The Mind Wanders While on Vacation

Jack Kerouac

I spent the first few days at our tiny, summer cabin reading beat generation poet Jack Kerouac's On the Road, a fictionalized biography of his travels to experience America in the late 1940's.
Here's a pseudo-tongue-in-cheek response to Kerouac's thoughts after reading his novel.

OFF THE ROAD

Jack Kerouac,

poet and chronicler of the long-lost

Beat generation,

lived on the road

because writers need life experience

to write. 

He relished his tales of

drinking and

hitchhiking

and breaking bread with people as diverse as

Nebraska farmers

and L.A. hipsters

while figuring out from where

his next dollar would come

or where

he (or with whom he) would spend the night.

Then he wrote about it.

Upper Springstead Lake near Mercer, WI

I sit here next to the lake--

sun warming my shoulders,

breeze gently stroking my hair--

swatting the occasional deerfly

that tries to nip my pasty, white legs;

the hummingbirds squeaking and dancing through the hemlocks;

the drone of an outboard motor steering

an aluminum boat to a 

(hopefully) more productive spot to fish.

The eagle scritches in the distance.

The water whispers in rhythm against the dock

(which, season-by-season, sags ever lower into 

the lake).

I'm not drunk.

I don't hitchhike.

Right now, the only ones with whom I'm breaking bread

(actually English muffins)

are my wife and our

shelter-rescue cat named Bluebell.

But this still counts as life experience,

right?