My ears have been plugged up for days.

I played a video game for six hours today and didn't pick up ONE book.

Thanks, Kyle.

on a beautiful, deserted island
building a boat

slowly

Now I saw,

though too late, the folly of beginning a work before we count the cost, and before we judge rightly of our own strength to go through with it.


1. The only reason that my name is spelled “Kevynn” sometimes is because I started it when I was 16 and really started to write a bunch of Emo thoughts, poems and stories into notebooks. Back then I only spelled it with one “N”. I kind of helped me out when I started doing a lot of Content and PR work for a bunch of failed TEH Interweb/nets companies and embarrassing music magazines. Nice to use your real name when you’re writing for new companies and not to be Googly-haunted by Bloggy, random articles, posts and blargh blargfh with the Emo one.

2. I only reason that I exist is because my father worked doing secret, secret stuff for an agency that only has three letters and because my mother was super hot and because he knocked her up. My brother was born in Vietnam and my older half brother was born in Bolivia. I would like to thank Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and all of Communism for this award.

3. I wear contacts and hate wearing glasses. Even though I like how I look in glasses. Sometimes. Glasses suck. Try to lay your head down sideways and watch 30 Rock with glasses, bitch.

4. I’ve always been this thin – but my weight fluctuates based on what’s going on in my life.

5. I hate talking on the phone. Hate it.

6. I usually don’t know that I’m speaking until somebody asks me what I meant, laughs or frowns.

7. I will die on the freeway sitting in the passenger seat.

8. I’ve lived in haunted houses more than once. I’ll tell you stories if you buy me a comic book and tell me that you like my shoes.

9. One of my eyes is lighter than the other.

10. I like Atari Teenage Riot and Crass.

11. I don’t know what I’m doing.

12. I miss playing in punk/surf bands.

13. I’ve always had Deja-Vu. It gets so bad sometimes that if I shut my mouth than I can silently watch everything that I know that will happen…happen. It drives me nuts but at the most, it only goes from 15 seconds to 30 minutes. What do you do with this? Nothing. Sometimes I know what you’re going to say. If you’re by me next time, I’ll write it down and show you later. Lame, I know – but true.

14. I never had much but AMAZING friends. I’ve never had any guidance. Especially in the last 15 years. I’ll take this over a solid family structure anyday.

15. I was homeless more than once and traveled via Greyhound across the USA and used to sleep in parks, friend’s cars, schools, park benches and used to sray up at 24-hour donut shops. AND more and more and more awesome places. Yay!

16. I have bad knees because of skateboarding when I was a wee tyke and have crappy, broken ankles. I walk like a young Benjamin Button when I wake up but it gets better in about fifteen minutes and I don’t hobble so bad.

17. I don’t have any family that lives in California.

18. I have amazing hand/eye coordination and amazing balance and aim. Really, it’s uncanny. I’ll show you…

19. I am a horse whisperer.

20. I always have to have something to drink. Water, juice, soda – anything. I can’t not have water or something by me. I’m either weird or OCD or my kidneys hate me or all of these things combined.

21. I have probably fallen asleep to Empire Strikes Back 300 and something times.

22. I paint about ONE picture every year.

23. I know a lot about comic books. More than anybody that you know.

24. I believe that right now, things will make themselves right in progressive, snail-like increments. I hope to look back on my newly-created phosphorescent trails and smile…happy to see how far I’ve travelled.

25. I am Jane Goodall's Tanzanian monkeys typing about bananas. My fingers are Santa's little helpers. My hope is a sporadic rainfall - yet a torrential downpour in all creative environments. I am Theseus, unspooling golden yarn. Sisyphus, sweating uphill. Bukowski, scribbling away in rooming houses. A river always flowing. I am the nightmare of stagnancy and the god of imagination. Not really... I'm just tired And Full Of Poo...

Who's scruffy-lookin'?

I'm a hungry Wampa without a Tantaun
Chewbacca without a Bowcaster
Greedo with good aim
Salacious Crumb without the cackle
A Sarlaac without a pitt
Boba without the jet pack
Echo Station without a shield generator
A Snow Speeder without a tow cable
I am Dantooine without the millions of voices suddenly crying out in terror that were suddenly silenced
I am a Land Speeder without the vaseline smeared glob beneath my wheels
R2-D2 incessantly chirping
I do not know how big I've grown eating food of this kind
I am the crying Rancor Keeper
I am Yak and Prune Face
I am Sy Snootles without The Max Rebo Band
I am a Gundark without ears
I am Darth Vader without asthma and an Emperor without finger-tipped lightning bolts
Jabba without delectable frogs and Bib Fortuna without the head tentacles
Watto without wings
John without the Williams
Leia sans slave outfit
I am Dagobah without its swamps
Bantha without the poodoo
and I'm a dud of a Thermal Detonator
I have convinced my new master to take of my restraining bolt
I am Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen without Tupperware glasses
I can't make the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs
I am the ninth moon of Endor
I am Jimmy Smits as Bail Organa
I am Kit Fisto, Plo Kloon and that other Jedi guy dying like bitches
I am the fat, dancing Twilek in Jabba's Palace
I am the bone in your Rancor's teeth
I am Jek Porkins dying in a shower of sparks
I am Industrial Light and Reality
Luke screaming, Yes! That's true! Yes, it is possible!
A tank without Bacta
An AT-AT without armor plating
Ewoks without a village
and Han Solo without a bounty over his head
4-LOM without Zuckuss
I am a canceled Boonta Eve race
and a quadrapelegic Wookie wanting to rip off your arms
I am the Star Wars Holiday Christmas Special
and a swarm of sucking Mynocks
I have a bad feeling about this

and

I am not the droid you're looking for.

Thankthegodsfortheglimmerof hope
atleastinthenextpairofeyes
thatlookat me
they'llsee you
andmycataracts
andispeakslower now
withlessenergytheysay
Thankthegodsfortheglimmerof hope
atleastinthenextpairofeyes

Mark MacGavern

is the homeless man that I met tonight as I was walking home
he gave me a good book list
was calm and pleasant to talk to
I told him that I had tried to volunteer at one of our local churches
I was curious what he needed and invited him to my house
I have all of my old clothes that don't fit me anymore, canned goods and a lot of Hagan's old camping equipment, a sleeping bag, etc.
I gave him money that he reluctantly accepted
and tried to give him my Steinbeck
he wasn't interested and showed me what he was reading
All he needs is hot, washed blankets
Now, I have that covered
and I spent two hours in the cold on a bench with him
just because I said hello
Mark looks like Rasputin and Zack Galafinakis
we
talked
man to man
about words
books
family
feelings
regrets
we are
both strong men

I'm sorry to see how things have gone in my life lately
but I never would've had this moment tonight
if I hadn't already fucked up the one I had

good
bad

but I remembered the old me from a long time ago
and I think the one that you loved

The one that I LOVED

Thank you, Mark.

Bukowski? You're still not my friend. I've re-read this eight times and don't know how I feel about this...

blasphemy of love

in my beginning
as with every human
being, we're
born early
into the truest sense
of the word NEED.

I was given the sustenance
of existence
until I was able to live without
any further original need
and so I boldly, naively believing
and brightly blazing
thrust myself
forward into life, filled
with an insatiable apatite
for self reliance, with
an almost curiously anti-dependant
desire; to be whole
without any outside force,
to rely on nothing
and no one else.

I searched and settled
and pondered and cursed thin air
and most often through the years I've
found myself in life
continuously fighting an almost
insurmountable surreal desire-
to be
needed by another...
I've finally come to know now unequivocally
that I am NOT, never
have been
and never will be.

I am a man, but I am not a leader
nor a follower or a Father.

through disenchantment and heartbreak,
through disappointment and
disillusionment, through false promises
given by and taken from me
through the whole of my
self-sustained life
it has ultimately
led me back within myself-
clarity has come for me
through a disintigration of truth
an obliteration of hope
a caricature of self
a malignancy of soul
and a blasphemy of love
most people know
every fire needs fuel
to continue,
or it must succumb
to an inevitable
cool weightless ash
and a dissipating smoke.

my dilemma has been that
I feel no need to seed
another human
into being
in need
of
original love to survive,
to endure another plight of life
in utter ultimate
useless
needlessness...
so to those I've loved I can only say this:
"I knew I wanted to be with you,
but I never needed you,
I thought you might have needed me,
but you didn't and you don't.

I apologize for not knowing that
better back then.

but I promise you this
My Loves,

it'll never happen again.

Nitro!

fatfreemilk@gmail.com

The Mall On Haunted Hill...

The Mall On Haunted Hill...

The absolute wondrous horror of what was a rare Orange County mall experience for myself is today, losing its luster - so I might as well try to jot down what I can remember -

In Southern California, there are people. A lot of them. All attached to some type of device that transmits IMPORTANT relayed messages to their brain. Sometimes these PEOPLE fill up their tiny seconds with their IMPORTANT blabby-crap and sometimes forget to do things like say, HELLO, THANK YOU, EXCUSE ME, YOU'RE WELCOME, YES, NO, JUNIOR-DON'T-RUN-OUT-INTO TRAFFIC, etc. They also forget to drive faster, slower, at all and usually with any consideration towards the other millions of other dumb-dumby, spinning people driving out on the streets also. Sometimes their cars mirror the slow, congealing drips of mollasses inside their driver's skulls. Sometimes I point at these people while they go about their very important coffee retrieval and goods-purchasing daily sprees. Sometimes I don't point because there are a lot of bigger dinosaurs in this Pangeaic park of mine and I plan on settling into a nice, bubbly tar pit someday. I don't want anybody to fuck with that. I have plans. Rawrrr.

This is getting too long...

I only went to the mall after dinner to make my girlfriend happy. Her mall is my comic book store, but without the fast food smell, pimply teenagers and fat, sweaty men. Actually, both the mall and comic book stores have these type of people, but at least the mall is more spread out.

At the mall:

Clothing and accessories, when I rarely want them - are very easy for me to find. Not because I'm easy to please, but because my actual size in clothing never, ever actually gets bought by real humans beings because nobody is my size. My sizes are everywhere and always knocked down from a high price to a very, very LOW price. I don't know why they make these sizes. Why make clothes that fit drug-addict or tall Ethiopian builds? Or Ethiopian drug-addict builds?

I get bored easily if I'm in a store that doesn't interest me. I can't sit down and be patient. I whine a lot and walk and walk around the perimeter of the usually-a-women's-clothing-store and pretend not to be a gay guy looking at clothes.

I went to an Apple Store for my first time and was completely horrified and amazed at existence of the whole poopy thing. Welcome to the future, Gramps.

The bathrooms looked better than some L.A. clubs than I've been in. Actually, DUH. Nicer than ANY L.A./Hollywood clubs. (this is the part where friends who don't read this snicker because how often do I go to Hollywood or LA LA?)

2b continued after i read this incredible hulk comic...

Ummm..there were security guards on Segways.

Boring now. The End.

Old Stuff.

no matter what you think
the day is going to be like
no matter what your plans are
no matter what lyrics
you compose for yourself the night before

time passes
no matter what you think or hear
today is a symphony
that sounds far away from yesterday

talktalktalk
thinkthinkthink
bebetterbebetterbebetter
begoodbegoodbegood
belikewater
learn
live
breathe
focus
shooosh
so pretty, so pretty as she strokes your head
calm down, calm down
don'ttalkdon'ttalk
don'tthinkdon'tthink
bebetterbebetterbebetter
what'sgood?what'sgood?
belikevapor
rise to the top
realize that falling down
is natural
dripdripdrip
goes tears
dripdripdrip
thank you, says
everything beneath you

Sweating in orchestra pits

upside down

thank you, says
everything above you

no matter what you think
the day is going to be like
no matter what your plans are
no matter what lyrics
you compose for yourself the night before

time passes

Fat Free Milk...

I am Jane Goodall's Tanzanian monkeys typing about bananas.

Though I love Ms. Goodall and her caring heart and though I do love the fabulous Gombe chimps - my fingers aren't typing Shakepearean sonnets about fruit. I haven't written much lately. I used to a lot - and not just on this crap. An old roommate emailed me yesterday if I was interested in doing comic book writing and said that she was serious about it. Crap, whatever it is. Ummm...yes. Then you'll be seeing some furious bouts of the ol' clickity clack from my simian stubs.

My fingers are Santa's little helpers. My hope is a sporadic rainfall - yet a torrential downpour in all creative environments.

I think in this last year that my hope has been more like a trickle from a broken water pump in Uganda than anything else and "creative environments?" I'm thinking that I need to find myself lot more of those. Really.

I am Theseus, unspooling golden yarn. Sisyphus, sweating uphill.

This I still agree with.

Bukowski, scribbling away in rooming houses.

I am not Bukowski and don't want to be. I don't want what he had. Sorry, Hank.

A river always flowing. I am the nightmare of stagnancy And the god of imagination.

I AM always peeing, that's true. I think I've been the whole Pantheon of the Greek Gods of Stagnancy in this last year. Imaginative, yes. Doing everything wrong and too late, yes.

Not really... I'm just tired And Full Of Poo...

Really. And I am always tired. And I have been completely full of shit.

No more poo for me. Really.

I am Jane Goodall's Tanzanian monkeys typing about bananas. My fingers are Santa's little helpers. My hope is a sporadic rainfall - yet a torrential downpour in all creative environments. I am Theseus, unspooling golden yarn. Sisyphus, sweating uphill. Bukowski, scribbling away in rooming houses. A river always flowing. I am the nightmare of stagnancy And the god of imagination. Not really... I'm just tired And Full Of Poo...

You'll look back on today...

And wish you could've tried harder.

Not then.

Right now.



I'll look back on today...

And realize that I could've tried harder.

Then.

Not now.

Cute Girl in a Tracksuit by Eugene and Kevynn

Welcome to 2:15AM in the most anti-climactic town in the world - F********, California.
Where cute girls in tracksuits don't give you the time of day.
Where Guatemalan sisters get pissed off at you for not paying attention.
Where balding middle aged men want to fight you because you got it all figured out.
Where the drinks are moderately priced and strong - that is if you know the bartender
Where collaborations of two blogging giants happen.
Where getting tacos is an adventure you do not want to take.
I really really really wanted to talk to the cute girl in red adidas tracksuit tonight.
She remembered every nuance about me from 4 months ago.

She remembered what I did for a living.
She remembered my name.
She remembered the last time we talked.
She remembered what I know about her.
That kinda stuff just kills me.
That kinda stuff makes me melt on the bar floor.
That kinda stuff makes me tingle.
That kinda stuff makes me love life.
So, I did the only thing that comes naturally to me...
I pretended not to remember her.
She talked to a extra you would have seen on the boobtube.
He was tall and wails a guitar that's not plastic.

...


I got it all figured out,
Except cute girls in tracksuits.

***********************

There Are Always Cute Girls...



But not BEAUTIFUL girls
beauty is you at your most private
turning around to see if anybody else saw what you saw
beauty is you sharing a moment and realizing that you have nobody to take a picture of you in that special place
beauty is me crying last night talking to one of your friends on the phone and seeing a shooting star or maybe a passing satellite and not making a wish because it didn't matter if I did then because if wishes were always granted to the one's that wanted them than wishes are fishes and the world is Nuoc Cham.

Work is work but work is love.
Play is useless and is not as special if I can't extend myself and continue to share joys with other people.

I am a very confused man. And I only say, "Man" because it seems weird to say, "Boy" because I guess that I'm not. But I am. A boy. The same, confused fucker that never loved anything less than what he'd been given or not or never tried to work with what he had. I'm so proud of myself, guys - I really am, but need to remind myself of strengths that I have growing up. I am full of crap and flowers. BUT I AM IN CHARGE OF IT ALL. My life. Your love. My mistakes. My heart. I've killed myself with confusion and with mistakes but wouldn't be me if I hadn't been strong or weak in the past?

Were you there with me in the 24 hour donut shops? Were you there, holding my hand on a cold bench next to me at the elementary schools. Where were you when it rained as i walked the streets? Where were you two years ago? Where were you to protect me? Where were you to squash the cockroaches? The physical, sexual and mental pain? You weren't there - I was. I'm here all of the time.

YOU WERE THE PERSON THAT I KNEW THAT I WANTED AND THOUGHT THAT I DESERVED.

AND YOU'RE HERE NOW.

I am a fucking, large pill hard to swallow. A beautiful boatload of hope and an eyeful of cataracts in your future, you think.

I am Penicillin and an operation that you're unwilling to take to clear the sickness cloudy doubt that obscures the vision and health of your heart.

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900), "On Reading and Writing"

I am long-winded. Duh, kids.
I've loved you all.
This was a thing that Eugene and I thought of real quick-like and bored.
I take his prose and turn it into a big, heady bummer. Badly-written but with an intensive purpose.

I am getting better and better - EVERYDAY.

But I still need your help. Why wouldn't I?

Be paper.

Be loving, laughing, be Eugene trying to solve a Rubik's Cube because we talked about how cool it would be to do so. He just dropped it and scratched his head and is now pulling books off of my bookshelf while sitting on my bed.

I need your help, folks. Sorry for putting you off. The heart has always been on and is so heavy, man. So HEAVY.

Thank you. All of you.

I'm not heartless. I don't want to pick fights. I just want to continue to love more and to love you better.

These words don't do anything justice...but they do help.

They really do, you beautiful friend.

You've always opened my eyes.

I love you. And I'll continue to do so. You. Me. All of us.

I Miss You At Every Corner...

and at every stoplight and
every sign and billboard that I pass
every bug and blade of grass

I can't do time anymore
everyday is like a prison sentence
leading to a quick lethal injection before going to sleep

I want to wake up, friends

tonight is one minute til midnight
and I have don't have the will to spend time with myself

shirts are drying and trying to be shrunk to fit my body for Ollie's funeral tomorrow
I'd rather cry about myself than to cry for other people
I'd rather miss myself than somebody else
I'm waiting to polish my shoes
I'll look pretty on the outside
I think I'm looking a lot more now like I feel inside
and I'd rather have it that way

no more polished turds to go along with my shoes

I have everything that I wished for before and I don't fucking like it

tomorrow? Oh god, fuck - really?

fuck fuck fuck tonight's a lonely night and I'm not going to go out because I hate it when I go out too. It's just a bit more distracting and having empty conversations with somebody else other than myself can feel good

I'm going to see my sister and my new nephew and also see my father next week
Not prepared for that either. Last time I saw my father I was in a happier place then but I was sharing D's grief and It killed me because of what she was going through. i felt hopeless and spent days, months and years holding somebody shaking uncontrollably. My face would fill with tears and I'd either look up at the ceiling or the sky and wish to the gods that they would take all of her pain and give it to me.

Last time I saw Sindy and Brian was a good time, kind of. I was confused and the relationship was going to shit. D encouraged me - kind of told me to go and that maybe it would be good for me and that maybe I'd figure out what I wanted to do. I was excited to drive by myself to Vegas but the trip back was fucking horrible. I was broke, tired, even more confused and almost drove myself off of a cliff. I shudder inside when I hear Vegas from now on. Bad, bad last day and drive back.

Hopefully, I can convert some of the symbolism of a new, shining kid that I'll meet for the first time who shares the same name as the dead friend that I'll be saying goodbye to tomorrow into something cyclically positive for me to chew on when I get back to my crappy town. Hopefully. I think the love in my heart is part of the problem. My head kills me. My fucking thoughts and my stupid mistakes haunt me everyday. Nobody's around. I've been told that this is my fault. I'm not around. This is my fault.

I love you all - I really do.

I love myself sometimes. I really think I do.

And I miss you. I know I do.

Why does food always smell better when you don't make it yourself?

The pizza always smells better on the other side of the fence.

H Butt...

I am forever changed by knowing you.

My heart has grown.

I grow stronger everyday.

And hopefully, you'll want to hire a team of workers to transport what's inside of me now to wherever you may happen to be later in life.

If you'll still have me then.

I love you.

Even more now.

Sales Of A Deathman...

1 of 64

I felt it earlier

wanted to
and now that I'm here
I'm not feeling it

Like Hannibal sending the elephants back home
Like Hannibal telling crazy Murdock that he can bug B.A. incessantly
Like Emilia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh to turn back
Like telling moonlit Werewolves and hungry zombies to turn back
Like rewinding immaculate conception
Like Autobots ignoring deception
Like John Holmes sleeping off an erection

Not feeling it
I'm not

I

live
a
pretty
lonely
life

Bukowski?

I wish I had the words
to properly thank you

I love you and will

forever

BUT...we're done

DONE

And have been

For a long time now

Write me, still - please?

Stephen King Has Always Been My BFF...

For years I dreamed of having the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room . . . In 1981, I got the one I wanted and placed it in the middle of a spacious, skylighted study in the rear of the house. For six years, I sat behind that desk either drunk or wrecked out of my mind . . .

A year or two after I sobered up, I got rid of that monstrosity and put in a living room suite where it had been. . . . In the early nineties, before they moved on to their own lives, my kids sometimes came up in the evening to watch a baseball game or a movie and eat pizza. . . . I got another desk -- it's handmade, beautiful, and half the size of the T. rex desk. I put it at the far west end of the office, in a corner under the eave. . . . I'm sitting under it now, a fifty-three-year-old man with bad eyes, a gimp leg, and no hangover. I'm doing what I know how to do, and as well as I know how to do it. I came through all the stuff I told you about . . . and now I'm going to tell you as much as I can about the job. . . .

It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support-system for art. It's the other way around.

Kerouac? I loved you innocently...

Remember above all things, Kid, that to write is not difficult, not painful, that it comes out of you with ease, that you can whip up a little tale in no time, that when you are sincere about it, that when you want to impress a truth, it is not difficult, not painful, but easy, graceful, full of smooth power, as if you were a writing machine with a store of literature that is boundless, enormous, endless, and rich.

Still, it's a bit comical to think of Kerouac going through such rah-rah exercises before getting down to the actual act of writing. At some points, it begins to sound like one of Al Franken's Stuart Smalley sketches from Saturday Night Live: "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!"

In the years after he dropped out of Columbia, Kerouac was a merchant seaman, a brakeman on the Southern Pacific Railroad, a live-at-home dad, a runaway dad, and, through it all, a writer. As he dashed madly around the United States, hitching, driving, hopping on boxcars and into beds, and leaping up again to keep the toot going, he developed the writing method that mirrored his frenetic pace of life. In his "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" (1957), Kerouac called on writers to "begin not from preconceived idea of what to say about image but from jewel center of interest in subject of image at moment of writing, and write outwards swimming in sea of language to peripheral release and exhaustion. . . . " Such verbal freedom, with its inherent lack of structure, was a mixed blessing. By exploring his acute sense of the American vernacular, Kerouac, like Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams before him, loosened the collar of American prose. But by giving himself this latitude, he ensured that much of what came out of his typewriter and his pocket notebook was not real art. In the end, he would pay dearly for his attachment to this approach. From 1951 to 1956, Kerouac pounded out some 11 books of poetry and prose, all of which went unpublished.

But when his novel On the Road appeared at last in 1957, after years of haggling over changes with editor Malcolm Cowley, Kerouac became an overnight celebrity. Suddenly, everyone wanted a piece of the King of Beats. It is here that Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters 1957-1969 picks up. Kerouac was suddenly a one-man shopping stop for all things Beat. Travel articles, stories, jazz readings, plays -- you name it, and it was requisitioned from the eager author. Meanwhile, there was one party after the next, and Kerouac got progressively more inebriated at each event. A shy man, ordinarily generous and good-natured, Kerouac became combative when drunk, and he needed to be drunk in order to deal with his fame. Two years later, he wrote to his agent, Sterling Lord, almost asking for help: "I'm really now rapidly going to pot and on the verge of becoming a blob. . . . And what bothers me is the way I have to constantly drink to put up with nervous appointments . . . and vast nervous parties where everybody is staring at me and fulfilling their preconceptions of me as a drunken fool."

As fame used him, Kerouac tried frantically to use it, before the spell wore off. "I wanta get these masterpieces of mine published before everybody gets sick of me," he wrote to Lord during these heady years. And Lord responded valiantly, managing to place Kerouac's previously rejected manuscripts with domestic and foreign publishers everywhere. Kerouac published two books a year for several years, flooding the market with his work and raising the ire of critics who got the impression that he simply dashed off a book every few months. Some of their criticisms were indeed valid, but they were unnecessarily vicious. Kerouac's former mentor and champion, Kenneth Rexroth, began denouncing him in the New York Times Book Review, and Time magazine unleashed a persistent barrage of insults. One especially cruel critic wrote that "reading Mr. Kerouac's On the Road or The Subterraneans, I am reminded of nothing so much as an insistent and garrulous barroom drunk, drooling into your ear."

The more critics attacked him, the more unwilling Kerouac became to meet new people or see his old friends. He wrote to Gary Snyder of how disillusioned he had become: "I was in love with the world through blue purple curtains when I knew you and now I have to look at [the world] thru hard iron eyes." As his mother got older, Kerouac was forever cooking up schemes to bring all his family members together under one roof, and to keep away from the partying friends he had shared his life with. By the time of his death, he had cut himself off from all those former friends, becoming paranoid that he would be implicated in Allen Ginsberg's revolutionary politics. Instead, he stayed home and laid waste to himself with cases of liquor. "I only have one body and one soul and can't handle everything at the same time," he wrote in self-pity. Eventually, Kerouac got to the point where he couldn't handle anything at all, not even the thought of breaking the tape at the finish line. When held up to the bustling, bright, and wonderfully optimistic Kerouac of Atop an Underwood, these late letters tell a sad, cautionary tale.