Beat Detrain

Why write a book, any book? Authors expect to sell their scribbling, or at least get paid by someone who wants to spread whatever they’re spewing. If not, then for glory or therapy's sake, strictly out of craven conceit, especially among self absorbed babies stuck in sandbox battles. Maybe some feel compelled to change minds and win support for hopeless causes, such as civil rights or social justice. After all, they were cycled through a system that educated them how to compose and encouraged them to produce. Reading begets writing and vice versa. Presidents pen memoirs to publicize legacies and pursue agendas, more likely ghostwritten by mercenary evangelists.

Only bankable stars or brown-nose sycophants actually secure book deals, yet library shelves groan with hundreds of millions of titles, too many to read over an eternity even if you wanted to. Effort expended on each is considerable. Wonder why so many exist, not to mention how many more never get past censors and editors. Took millions of contributors, dreamers, librarians and publishers many centuries, yet some jihadists and neocons would burn books by the gross squared per minute because they disagree with their nazi scheme to power their steam rolling machine.

Bike&Chain took 25 years to date, not full time, mind you, except at intervals between cash gigs and professional contracts, late hours stolen from sleep, multitasked during otherwise boring bicycling, cooking, gardening, and household chores. Can't really produce own books while proofing texts and writing books for corporate crusades, though ideas distract and percolate 24/7/365, why so many would-be celebrity wordsmiths drink or take drugs lest they go mad not submitting to this herculean chore.

Researching content takes as much time as writing copy. B&C was based on personal experiences including 7 solid work years worth of cycling spread across half a century; external resources were hardly ever used, nor were experts interviewed. Can entirely blame none other than Labann. Let other authors take pride in parading champion soundbites. Didn't take an expert to publish something so pitiful, akin to busy Bay Area street graffiti glimpsed on Google Maps, yet who's to say it isn't just as brilliant as any other title? Depends upon what you value including role you accept, reconsider, or reject when opportunities equal one among thousands who apply.

Whole B&C thing traces back at City Lights bookstore in postwar San Francisco, where Beat began a lifetime ago in year after Labann’s birth. Ink for innocent verses had hardly dried before anger waxed and charges were filed. During obscenity trial, Berkeley professor Mark Schorer rightly defended Ginsberg’s poem Howl as, "an indictment of materialism, conformity and mechanization leading toward war,” same as B&C, and smartly helped acquit defendants. Great notions rippled into next decade onto opposite coast to a curious teen kneeling between magazine racks perusing old issues of Argosy and Evergreen Review, racy rags libraries didn’t lend, trying to duck surly shopkeeper, who kicked out loiterers for not spending. Before Internet, ideas took years to spread thousands of miles. Freedom forever faces accusation, indictment, persecution, and resentment.

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, coauthored by Jack Kerouac and William S Burroughs in 1945, wouldn’t be published until 2008, same as B&C, despite Jack’s best drunken efforts and both of their deaths. Tricycle: The Buddhist Review also posthumously serialized his biographical nonfiction Wake Up: A Life of Buddha. Few recall his aborted lawsuit against GM for On The Road ripoff TV series Route 66. Was it all an anarchist hoax, insider jokes giving The Man irreverent pokes, nonsense wheedled from needles and tokes? Yet Beat bellowed from the heart, spilled out dancing characters, disgruntled protests, jazz rhythms, ragged sentences, vignettes from thousands of miles of road journeys, same as B&C. Nothing so emotionally sophisticated, humanistically tender, and literarily pious cannot help but succumb to a crass movement within mundane masses. In fact, good rhymes almost always get inverted into vile crimes. How does one detrain this Beat express, exit its miserable boxcar, quit crowd of disreputable copycats, and transcend urban distress?

Mr Master and his grammar police to this day release almost no measurable empathy. Their old rules suppress resolve to express among those they oppress, so couldn't matter less. Mothers babble and coo over babies you know they cherish. Trigger words repeated, repeated, repeated beseech a monument to one's opinions as if an obelisk of Babel to the threshold of heaven, as do all magical incantations, and, spit at risk, supplicate in order to resurrect spirit, if any residue persists.

Poetry and prose don't primarily exist to inform, but emote, inspire, raise girls and guys above ignorance and want into sustainable teams with purpose in common, say what should be said, sometimes right wrongs, or underscore better ways to relate than war. Wild oats Beat generation liberally sowed were harvested by hip hop, rap, and rock stars - Dead, Doors, Dylan - who cared for the neglected, fed starving, founded charities, redistributed riches, and restored some semblance of balance. Few music icons are multimillionaires; most just possess extra bling, golden grilles, and obsessive entourages. Free hands and open wallets may save marginal society, though quickly vanish since mostly mirages.

Champions of contradiction, pilots of paradox, pray poets never go away. Though persecuted by petty officials and reviled by bourgeoisie, as déclassé as it gets, they signify another forsaken refugee, who supposed leaders portray as nation's biggest threat today, since they'd have to pay for some welfare skyrocket from revenues they'd rather pocket. Worst threat will always be greed that does directly lead to wealth disparity, engenders powerful cadres with selfish agendas, and establishes scenarios that result in fiascoes. Must you be reminded of what living was like under inbred monarchy madness? Masses pay price, while billionaires who own all media escape deserved vise by applying divisive debate as a rhetorical device thereby disguising own avarice. Only one independent voice in Congress redirects this argument, proof it's plainly a rudimentary truth.

Entire sectors of busy bees have invested lifetimes into bilking consumers and screwing other nations. Complicity disassociates from legacy, tunes out contemptible poetry, and washes down guilt with bilious wine approaching life expectancy. America’s biggest employer, government, resolutely ensures tax revenue flows, from which conservatives have established a long running ruse to appear benevolent while they deliberately stuff offshore accounts and war chests to stay in office despite repeated layoffs and scandals. Meanwhile, $50 trillion disappeared. An awful lot of good might have occurred with so much public treasure, but didn’t. Tragic consequences await.

Sometimes what you do is simply manifest within you. It's the best and worst reason to write: pure intentions, poor rewards. Original inquiry into dubious activity will never be popular or salable; only plagiarists and publicists ever profit. By 1940’s linear narratives with rigid plots had already forfeited power to communicate to rival films, recordings and television. Demanding quests capitulated to passive consumption. Beat poetry represented a requiem for a dying art form, which morphed into meaningless musical lyrics people were willing to plonk down cash to hear so distorted they might as well have been beats of branches banged on tree trunks. Yet this business has also faded. Only rants and vents against momentary frustrations entertain anymore, that is, fake infomercial news and iron fisted judges settling cases on brazen ego. Viewers want to believe they can exert control in a world best described as sheer mayhem even though they cannot and never will. Maybe a smidgen of mercy is all anyone can assume.

“...nobody knew or far from cared who I was all my life three thousand five hundred miles from birth-O, opened up and at last belonged to me in Great America.” Jack Kerouac, "October in the Railroad Earth", Evergreen Review, Volume 1, Issue 2, 1957, which recounted his impressions as an apprentice train brakeman.

“Unlike motor cars, which have developed into baffling robots that apparently have opinions of their own and would much rather they drove themselves... the bicycle rewards hard work; we understand and respect that.” Paul Maunder, The Wind at my Back: A Cycling Life, (Bloomsbury Sport, 272 pp), 2018, explores how bicycling inspires creativity. It’s well known that artists and authors gear toward cycling, because it invites world into one’s soul instead of insulating body from universe within a self inflicted cage destined to kill when computer control inevitably crashes.