Every night I still ask the Lord, "Why?" and haven't heard a decent answer yet..

- - - Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels

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But it was on this trip that the great change took place in my life which I called a "complete turningabout" on that earlier page, turning from a youthful brave sense of adventure to a complete nausea concerning experience in the world at large, a revulsion in all the six senses. And as I say the first sign of that revulsion had appeared during the dreamy solitary comfort of the two months on Desolation mountain, before Mexico, since which time I'd been melanged again with all my friends and old adventures, as you saw, and not so "sweetly," but now I was alone again. And the same feeling came to me: Avoid the World, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end. But what to do instead? And here I was relentlessly being carried to further "adventures" across the sea. But it was really in Tangiers after an overdose of opium the turningabout really clicked down and locked. In a minute—but meanwhile another experience, at sea, put the fear of the world in me, like an omen warning. This was a huge tempest that whacked at our C-4 from the North, from the Januaries and Pleniaries of Iceland and Baffin Bay. During wartime I'd actually sailed in those Northern Seas of the Arctic but it was only in summertime: now, a thousand miles south of these in the void of January Seas, gloom, the cappers came glurring in gray spray as high as a house and plowed rivers all over our bow and down the washes. Furyiating howling Blakean glooms, thunders of thumping, washing waving sick manship diddling like a long cork for nothing in the mad waste. Some old Breton knowledge of the sea still in my blood now shuddered. When I saw those walls of water advancing one by one for miles in gray carnage I cried in my soul WHY DIDNT I STAY HOME!? But it was too late.

Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels

If God is an opiate so am I. Therefore eat me.

Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels

"No doubt he asked 'Why?' 'Why, name?' - Lonely lips of Paleolithic men under the stars, the nomad night - the crackle of his campfire -"

- Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels

"The best moment of the day was to slip in bed with bedlamp over book and read facing the open patio windows, the stars and the sea. I could also hear it sighing out there."

- Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels

"... but at midnight while they slept to rest for another day's work, Old Rembrandt was up in his study putting on light touches of darkness to his canvases -"

- Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels

"The only truth is music….Music blends with the heartbeat universe and we forget the brain beat."

― Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels

Kerouac Society: https://bit.ly/39ytOiL

photo credit: Elliott Erwitt

Interview with Clive Pearson from Desolation Angels for The Metal Gods M...

photo credit: Allen Ginsberg

* * * *

"Wearing Deni's huge vicuna coat with the si cap over my ears, in cold biting winds of December New York, Irwin and Simon led me up to the Russian Tea Room to meet Salvador Dalí. He was sitting with his chin on a finely decorated tile headed cane, blue and white, next to his wife at the Cafe table. He had a little wax moustache, thin. When the waiter asked him what he wanted he said 'One grapefruit...peenk!' and he had big blue eyes like a baby, a real or Spaniard. He told us no artist was great unless he made money. Was he talking about Uccello, Ghianondri, Franca? We didn't even know what money really was or what to do with it. Dali had already read an article about the 'insurgent' 'beats' and was interested. When Irwin told him (in Spanish) we wanted to meet Marlon Brando (who ate in this Russian Tea Room) he said, waving three fingers at me, 'He is more beautiful than M. Brando.' I wondered why he said that but he probably had a tiff with old Marlon. But what he meant was my eyes, which were blue, like his, and my hair, which is black, like his, and when I looked into his eyes, and he looked into my eyes, we couldn't stand all that sadness. In fact, when Dali and I look in the mirror we can't stand all that sadness. To Dali sadness is beautiful." ― Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels

Bad Company, “She Brings Me Love (Live),” The Empire Pool, Wembley, London, 9 March 1979; originally released on Desolation Angels LP (Swan Song, 1979)

Desolation Angels, Jack Kerouac FYI - This is 1 of 12 vintage paperback classics that comprise our current giveaway.

Every night I still ask the Lord, "Why?" and haven't heard a decent answer yet” - Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels

I’ve finally finished Kerouac’s Desolation Angels.  It only took me 34 months.  

No lie.  34 months.

Some pics of me in 2011

And I will die, and you will die, and we all will die, and even the stars will fade out one after another in time.

Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels

Czysta gra

aka Fair Game

aka Desolation Angels

Director: Christopher Fitchett   

1982

imdb

Elgaz

And she flashes him that languid smile worth more than her whole naked body, a really philosophic smile, lazy and amorous and ready for anything, even rainy afternoons [...]

Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels

from ‘Desolation Angels’

“So shut up, live, travel, adventure, bless and don't be sorry.”

[Jack Kerouac]