It was almost forty years ago that I read On the Road and I didn't see too much to it--just a bunch of blather by some guy who'd found the world in his navel although he had to keep dusting the lint from it to see clearly enough to remember where the orgone collector was so he could find his friend with the wine and doobies--which helped to clarify the images projected by his goddamned umbilicus a little bit, so it wouldn't look so much like just some twisted flesh down there below his nipples and just at the top of the line of pubic hair rising from his crotch--which was what he really wanted to contemplate, which he knew was closer to the source of all secrets than a vestigial nutritional conduit which had lots of meaning when his mother was eating for two but which had lost it when it got cut and tied off, the only concern after that being whether it would be an inny or an outy but Burroughs obsessed about it when he should have given a bit more thought to the holes he kept poking into the veins at his elbows for the sustenance offered by his new mother the eyedropper--no, I couldn't see much there when behind in San Francisco were--lumped into the same generation--Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg and Corso and Rexroth and a bunch of others just as alienated from the "you in your goddamned Brooks Brothers suit, you son of a bitch" types who had--after all--killed Dylan Thomas but somehow found lots to think about without twisting into a lotus with fingers and thumbs formina a triangle framing their goddamned belly buttons--but reading Kerouak as projected by Neil and Leej makes me think maybe I missed something, so maybe I'll give The Subterranians another chance.

--seed