How I made the Beat Generation giggle
I was in a book shop on Back Wynd street in Aberdeen buying a book by Jack Kerouac when the lady behind the cash register started to giggle. She was in here sixties looking at me and Miss T and giggling hard.
After she gave me the book, it was called “On the Road“, she started explaining. “This book was the must read book of my generation. Everyone was reading it, you must be what, 20 years old?” I said that I’m 22.
“Well, when I was your age everyone was reading Jack Kerouac and the other guy that just died, what was his name?” I had no idea about who she was talking and I felt sorry because she started punching her head with her fist trying to remember and it wasn’t a pretty site. “Are you talking about J.D. Salinger?” said Miss T and she stopped hitting her forehead.
“It’s interesting for me to see how your generation reads the same books we did at your age. Things didn’t really change, we did everything that you do, but we had a different name for it. My daughter still gives me the look when I tell her that I used to go and rave in some basement and after that run from the police.” And she was right, nothing that my generation does it’s new to the world. We do the same things that people before us did and rename them to feel like we invented a new culture. And after we did that we destroy it with a virus. If that virus was called hippies a few generations ago, now it’s called hipsters. But it’s the same thing, how ever you look at it.
I think the only true original persona, the one that created the bohemian hedonist culture is King Solomon. From him to this day, everything is just reinventing and renaming the same thing. His the one that gets all the giggles in the end.
May 7, 2010 1:54 am
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