Jack Kerouac Archives - davidbiddle.net

Not feeling so good... — Not feeling so good…

A version of this essay was adapted for The Huffington Post. Read that here.

I nearly died just after completing the first draft of a novel called Beautiful Morning Blues. The story I came up with is unnerving, possibly amoral, anarchic, and, certainly, nihilistic as hell — but it still tries to say life is a magnificent and magical journey. I’m convinced that this dualism, this story at play with big metaphors and dark issues, was working to assassinate me — the messenger — from the moment I conceived it.

I struggled for two years to bring the whole 438 page draft into existence. Beginning with writing the first paragraph on a whim in 2002 (a guy gets offered $300 by a neighbor to have sex with her), over the next two years I battled depression, a growing addiction to alcohol, struggles in my marriage, sexual insecurity, and a weird sort of self-centered lunacy that you really have to call psycho-narcissism. On top of all that, every few months or so I just felt really crappy. I would run a low-grade Continue reading →

After reading A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and the last part of On the Road.

That sense that here I am touching more than myself, but, fantastically, and with dumb luck, I have stumbled toward the top of a ravine where the bottom that I can see below me reflects something more than schist and feldspar. I step over the edge and immediately I am falling what looks like a very long distance, enough to kill me. Momentarily, an image starts to go through my mind of my sweet lost mangled body crumpled into two or three fissures in the rock, bloody, limp, gone. Then, wham, I hit. And everything’s okay. Very quickly, I wonder if I was just flying.

Lightly, with the floppy thud of a large eraser in the shape of a man, I hit a soft, flat spot that I couldn’t quite see looking down. It’s dusty for a moment and maybe I cough once or twice. But the air Continue reading →