35mm And Counting

I've been reading this book, On the Road (care of Melissa, as my brother was unwilling to loan it to me), and it's reignited my interest in the whole Beat Generation thing and, furthermore, released the full fury of my hitchhiking-or-lack-there-of related grief. I'm a huge supporter of the wanderer, the self-made hobo, or what have you -- the guy who travels back and forth across the country with like three dollars in his pocket. I want to be that guy, but I've got these goddamn career aspirations that keep on getting in the way. Plus, as previously noted, hitchhking is no longer a thing you can do, not in this country anyway, and not very succesfully. Maybe in Europe. I don't know. It seems like things are a little looser over there. Less sensationalism about rape and axe-murderers. I could be totally off, though. What do I know?

Anyway, to revert from my usual digressions, I really need to find someone who was in to the whole travelling lifestyle back in the early sixties, chat it up with them, hear their stories, et cetera. I get such a kick out of the whole artist living in New York City thing, poor as can be, but surrounded by adventures, laugther, and friends. That pretty much goes hand in hand with what I was talking about before, anyway. I mean, I really don't like Bob Dylan's music or even his poetry or whatever -- what draws me to him and others like him is entirely dominated by their lifestyle. Half the reason I'm going to NYU is to get a taste of that Greenwich Village vibe, and I hope that my early adult life is chock full of shitty apartments, late night diner conversations, weird performance art, music, and scraping together money for bills.

A lot of what inspires these "aspirations" in me are those great black and white photos that are always floating around of a guy just chilling with a weird grin next to a brick wall. Or the browned, color-faded polaroids of a group of friends in wool coats and mittens posing on a New York City street, with nowhere to be, but plenty to do. Or a guitarist who's just playing on a stoop, not begging for money or anything, just hanging out. A crowd clustered into a small apartment surrounded in smoke and self-made bliss. Maybe it's just me, but I get such a great feeling flipping through photobooks with those kind of pictures in them. Of course, they're not framed "right," the light is way off, blah blah blah, but they're great. I absolutely love them.

I am so good to go as far as college is concerned. Everyone once in a while I just feel so happy that I get to be an artist and a writer in New York City in the beginning of the century. I mean, come on, cool stuff always happens in the first decades of centuries, right? I have these hopes for an enormous artistic renaissance exploding in the next dozen or so years and I want to be right in the center of the whole thing. Not the center or anything. This is, in all seriousness, not an ego thing. I just want to be surrounded by it.

I'm pretty sure I'll probably be turned bitter by reality and the over commericialism of blah blah blah, but at this point my head is so full of visions and hopes that I'm sort of numb to that possibility.

And I think I must sound absolutely ridiculous. Freakin' punch me in the head if I ever make a count down.