on the road

"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-by. But we lean forward to the
next crazy venture beneath the skies." 



jag gav mig på on the road av jack kerouac, som handlar om ett gäng rastlösa ungdomar i slutet av 40-talet som liksom ständigt är... på väg. new yawk, frisco, denver, texas,  mehico... fram och tillbaka. hela tiden. berättarjaget är sal paradise, en ung man med författardrömmar, och vid hans sida finns dean moriarty, som är... helt galen. jack kerouac skrev den här boken på tre veckor på en lång pappersrulle. så handlingen liksom... flyter fram. intressant. lånade den här boken på det kommunala biblioteket, men jag tror att den är värd en permanent plats i bokhyllan. nedan kommer mina favoritdelar.den första är från en av sals utflykter till kalifornien, när han fick ett gig som vakt i ett hamnområde med drunk and disorderly sjömän.

[Remi] arranged to get me the same kind of job he had, as a guard in the barracks. I went through the necessary routine, and to my surprise the bastards hired me. I was sworn in by the local police chief, given a badge, a club, and now, I was a special policeman.

[...]

It was a horrible crew of men, men with cop-souls, all except Remi and myself. Remi was only trying to make a living and so was I, but these men wanted to make arrests and get compliments from the chief of police in town. They even said that if you didn't make at least one a month you'd be fired. I gulped at the prospect of making an arrest. What actually happened was that  I was as drunk as anybody in the barracks the night all hell broke loose. This was a night when the schedule was so arranged that I was all alone for six hours - the only cop on the grounds; and everybody in the barrack seemed to have gotten drunk that night. It was because their ship was leaving in the morning. They drank like seamen the night before the anchor goes up. I sat in the office with my feet on the desk reading Blue Book adventures about Oregon and the north country, when suddenly I realized there was a great hum of activity in the usually quiet night. I went out. Lights were burning in practically every damned shack on the grounds. Men were shouting, bottles were breaking. It was to do or die for me. I took my flashlight and went to the noisiest door and knocked. Someone opened it about six inches.

"What do you want?"

I said, "I'm guarding these barracks tonight and you boys are supposed to keep quiet as much as you can" - or some silly remark. They slammed the door in my face. I stood looking at the wood of it against my nose. It was like a Western movie; the time had come for me to assert myself. I knocked again. They opened up wide this time. "Listen," I said. "I don't want to come around bothering you fellows, but I'll lose my job if you make too much noise."

"Who are you?"

"I'm a guard here"

[...]

"Have a drink fer krissakes." I didn't mind if I did. I took two.

I said, "Okay, boys? You'll keep quiet, boys? I'll get hell, you know."

"It's all right, kid," they said. "Go make your rounds. "Come back for another drink if you want one."

And I went to all the doors in this manner, and pretty soon I was as drunk as anybody else. Come dawn, it was my duty to put up the American flag on a sixty-foot pole, and this morning I put it up upside down and went home to bed. When I came back in the evening the regular cops were sitting around grimly in the office.

"Say, bo, what was all the noise around here last night? We've had complaints from people who live in the houses across the canyon"

"I don't know", I said. "It sounds pretty quiet right now."

"The whole contingent's gone. You was supposed to keep order around here last night - the chief is yelling at you. And another thing, do you know you can go to jail for putting the American flag upside down on a government pole?"

"Upside down?" I was horrified; of course I hadn't realized it. I did it every morning

mechanically.

"Yessir," said a fat cop who'd spent twenty-two years as a guard in Alcatraz. "You could go to jail for doing something like that." The others nodded grimly. They were always sitting around on their asses; they were proud of their jobs. They handled their guns and talked about them. They were itching to shoot somebody. Remi and me.

these guys had a lot of windshield time, so to speak. följande utdrag är från en av grabbarnas många turer tvärsöver landet och definierar till en stor del boken: bilturer och beskrivningar av det amerikanska landskapet. för att spara bensin och därmed pengar rullar de nerför bergspassen i kalifornien: 

Then we started down. Dean cut off the gas, threw in the clutch, and negotiated every hairpin turn and passed cars and did everything in the books without the benefit of accelerator. I held on tight. Sometimes the road went up briefly; he merely passes cars without a sound, on pure momentum. He knew every rhythm and every kick of a first-class pass. When it was time to U-turn left around a low stone wall that overlooked the bottom of the world, he just leaned far over to his left, hands on the wheel, stiff-armed, and carried it that way; and when the turn snaked to the right again, this time with a cliff on our left, he leaned far to the right, making Marylou and me lean with him. In this way we floated and flapped down to the San Joaquin Valley. It lay spread a mile below, virtually the floor of California, green and wondrous from our aerial shelf. We made thirty miles without using gas.