Thanks for the birthday greeting you sweet, sweet person. I have to go get really caffeinated to write that sentence. Rated.

I'm gonna drive, drive, drive on, on into the moonspill, whiskey and mescaline, drive, drive, drive on like weeds on alien surfaces, spreading my velvety fingers, drive, drive drive, on and on, float by the protuberances of hippos until I reach my final and ultimate destination and wish Sheepdog a happy birthday.

Very sweet sentiment. WOOF WOOF Sheep Dog, Happy Birthday my brutha!!!!!!!!
Rated for Dogginess

The dance of life, cha, cha, cha, never sure were the next move might take you, open to new possibilities, cha, cha ,cha, feeling the beat as you go, grounded in the basic moves of living, cha, cha, cha, a crisis and a turn, cha, cha, cha, the flirtation of the dance, cha, cha, cha, a new embrace, cha, cha, cha, new moves originate, old ones recycle back with a familiarity and comfort, and the dance continues, cha, cha, cha.

happy birthday, sheepdog!!!! shit, wish you'd said something in your comment to me!!! this is better news that stupid george any day. shit, i don't know about beat language.

can't do this now. will think on it while i carp and come back. love love love for you and sheepdog and kerouac and a great idea!!

teddy, you is the queen of the ramble. take any sentence outta one a your posts and der, ya go:)

hey, shel.
love the sexiness of the moonspill whiskey and oddness of the hippo-rific protuberances:)

Quite the dancer, eh sensus?

By the way, thanks for making me think of one of my all-time favorite 10,000 Maniacs songs!

shel: i know! me too!

The only days for me are every day I see another precious sunrise glowing like a hot pink ember on a newly clarified horizon that had been all but invisible just a few hours before, when in unquenched wonder I finally relented, and left my warm bed; quietly creeping through the house to get outside where I gazed up, not at the black and unforgiving ceiling, but into the heavenly vault of endless, indescribably beautiful and inhumanly immense starry starry star filled infinity; feeling serene and sad and so very thankful and full of inspired wonder; sleepless and starry starry eyed drunk on the strong, blood red wine of my thoughts, my needs, my wishes, my dreams, and the people who fill them, one precious sunrise after another, like the very best of my miraculous intentions gazing up, a lonely human wolf howling at the brilliant barricade of endless stars because I couldn't sleep and still or even slow the amperage and my mind was whirling at warp ten thinking about things I love so much and things I lust for so so much and things I've done and all the things I wanna do again and again and again and things I've never done yet but will, I swear to God and the heavens and the universe above; and I think about things I wish were different and things I'm so thankful for and things I can't do anything about no matter how hard I try or cry or howl and things that make me feel good and fine and sweet inside and contribute to my strength and things that drive me wild and free and happily howling half crazed with unspent desire into the starry starry night, until the sky begins to lighten and warm ever so softly grey like a Mexican blanket in the East; and even the coyotes have finally gone to ground; but I am sitting still and quiet and contemplative in the tall grass with the universe whirling like glowing hot pink embers in my head and another day is blessing me with it's empty palette of possibilities.

and elvis has left the building.
good god, bruce. that was some real wow.

well, honestly, I almost wanna post it myself. I'm fairly proud of that one. It just poured outa me like water from a spring. Kerouac is one of my kind, dharma.

Well kiss my grits! Happy BD OEs!
From Daddy O wannabe & Rat Fink (my dog). Hope you have many more. Rated & Cheers!

I sit at my writing desk, the one with the quartersawn oak, rays afire, with a big white recycled sheet of paper, three pencils, and eraser and a big out of scale drawing of my yard, a stack of seed packets, downloaded plant information about white blooming Dogwood trees, red and gold twig Dogwoods, purple flowing fountain grass, cream marginated Hostas, ferns and fencing materials, and as I look beyond the immediate deforestation into the pasture that was rent asunder by the logging equipment I see that it is now still covered in the snow that came down Monday and has not melted away, but instead, blankets the ugliness beneath and hints at a better day when the grass returns, the meadow flowers bloom, the sky is blue and all of this becomes a memory of the end of Winter and the dawning of yet another season of hope and beauty, Spring is arriving slowly but surely here.

Happy Birthday from the currently snowy Pacific Northwest.

Lovely, lovely Susanne. Thank you.
And I am sorry for the ugliness going on in your backyard...there is rampant irresponsible development screwing up my pretty city, too. I feel your pain.
But soon to Spring! and hope in full bloom!

It's like millipedes as they stomp, stomp, stomp along 34th street down the stairs into the tunnel of unlove and into the sardine can filled with people as it rumbles along, and we rock back and forth and we stop and the can explodes us out on the the platform sucked along by the crowd that can only be described as crawling at a time the rest of the world knows as rush hour.

You musta had a latte, birthday dog:) I likey.

Upon further consideration, I take it back. It was wrong of me to make such a claim, and not any more fair to me any more than it was fair to Kerouac. I'm not so much like him at all. Our love of travel, our spiritual connection with the Earth, and our stream of consciousness writing about people we really know and hang out with is something we have in common; but his life and lifestyle was utterly different from my own. Kerouac died at 47, when flagrant and self abusive excess burned his candle out; and his work received very little critical acclaim during his lifetime.

Yep. God love him but he was quite the drunkard and odd mama's boy, too. Still love em, though:)

Probably not a guy you'd ever wanna live with, but I agree with you about his work. Gotta love him. Classic forever. Thanks for the challenge. It was an interesting process to write that little piece. At first the blank page stared at me, and then the words started pouring out. :) The Kerouac quote you gave as an example of his run on prose was 69 words. Mine was 354.

The real peace is gunning that engine straight out to the ceaseless horizon, the blue meets the white but never does, the slate grey brown water slides to shimmering emerald as the sun bounces deeper, deeper, deeper lighting up the depths as the shipping channel buoy clangs and fades, and fades, and fades until still, and the giant shells slice the calm feeding voraciously on jellyfish, the bottlenoses bow riding, the flying sea robins and the quiet patrolling sharks and giant rays back flipping with thunderous explosions, and the lone seagull laughs on the deck.

So. Worth. The Wait. ((Grif))

all of these are so so so good

your turn, girl:)

Every so often in history some guy comes along at just the right time, after things have gotten so totally, utterly fucked up that everybody else has all but given up, but he doesn't give up 'cause he’s got hope because he knows he's got his shit together, and if there's any chance that the world can be put back together, he knows he can do it -- not that he's got his head up his ass, just that he's cool with himself and even cool with all the loudmouth, fat-ass, sumbitches who screwed everything up in the first place and now want to blame it on him but can't because by now everybody’s figured out they’re just so much mumbling, bumbling flyshit who think they know but don't know nothin', and that’s why he knows that he can blow by them and leave the mealy-mouthed bastards suckin' hind-tit or bendin' over and takin' in the ass in a prison-cell doing eight-to-twelve because they had their hand out to every low-rent, strung-out, two-bit, on-the-make, twisting, scheming, lying bastard in a $5000 suit and a Benz, some big-shot who puts on a highly-leveraged show of success with fancy dinners, single-malt scotch and $40 cigars, but in reality has to lie, cheat and steal and bust his ass because he's got a nut over a hundred-grand a month counting the alimony and child support, to say nothing of what it costs him to keep his 25 year-old arm-piece half-way happy, but only half-way because he can't get it up any more without Viagra because he's fucking wore his heart just about out from worrying that if he doesn't keep running twice as fast as he can, he's gonna lose all this success -- and he is going to lose it all because like the new guy says, it's all about to change, because every so often in history lots of somebodies who’ve got nothin' and are gettin’ damned tired of it start to believe in a new guy like that, and they get in line behind him and things do change enough so that somewhere down the road people will write about all this and call it a turning point because it was one of those moments when the old rules ain't workin' and for one brief, fucking, shining moment, everybody gets to have their say about the new rules -- for a little while anyway, until the new guy gets corrupted or he leaves town, and then every thing starts to go back to the way it was, the way it always has been, they way where them that's got gets, and them that's not gets their faces shoved in it.

Tom:
Your run-on would be best served with some accompaniment-- maybe a slow sax solo? Something real low down and dirty.

Well, I confess I was channeling Lawrence Ferlinghetti more than Jack, but hey, it's all in the extended family

i love Kerouac and this is my favorite quote. i was trying to do a Kerouac run-on thing with my latest post but the punctuation kept getting in the way.

Lovely! I have run across the Kerouac quote before. I fear I vacillate between the commonplace and occasional spikes of something more interesting. Maybe I should be glad, as this might keep the candle going a bit longer.