On the Road: How I Discovered the Real World
Disappear into the night and go somewhere
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Now onto today’s edition…
I had a lot of preconceptions about the people I shared a country with when I stepped into the stuffy and crowded Ford Econoline van.
I was in my mid-twenties; a full-time musician and a part-time line cook at my “rent job” and I’d gotten a fill gig-in for an established band from the Bay Area. Thirty shows in thirty-one days; two more national tours were scheduled later in the year. A dream come true for a single bohemian know-it-all.
Initially, I was excited to play music, talk to girls, and connect with other bands. I didn’t want, or need, to see much of the country. At least, that’s what I thought.
What I understood about unknown America: the Deep South, Appalachia, and the Midwest, came from podcasts, college classes, conversations with friends and family, and a few hours on Wikipedia. It was a mist-shrouded idea built on preconceptions and Hollywood representations.
I assumed there was a type of simple, dull, earnestness in these places. A slow sense of time and place and confusion about the parts of the country that “pulled them along”. I was a good and empathetic left-leaning Californian, and at the time, like so many of us, felt more comfortable drawing on the scenes and opinions seen through the windows of others than my own.
And then I found the real world.
On the Road
By the time I turned 18, the education system (keep in mind, this is prior to the current revolutionary insanity taking over schools) had given me a clear directive on who and what I should care about. I was the perfect mold. Young, naive, with a desire to enact change.
I marched in the Occupy Wall Street Protests, I supported Bernie Sanders for President, and I railed against the Christian Right and what I thought were its backward ideologies.
This was my public — acceptable — face. In private, I was curious and uncomfortable. I had taken little time to develop my own opinions of the world because I did not come to conclusions about my beliefs based on direct experience. There were multiple times, after taking a heavy rip off a joint, that I realized that my philosophy had been downloaded from another public persona. One that was deemed right by the institutions I was beginning to lose trust in. I hadn’t found the world. I hadn’t built a model or moral foundation from my own experiences. I was lying to myself.
Inch by inch, I realized my heroic idealism had been weaponized against me. I was being programmed by commissars, not by the experiences I sought and found and struggled with during my own moments of observation and introspection. The naked and open mystery of the world still was an illusion to me.
All I wanted to do was sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere, and go and find out what everybody was doing all over the country.
-Jack Kerouac
What I realized on the long drive across the vast and empty expanse of America, was that forming your own worldview requires shutting out the noise the world blasts into your ears. It requires approaching new experiences and people with the perspective of a curious, humble, observer. Only then can you start to incorporate the wisdom of others. If you skip this step, like I had, you become the wind in someone else’s sail, without the necessary baseline to assess and compare the opinions and ideas of others with your own first-hand experience.
What I found on the road wasn’t a new system or a pure ideology I could pull beside me for the rest of my life, it was an understanding that blanket statements about “people” simply aren’t helpful.
I had many ideas about the people I’d meet. Each show, each interaction at a rest stop; each serendipitous experience only proved that I knew nothing. And I got addicted to the feeling of being surprised.
After the first days, I wanted — like Kerouc — to be a fly on the wall everywhere I went. To stop and watch and be grateful for the world in the people in it, as they naturally are, not as I intend them in any way to be.
When you walk into a bar so isolated off the interstate that people still smoke without thinking twice. When you strike up a conversation with a grease-stained mechanic who tells you about his patent for a steam-powered car. When you grab a paper plate and walk down the buffet line at a Southern cookout. When you step out of the van for gas in a farm town surrounded by soybean fields in the middle of Nebraska and have steak and eggs at the counter for $7.99. When you take mushrooms and stare down at the well of the 9/11 memorial at three o’clock in the morning and watch in silence as the ghostlike apparition of a passerby stops across from you and pays their respects. When you play a backyard show in Casper Wyoming where half the town shows up in Stetsons and boots to hear you play heavy metal.
These are the moments that shatter your preconceptions; that allow you to understand that people aren’t one-dimensional abstractions.
The Serendipity of the Moment
Both Jack Kerouac and the late Christopher McCandles wanted to be swallowed by the real world as I did.
On his ill-fated cross-country journey to the wilds of the Alaskan bush, McCandless wrote
There is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. I've decided I'm going to live this life for some time to come. The freedom and simple beauty is just too good to pass up. Happiness is only real, when shared.
There were moments of time on the road when our band would be welcomed into the homes of strangers — usually one of the members of the local opening band on the bill — and we’d sit and talk and play guitar and share song ideas until the early morning. The feeling surrounded me, that in another life, in another place, I could be sitting with a group of best friends. In the morning we’d give a friendly hug and be off to the next place. To the rest of our life.
Kerouac found, in his most well-known work, On the Road this same feeling of equanimity in chance encounters.
What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.
The result of this life, of this seeking of adventure in the real world, is knowing that there are people; good, mad, difficult, ill, talented, and every other shade, pushing their next foot forward as you are, seeking with the same abundance and wisdom and misguided naivety and finding what they can along the way.
When building a worldview under the fluorescent light of classrooms, administrators’ offices, around the dinner table with older family, and at the bar with co-workers, is the equivalent of watching a YouTube video on how to paint, without having the brushes or palette beside you.
It’s this idea that led Kerouac to resent the generation he supposedly inspired, for knowing the words but not the music. For feeling like they had all the answers, without all the experience.
If you feel strongly about something, an ideological imperative that you must, be right, you have a moral obligation to move into new environments and have new conversations. Volunteering at your local non-profit does not qualify, joining a club on a College campus does not qualify; these are only one tiny piece of the mysterious whole we pretend to know so much about.
Sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere.
And if you can’t do that yet…
Find a dive bar and shoot pool with a stranger. Wager some money on it. Ask a stranger on a date, leave your phone, and choose a restaurant you’ve never been to. Have a conversation with an old woman on the bus.
These are the small moments that will open you up to the infinite whole you can find on the road.
As always, thanks for reading.
-Joe