The place is roaring

I've conjured a romantic vision of a man who walked around San Francisco (he walked around everywhere) in the 1950s fresh from coming down off Desolation Ridge. Three months up on a mountain all in preparation for a night out on the town? As I sit on the bus I read 'Desolation Angels' and my head spins: fifteen words I've never heard before on that page, who's that, where they gonna go now? Sentences swirl around and bump into others and they form one long sentence, nevermind the punctuation. I've romantcized all this; those big typewriters and their drunk fingers. "I'm gonna read him or that next (no more Beat)." And then a box arrives from N. America and it's 30 pounds of clothes and paper and electronics and I open it and out jumps a brown book all battered and I'm back where I started, in love with and heart beating to it again...

From 'Desolation Angels'
Jack Kerouac - The Beat Generation - mp3

Whether this sums up the essence of what Kerouac and his gang were all about or not or it's just a voice that I somehow trust to tell me some sort of truth, here it/he is/was.