Jack Kerouac's On The Road Has Me Feeling Real Stuck

As much as anyone over the age of 50 would hate to admit it, the simple, golden years of America are quite over. Gone are the days of hitchhiking, peace, love and legal LSD.  Jack Kerouac was once described to me as Steinbeck, on Acid, which after reading On the Road, is not a bad comparison.   This great American Novel had me bewildered by the end.   Thinking to myself, “What did I just read?"  But is that not the point?  The book is a pseudo-biography, a journey of a young adult surrounded by his disastrous friends to nowhere in particular, for not a whole lot of reason.  Back and forth across the country multiple times and finally down to Mexico, the whole thing seems so foreign in the information age.  The prose and the rhythm of the writing are enticing.   Kerouac’s style of using simple imagery to form complex thoughts and descriptions has to be 
why he is one of the best 

authors of this time period.

Some Examples:

…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!' What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany?"

…"I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost." …

Above all, On the Road is a window into the Beat era, pre-hippie, and 1950’s counterculture, the very beginning of a revolution carried on by many in the next 20 years.   The simple freedom of Kerouac is something that I envy.  What is it that people my age have lost?  Why is it that we are too serious to shrug off a little responsibility?  It would be a difficult decision for me to just get in my car and drive to California, leaving my safety net to come back with nothing; all in the name of finding myself.  Maybe I am not about to embark on any insane road trips with my friends just yet but this novel will definitely give you the itch to pack your things and wave goodbye.