Further appreciation …

… “On the Road,” Again. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… I blew the dust off a copy of On the Road that had been moldering on the shelf for the last 40 years, breathed deeply of the comforting old paperback fragrance, and dived in. Two hours later, by the time Sal Paradise (a.k.a. Jack) was sprawled out in a Denver park with a bunch of hobos, listening to the trains howling in the mountains, I was hooked again, much as I had been at the tender age of 15, when I last read the novel. Only now, I had driven, hitchhiked, and taken bus trips coast to coast, ridden a freight train from Texas to Los Angeles, drugged, drank, banged, etc. — in fact, done just about everything Kerouac described in prose that was riveting to a ripely rebellious teenage mind.