, there’s a way to fill whatever black hope keeps chewing through your insides.

When On the Road his shelves in 1957, it was a lit match in a room full of dynamite.  Suddenly, every Poor Bastard in America who’d been staring down the barrel of nine-to-five mediocrity had permission to trash the manual.  This wasn’t about winning; it was about searching.  About saying “fuck it” to the scripts we’re handed and chasing the kind of truth that burns like whiskey going down.

Many made the mistake of calling it romantic.  But the road isn’t about romance – it’s about friction.  [The same could be said about sex, of course.]  The kind of friction that leaves you scorched and skinned and shaking but alive in a way you forgot you could be.  Kerouac wasn’t glorifying anything.  He was giving us the messy, bloody glory of coming undone – and maybe finding God in the process.  Although, spoiler alert, it probably wasn’t the God you’re thinking of.

Fast forward to right now.  July 17, 2025.  Do the math, dear reader.  You’re not too old, too broke, or too goddamn civilized to take your own swing at this.  You won’t be Kerouac – good.  He already did it, and you wouldn’t survive on the kind of coffee and amphetamines that fueled him anyway.  But was you can do is crack open a notebook, climb into whatever vehicle you’ve got, and chase something that’ll look different from freedom but feel just as dangerous.

And maybe when you’re out there burning rubber through the sticky American night, you’ll catch a little of the jazzed-up chaos Kerouac found.  And I’ll be out there with you, chasing the same thing.  Just make sure when you catch it, write it down.

N.P.: “I Gotcha” – Eleven Triple Two, Ghostwriter