Regarding my crush on Jack Kerouac

"...because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' " -from "On the Road"

I want to put Jack Kerouac in a box. One that will fit in my pocket. I want to fold him up, sew him shut with his own long strings of sentences and fit him into a locket, maybe one shaped like a heart and worn always around my neck, the metal warmed from resting forever on my chest.

I want to ring around his rosies, stuff my pockets full of his poems and the places where he once breathed so deeply he couldn't help but write about it. I want to stick Denver to my skin, whirling and drunk like he saw it, and soak Frisco into my hair, smoke-scented and sprawling.

I want the long nights spent talking-- the words left out in his mad frenzy to get where he was going, to see what happens next. I want to hit the pause button and just settle into a moment, wrapping "On the Road" around me and, like a rush of wild madness, feel it seep into me, sinking into my eyes and ears, nose and mouth.

I want to live this, breathing wild and frantic beside Sal and Kerouac and Dean Moriarty and Carlo Marx and Remi and Eddie and Eddie's Girl and Major and Rita and everyone who ever took up a space similar to Kerouac's.

And so I guess I should admit it, now. I guess I should mention that I have a big, fat, juicy crush on Jack Kerouac. On him and his writing and his characters and his eventual, inevitable misery. Maybe I'm a couple of decades too late, but that boy is just the right amount of mad for me, for life, for being a writer.

The way he weaves his words, like he just closed his eyes and put himself back there, back to that second where everything was happening, and he just wrote it, typed the hell out of it, cigarette burning, eyes still closed, writing his life.

I want to be there, to see the expression on his face when he buries himself in his writing. I want to watch the way his fingers cramp and his shoulders clench and his back aches, the way the cigarette ashes float across the type-writer keys. I want to see the crease in his forehead while he crouches, taping together all those pieces of paper so he can just go and go and write and never stop. I want to witness his genius exploding across the page.

Perhaps I'm being a bit too dramatic. But what you have to understand is, I love him. I love Jack Kerouac. The kind of love where it is hard to find fault, the kind of love where all you can do is exist in awe, rapt and attentive, waiting for the next great thing he'll say, think, write, mumble.

Which is why I am too late. I was born too late to soak up the actual man, so now I just read, read, read. I don't care what they say about all of the other ones being crap-- I want to understand this man and everything he writes. Wrote.

I want to put Jack Kerouac in a box and take him out and listen to him spout lovely words and angry ones all full of passion. But since I can't do that, I guess I'll just settle for reading. Every word.