When his daughter, Jan, was ill with the kidney disease that eventually killed her, the Estate made sure she never got a penny. There's all kind's of vested interests in Lowell, MA. He was that drunk on Old Grandad near the end, he could've signed, wrote anything in his speedy-bop-de-bop Zen master state.

Yes, indeed.  He was an alcoholic until the end and most of the Dulouz Legend, after Visions of Cody is a serious drunkards plea for salvation. Not the Zen master Ginsberg would have us believe.  For the last decade he could only write whilst out of his tree on booze and benzedrine.

He was the only person Timothy Leary had a bad trip with, as he wouldn't leave the barfly persona he brought with him. Drank a full bottle of bourbon to escape the effects of LSD.  I was told by a dealer once, that a couple of lines of coke would have also done the trick.

^Probably not. One can replicate such experiences by listening to the non-swing music of Sun Ra - pretty ugly.

I had some work dealings with a dishonourable chap who turned out to be an ex-H addict who had spent the last decade in Thailand and who had reinvented himself as a legitimate "oil and gas engineering manager."  He found a connection for c and the rest is an ugly history of a sociopath, who eventually left his wife and child (for the the third time, different families) because he loved c and getting high more than them.

I'm looking forward to the day that particular junky is found dead.

C with booze is a particulary splendid high, but just look at the crew of pirates your with.  Comes with the territory I guess, ugly c heads, the center of their own Sun Ra like universe, where everything revolves around them.

Last edited by The Ace Face (2009-08-09 08:47:44)

Coke appears to be wonderful but it's ugly. With Sun Ra, it's the other way around.

I dig Sun Ra, only when he's swinging and often you only get that on one track of the album. Indeed, very profound and true from '66.

C is the ultimate drug of avarice, there's a morality play in it. It makes you greedy, self obsessed and obnoxious. Creeps up on you like you're Alabamy Bound with Santo Pecora & The Tailgaters and the next thing you now, booze is just background radiation and you can never go home again and delight in getting pissed with your mates.  Not for a very long time.

And Kerouac, lonely in his room knowing that to write anything he would have to get all bennied up and full of road house corn and write everything in an all night mammoth session, a prisoner to spontaneous prose. For something truly awful, check out the Rhino box set of Kerouac's poetry.  Awful. And yet, I loved that man.

Last edited by The Ace Face (2009-08-10 13:40:57)

Some of some of his best work is his least known. Visions of Gerard is one of my desert island books. A masterpiece.