RIP Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

He loved the sounds and the heft of words, though the first words he heard were not English words. Mais non. They were joual, the dialect of working class French Canadians spoken by his parents in Lowell, Massachusetts, where they attended church, prayed and raised a family, though a son named Gerard died as a child, leaving brother Jack alone and lonely, weeping daily and knowing in his heart that there must have been a hundred words for crying, much as Eskimos had a vast wilderness of words for snow, which he imagined as frozen tears, and so he grew up thinking of himself as a lowly Canuck, found salvation first in the blues on records that gave him permission to experience his pain and later in the city he heard alive and in person, the Prez Lester Young, and Billie Holiday, the Queen, wrote without stopping, without thinking, let words pour out, filled endless pages, went on the road, covered mile after mile, traversed the continent with companions Neal and Allen, the radio blaring, the landscape blurring and words eating up the miles, and so he lived in sadness and in joy, and in joy and sadness, killing the pain anyway he could, and so now I remember him, angel headed hipster, 100 years after his birth, March 12, 1922, RIP Jack Kerouac