Aimless

"Aimless: one man's journey without any sense of direction"
another adventure
by Jake Kilroy

PREFACE:
Tennessee, Whiskey & Beatnik Poetry: The Adventure

My friend Grant and I were dying of boredom and bored of dying on the West Coast. We decided to do something about it, we decided to wreck Tennessee and drink ourselves to death.

So, we're flying out to that flat trapezoid state that's half an east coast fury and half a southern belle. Once again, I plan on living like Jack Kerouac and any beatnik poet writer that ever thought the written word was worth more than alliteration and oxygen mixed together in a cocktail.

Grant said, "We're going to live like Dean and Sal, though I don't know which of us is which. I'm not sure who will be the writer and who will be the screw-up. My girlfriend says if I were traveling with anybody else, I'd be the voice of reason. But, I think because I'm traveling with you...that makes me the crazy one."

He's talking bar fights and I'm talking jail nights. I told him that I had planned on being Sal anyway, just because once we finally dragged our broken bodies and fiery souls home, I intended with every dedicated sweaty ounce in my body to document our furious chaos in scribbles and frantic sketches of the countryside. I'll even buy a typewriter, I thought.

And that's where this comes in. This is the manifesto I wrote on the road, a pen dipped in magic, a luxury I haven't always had to my own disintegrating name.

So, I'm Sal, Grant is Dean, and I hope to Christ that he (or He) steals us some cars, just in case we leave the rental in a river. Maybe while we're swimming, we'd leave it in neutral, and so would be the story to tell the curious grandkids. While we're jumping off barren cliffs in the Midwest (if such landmarks exist in the clunky cornfields and miles of the Western Promise not yet corrupted by urban sprawl), we'll soon realize that we may have done ourselves in. We'll tread water (Grant maybe with a cigarette or chewing tobacco in his mouth, and I maybe with sunglasses on), and watch our great ride home sink to whatever river it is that we may pass the afternoon in.

The sun will shine as we watch it bounce off the license plate before it finally submerges, coughing up bubbles to where we tread the deepest water. We'll both stare, gawking as we stay afloat, before I know both of us would laugh like mad, acutely aware that we have no way of making it back to California, but also being excited to tell the story whenever we return by whatever means we'd later figure.

We'd be botched extraordinarily if that asphalt ship went down, but we'd laugh for days as we took the bus home from Kansas across sketchy looming time zones. And besides, time zones only matter on maps. It's not like Grant or I will care if it's two or three in the afternoon. We just want to be sure that we have another hour of sunlight. And we'll realize it soon enough when the sky breaks orange and sputters yellow and some raggedy purple, and finally the clouds are red, and it's nothing but a paintbrush shadow carrying us into quiet evenings of fireflies and conversation.

Also, whiskey.

We'll land in Tennessee with a tent, two sleeping bags, an acoustic guitar, a bottle of whiskey, a small bag of clothes, and a notebook and a camera. We're going to wander through the airport looking like "those guys," the ones who look completely out of their minds or the most brilliant men walking the earth, traveling and searching for the almighty goal of immortality. We'll be the men/boys on the street who look like we know which direction paradise is, like we know where the answers lay, somewhere beyond the city, and most certainly somewhere beyond the working man's mental realm.

We have no intentions of high luxury. We will sleep in our car or tent the whole way home.

We will pause to swim early mornings in rivers and talk entire afternoons in Midwestern cornfields. Our car's antenna will pick up folk, country and blues only. Our arms will be tan from dangling out the window under an overbearing Midwestern sun and our bodies will be cold at night under a harvest moon, always climbing as a giant over the trees, over the mountains, above the small quiet desolate towns, pinned tight against the nocturnal sky.

Life will be some joyride, us in the front seat with days and nights to kill with our best songs and tape recordings of dialogue. Never with any mal intention, never murdering our days and nights, but rather overwhelming these passing afternoons and evenings well into slumber. For how long, I couldn't even begin to imagine or wager.

We will throw concrete jungle philosophy around small farming towns, just to see how it all fares across this roadmap of a nation. We will find heartache and blessings on the open road. There will be no sunset we won't see and no sunrise that won't cause shift in our sleep. We'll live like cowboys dependent on a rented car. And we will read used book store fiction and fall asleep to a cracking fire and strumming guitar.

Our hearts will beat so loud and affectionately that it will always sound like we wear it on our sleeves, but we'll probably just leave it back in Tennessee with whatever sense or reason we once had in our claustrophobic hometown.

I don't want to feel like I'm moving through motions.

I want to feel like I'm traveling through some kind of warp, straight through that highway I've always dreamed about. It's the one where I'm everlasting, the one I felt occasionally in high school when everything made sense but I was still out of my head entirely (junior year), the one that caused such an uproar in my heart about living and maybe dying in Australia, where I may or may not have been a drunk philosopher poet who attended the operas with his beatnik woman who spent her afternoons playing records and teaching me how to dance.

You see, it's all poetry for the crumbling eras living and whispering in your heart.

We are all everlasting, and we'll travel through jungles and oceans, but there's some city that we don't catch up on, inside us, and we make snide remarks about it all, never realizing our own truth. It's when you finally start moving fast enough or slow enough that the times are making sense to you, where you finally go to bed immediately. And the death of insomnia isn't from a long day or lack of previous sleep weighing upon your skyrocketing skull. It's from some closure that covers you better than the blanket you only hold onto for sentimental reasons.

There's truth in all of us, and it just seems like everyone has their own separate timebombs that will blow them up apart to the same conclusion: we are everlasting. And we should all know and act upon it.

We won't come home hungry and we're not coming back thirsty.

We're coming back complete.