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[mossyhairdontcare]

The fundamental misinterpretation of Jack Kerouac’s On the road and how the male gaze tortured and ultimately killed Neal Cassady and Dean Winchester.

On the road is one of those books that periodically trends every other decade as every generation rediscovers it. Its story about leaving your everyday life behind to go on a drug-fueled cross-country trip meeting the most exciting people of your time never failed to draw in the disillusioned youth. The book has been long considered to be a sort of right of passage to adulthood. It provides the type of escapism that you could almost believe is achievable even for you, the only thing you’d need is the courage to get on the road. Kerouac inspired an onslaught of artists who went on to create the romantic myth of the American road.

But all this is not what the book was written about. Because this story? Is not a romance but a tragedy.

Neal Cassady was born in the Denver slums as the second youngest to a dozen children and from an early age, he was surrounded by violence as his stepbrothers would torment and beat him and his father. His alcoholic dad later separated from his mother and he raised Neal mostly alone away from his stepsiblings and sister. Neal went to school and proved to be an exceptionally bright child only he had trouble with structure and discipline. He consumed a copious amount of literature and movies. During summers Neal and his father hitchhiked and train hopped across the country to find work and so Neal’s love for the road was cultivated. He loved driving and was very good at it just like everything he took an interest in. By Neals admission, he stole his first car at the ripe age of fourteen but Neals charming skill of storytelling often came with embellishments just for dramatic purposes, so we can never be quite sure. At fifteen he met Justin Brierly who’d have a great positive impact on Neals life and education but also allegedly introduced him to gay-sex and prostitution. During his late teens, Neal already had an independent life mostly staying with one friend after another. He was charming and know how to impress and con people to meet his needs. This chain of friends is how ultimately he got to New York at the age of twenty with his sixteen-year-old wife LuAnne, where he met Jack Kerouac and other members of a forming new counterculture.

It was just a couple of years after the second world war that was preceded by the great depression. Generations of Americans were traumatized and young adults tried to comprehend what exactly are they supposed to do with their lives. As usual great suffering is often followed by a great amount of hedonism. For the young, tradition is meaningless because it represents the senseless tragedies of the last thirty years. College-educated artists rebelled against conventions and were hungry for alternatives as for example their embrace of easter spirituality and jazz. To this circle had the working-class Neal arrived and soon people were infatuated with his charm, intelligence, his exciting criminal life, but also this mad energy he possessed.

But the illusion would never last forever, after the excitement over his energetic personality died down, people would realize that Neal was a conman, actually crazy, and in fact not a good friend. He would rotate through friends and crowds never stying in on place for too long. There were some exceptions.

His lifelong friendship with Allen Ginsberg was more based on Allen’s infatuation with Neal, than equal attachment. The first time they met was followed by a very intensive and sexual couple of nights but then Neal’s attention shifted to other women. (who were also not his wife) Allen unlike many others appreciated Neal’s intelligence and saw true worth in his intellect. Inturn Neal envied the kind of education these guys had and was happily leading Allen on if it meant he gets to converse with him regularly. Neal’s sexuality was complicated. He was bisexual. One of his fantasies was living in a triad with two men and a woman. In his letters, he sometimes calls himself bisexual sometimes straight. His sexual relationships with men were very transactional, but considering how he got introduced to gay sex maybe that’s understandable. Ninety percent of the time he refused to be physically intimate with Allen but had no problem promising so if Allen comes and visits him. Once he came Neal tended to be inconsiderate and let Allen hang out while he was having sex with women. Despite all of this they had a lifelong friendship.

His other friendship with Jack Kerouac writer of On the road is the one that really describes Neal’s whole life the best. If you read On the road you might get the impression that Jack was a shy but well-educated guy, who followed Neal around starstruck with his lifestyle but in reality, Jack was just as mad as Neal. He repeatedly dropped out of university, went to navy boot camp, got kicked out. The official reason was a diagnosis of schizophrenia but that was incorrect. Reading his file they described him as a bright man who gets bored very quickly, has trouble adjusting to structure, and has a deep-rooted disregard for authority. Funny enough they also mention a wild imagination which they mischaracterized as delusions, notably one of being a writer. Kerouac later told a journalist that he was messing with the doctors so that might swayed their judgment too. Looking at this list one might notice that these traits are very familiar to what today we would see in adhd diagnosis. What is an even more likely possibility knowing, that Kerouac was known to only be able to write if he used stimulant drugs. He had the same type of high energy as Neal and bonded with him quite quickly. Their minds turned to the same rhythm. Looking at Neal’s mental health we see similar patterns. He was a very bright child with a vivid imagination who had trouble keeping to the school structure. From a very early age, he was hypersexual and very probably had a conduct disorder contributing to his criminal activities. But that would be just a prerequisite to what he developed in his twenties. It is known that having adhd especially with higher than average intelligence makes it more likely that someone develops bipolar personality disorder which usually develops around the early twenties, but can be triggered as well by the use of drugs. Bipolar is genetic, and while Neal never got an official diagnosis even though we’ll see he tried multiple times, his sister was admitted to a psychiatric hospital where they diagnosed her with manic depression which is the old term for bipolar. These two in some sense found in each other what alienated them from the rest of their peers.

Things started to turn for the worse in their friendship and their life after the publishing of On the road. Neal lived with his third wife and kids and after a failed attempt at trying to have Jack live with them (as it was known that Jack and Carolyn had feelings for each other), their friendship was in a cold state.

Neal at this time was trying really hard to have a normal, regular life. He loved his kids and they never described him as anything other than a loving father but at the same time, he had many other abandoned children all across the US. He was either working at the railroads or was an enthusiastic stay-at-home dad. His relationship with Carolyn was the most honest one he ever had, despite his problematic sexual behavior. He cheated on his partners like it was unexpectable of him not to, he was described as violent and animalistic during sex by multiple partners and did rape Carolyn along multiple other women, and had sex with a Mexican child prostitute. She was a best friend to him trough out his life even after their divorce. Carolyn was one of the most prolific beat writers and a woman certainly ahead of her time. Their intelligence matched perfectly, their conversation would attract crowds of listeners. According to her he did truly try to have this family life, but would routinely fall out. He had episodes of mania when he just disappeared for months, he also had depressive episodes with multiple suicide attempts that he would regularly write about in his letters. He tried to get himself diagnosed but did not succeed, he described his mind descending into madness, and was very aware of how his condition was out of his control. This is when the fame of On the road caught up with him.

This is where we come to how misunderstood that book was. Neither Kerouac nor Neal understood why young people were fascinated by this book. They never saw it as inspirational, they never wanted to influence young people to do drugs and crime, they were quite ashamed of a good couple of things in the book especially both of them being very religious. But huge flocks of young hippies would idolize them and give them legendary status. It was the same type of voyeuristic escapism that Neal's friends saw in him during the '50s. The huge difference between all these people, that for most of them this is just a phase in their life. For them, this is a sort of freedom and fun they would like to have in their twenties, but for Jack and Neal, two mentally ill people that was their whole life. When you are up people find you entertaining and envy you, but when you coming down none of them are there to see it. What the book was supposed to be about and what is a worthy addition to world literature is the voice of the book. The beat generation mostly consisted of educated people who had a very traditional form of literacy demanded from them by universities and publishers, but as the counter-cultural ambitions grew they were all trying to find new sounds for writing. Allan and Jack were fascinated by Nail’s voice but especially his letters. (They are published I highly recommend reading them.) As much as Neal wanted he never succeed to become a writer. He had trouble just sitting down and writing, but what he did is write letters to his friends where ever he was in America, he’d use the back of a recipe a napkin anything, and write with such voice that when his friends read it they heard him speaking from the paper. Jack and Allan turned these letters into the distinguished voice of beat writing. That was On the road and Howl. A style experiment and a voice recording of the Nail Cassady conserved to listen for ages to come.

Neal’s feeling on the adoration of fans would change though. Once young people found the legendary Neal they wanted to experience the on-the-road magic with him. They would invite him to parties and road trips, the most famous of these being with the group Pranksters in their green schoolbus on copious amounts of drugs driving across the USA. The writers who would later encapture these trips also admitted to embellishing Neal’s character to legendary status, when in reality they were so high they could not even remember most of their trips. Neal didn’t particularly enjoy the crowd, these young people were different from his old friends. They were political something Neal never was. In truth, none of the early Beat Generation writers were, except Allan Ginsberg and then later the Beatniks. He and some others were the only ones who managed to transfer into the hippy community. They were extremely political and had a leading role in the movements during the ’60s. But for The Beat generation, the homosexual experimentations of the area were more about the anti-traditional status of gay-sex than gay rights. (At the first party in On the road, the reason for one friend’s abstinence was going to prison for killing a gay man for hitting on him.)

Neal’s mind was rapidly deteriorating from the drugs. Carolyn recalls one of their last meetings past their divorce. Neal had his head rested on her lap and told her, that he hates going back to the road, that he feels like people treat him like a dancing monkey. After this Neal moved to Mexico with his new girlfriend. Then one day, high on drugs he left the house, stumbled upon a Mexican wedding where he stayed for a bit, and then started to walk along the railroad. He collapsed along the way and died at the age of 41. Jack who crushed by fame became an even heavier alcoholic died a year later suffering a hemorrhage as a result of his addiction. The hippie kids grew up and became the “Boomer Generation” with completely average lives while many others from the beat generation suffered very similar fates to Neal and Jack. It’s a sobering experience reading through the list of how these writers died. But then again, living through the great depression and the second world war era, even the not born mentally ill were lost to their minds. The term "Beat generation" is attributed to Jack Kerouac and describes the weariness of the postwar generation.

And now I’d like to bring up Dean Winchester. Not gonna lie I have beef with Eric Kripke for this one. One notable thing about the book that it was first published in a censored version and only later in 2007 did the uncensored “On the road, The original scroll” got released. During censoring the homosexual relations were removed. Supernatural started in 2005. Neal Cassady was known to be bisexual before that, but whether any reader knew that depended on their knowledge of the beat generation, and till this day, sadly many people only read this one book from the era. This book is simply wildly different read out of context. When I first watched the show I didn’t know the connection, but I was familiar with the tropes and archetypes. The muscle car-driving, chick-magnet badass monster hunter Dean Winchester was in my belief a completely ironic take on Dean. Genre pieces usually start out with genre stereotypical characters but then start to get recontextualized quickly. Even when I learned about the connection on the road I believed that it is an intended ironical take that the show is supposed to develop out from, but learning more and more about production details and Kripke now I believe that I was so very wrong. Kripke read a fun escapist book and took the sex and road trips out of it and without a second thought dropped it into the show. It’s incredible to me how much of Neal’s story made it to Dean, the road tripping with an alcoholic father, the love for cars, pool hustling, and still even without knowing Neal’s sexuality and mental health. The ADHD!Dean headcanon got a lot of traction this year and for very solid reasons, and someone with adhd I can confidently say he fits the symptoms to a T.

But where the true tragedy comes in is with the audience. Kripke had good professionals next to him who stirred him towards more complex stories and characters, but the very first demographic of the show was watching Supernatural the same way people read on the road. Unironical escapist fantasy. But as we all know the show managed to grow out of it and so did the audience. The new fans are mostly women, mentally ill, queer, and neurodivergent people. Escapism is of course a very broad term, but for them, it wasn’t the cool parts of the show that was worth fantasizing about. For young men watching the firsts seasons monsters were just that monsters, to this demographic monsters, are a stand-in for all their trauma and suffering they have to fight through. For the first killing, the monster is the win, for them, it’s surviving it. Writers understood that change. Suddenly the writer fulfilling the escapist fantasies of the male gaze infinitely tormenting the characters in the meantime, wasn’t the genius artist, it was the final monster. So when we arrive at the end of the show and we get two heroic death and a season-one-esq episode I wonder, why do they go back to it? Was this episode intended for the demographic that watched the show 15 years ago and might be tuned back in for the final? ( and the answer is obviously yes who do we kidding…)

Now, some might say, “but it’s fictional”, well Neal Cassady wasn’t fictional. Popular culture has a direct correlation to how we treat those it represents. Maybe the first time you meet the ADHD!dean headcanon you wonder, but did the writer know? How did it stay consistent for 15 years? The answer to that is that the hyperactive personality is already a character archetype that was inspired unintentionally by adhd and bipolar people. You know and love many of these characters, but it doesn’t get recognized that their charming energy we love so much is a symptom of two very complex disorders. When I read on the road it became my favorite but I wasn’t exactly sure why. I didn’t find the prospect of traveling all that fantastical but, I did feel a very close kinship with its two protagonists. What I didn’t quite understand yet that is I have the same kind of madness they do.

People in real life love socializing with charming energetic people, who do dumb and improbable things all the time, who have wild stories to tell, but they don’t stick around for the comedown. I remember begging my friends not to invite me out to drink anymore bc it was hurting me and I couldn’t resist the impulse once I had the chance to go but they never believed me. Sure you can treat fictional characters as entertainment, concentrate on the fun parts but to hide away the whole truth that none of us enjoy being the dancing monkey? On the road is not a romantic road trip story but a tragedy and the same is true for Dean. Ultimately the audience yearning for fun murdered both him and Neal Cassady.

[mossyhairdontcare]

this happened again last night at hella mega in denver

every person can feel freddie’s presence in their souls when they sing MAMAAAAAA UUHHHH, I DONT WANNA DIE, I SOMETIMES I WISH I’VE NEVER BEEN BORN AT ALL with all the air in their lungs i’m not joking

[mossyhairdontcare]

I'll accept any kind of moron in to my heart, except an oxymoron, so if you're one of those "punk purists", whatever that means, then you can just get out, but, before you go, ladies and gentleman, take my advice, pull down your pants, and slide on the ice.

[mossyhairdontcare]

He, the leanan sidhe, and I, The willing fool,

utterly enthralled by sweet, all too present tenderness.

His gentle guidance, and warm encouragement, his light,

an inspiration unparalleled by any fleeting passion.

my heart burns brightly under his fire,

and all that is false in me is stripped away.

the pencils scraping, the click of the camera shutter, the song rising in my throat, they speak of him.

my muse.

not some distant, untouchable idol,

but a silly boy, with laughing eyes.

a scholar, an artist, a man.

a tender fool, enthralled himself in the warmth I offer.

I, his leanan sidhe, and he the willing fool.

heartsick, longing for understanding, eager to share the same.

to whisper secret codes from favored books,

to sing the same love songs,

to dream together.

to be seen, not as a catch, but as a complex person,

with undesirable traits.

with odd interests, and impractical dreams.

to be loved for his oddness.

to be a person.

[mossyhairdontcare]

Found a dozen eggs in the middle of the woods. Still cold even though it's a hundred degrees outside. Is this a faerie trick?

[mossyhairdontcare]

The Goblim Art Gallery is open ! Let’s come and admire

Alexandra Kehayoglou’s soft carpets :

Tim Pugh’s lovely arrangements :

Andy Goldsworthy’s land art :

Marc Bourlier’s sweet wooden spirits hoard :

Olafur Eliasson’s dirt installation :

[mossyhairdontcare]

[ ID: tweet by @ Skoog reading, “{slowly digs both of my feet into the wet sand} {whispers} planet shoes ]

[mossyhairdontcare]

MildlyInteresting dump

The corrosion on this water tap looks like a map

This spectrum of eggs from my mom’s chickens.

The chain of Starburst wrappers I’ve been building for three years

My friend’s smoked cauliflower looks like an explosion.

I took a photograph at the exact same time this photographer took hers - and caught her flash lightning the scene.

Fan looks like it’s missing a blade

My friend’s cat was recently put down, and the vet gave him this paw print of his cat that is full of flower seeds to be planted

This half dollar cut out by hand

The apple’s skin I cut looks like from a low-poly game

My friends bathroom is also the entrance to his basement

These horses have tail lights

This airport has free arcade games to help pass the time

My roommate painted ornaments of everyone in our house.

Photo I took of a lake through the lense of binoculars looks like a planet.

The snow/ice in this pic looks like the ocean

This can of paint looks like a cat.

This tiny plant growing in my car window

The pole in this picture makes it look like two different pictures.

The way this dead cactus decomposed, leaving only the spines behind

My mom found a baby owl on the porch behind the firewood

This moss covered boot found in the woods.

My school’s library has noise-level guides that change colour when it gets too loud

The way this snow stayed in place when the trunk was opened/closed

[mossyhairdontcare]

so i just double checked and yes, the 1855 toronto circus clown riots DID happen right outside my old college. 

as in if i were sent back in time from the spot i stood every day to catch the streetcar, i’d be treated to the sight of firemen and circus clowns beating the shit out of each other whilst in and just outside a brothel

[mossyhairdontcare]

hi yes i'm gonna need a list

My favorite jokes in M*A*S*H are the ones that make no fucking sense

[mossyhairdontcare]

I love tumblr. I love that tumblr is the best social media site of 2021.

Every other site has spent the last decade perfecting the art of targeted ads. I am a wallet of flesh and blood which must be stripped bare and profiled and picked apart for the maximally efficient way to squeeze profit from my presence. Every other site will fold and morph itself to a shape of my liking - like a fairy tale trickster stealing memories and taking their mold - to lull me into compliance and loosen my coin purse.

Facebook sees me searching fitness equipment and injects my timeline with athletic wear ads. Reddit profiles the subreddits I follow and eagerly promotes a new coding bootcamp or cloud service at every turn. Google overhears me lamenting over my moving to-do list on voice call and fills in my “how much to tip movers” query before I’ve gotten the third word typed out.

Tumblr never even tried.

They could have. The information is there. The basic infrastructure, presumably, exists. Tumblr can recommend me tags based on tags I follow, blogs based on blogs I follow, even posts that for one reason or another may strike my fancy. Tumblr could be - SHOULD be - funneling this framework into advertising, as the only means that free-to-use social media platforms can turn a profit in our capitalistic hellscape.

They just don’t.

Today I saw an ad for treating Hyperhidrosis - a condition, I think, in which a person sweats too much - and I saw it twice, four posts apart, and it is so incredibly benignly impersonally ineptly untargeted toward me compared to all other pinpoint-aimed advertising that I’m endeared to it. Tumblr knows NOTHING about me. 8 years, 51,000 likes, and tumblr has not learned a THING about me.

Advertisements for a mattress? Shitty mobile game ads that don’t make even the slightest pretense at being anything other than a candy crush rip-off? Choose-your-own adventure games either about Royal Espionage or Choosing The Wrong Dress For Your Date with ZERO in-between.

And then this. This here. The culmination, the crown-jewel of tumblr’s nihilistic non-compliance with the state of social media advertising. Any pretense of capitalistic exchange is abandoned at the gas station by the side of the road. This is not a company. This is not a product. This is not anything that fulfills the contract of consumer and seller. 

THIS. THIS IS WHAT TUMBLR HAS TO OFFER INSTEAD.

“Pour vinegar on your bread, fuck you.”

“Put it in the garbage, fuck you.”

“Your wife says you’re a fucking dumbass, fuck you.”

That’s it. That’s the advertisement. You vinegar-breadless cuck. You virgin extraordinaire bereft of bread and garbage can. I am fucking your wife right now in our vinegar-soaked motel bed. She puffs a cigarette which I pulled from the trashcan and we both laugh heartily at her recounts of your immasculine ineptitude. I don’t want your money. I don’t want anything from you. Fuck you. 

Amazing. Amazing. What a state of things to ring in 2021. What a great platform we all collectively choose to be on.

[mossyhairdontcare]

give me more cottagecore posts that are actually informative.

show me your bread recipe

tell me how to make soap

tell me how you make soup

show me how to tie herbs together for drying so they stay when they shrink (please)

tell me about what edible flowers also repel bad bugs.

[mossyhairdontcare]

coping with the pain of living by being a little silly

[mossyhairdontcare]

Drum noise

[mossyhairdontcare]

HE

You guys just have to trust me on this one and click here okay?

[mossyhairdontcare]

HOME

[mossyhairdontcare]

Unpopular opinion: I love clowns

I love clowns. I love the art of clowning and the humor that it outlines. I love the harlequin and the sad clown. I love the loud gregarious clowns who rush to smile and the tiny ones who do little sneaky jokes. I love clowns who are not in clown make-up; people classically trained to be clowns like Geoffrey Rush and Robin Williams, or the self taught clowns like Bill Murray. I love clowns who are in excessive and elaborate make up like Cirque du Soleil. I love the art and the style and the comradery.

My parents worked as clowns when I was a baby, my mother would paint people’s faces while my father made balloon animals. That was a rare blissful time for them before they realized they could never love each other forever, but at that moment in time they were rainbow colored and smiling.

I used clowning in high school to fight against my depression, my anxiety, and to explore my sexuality. I adore wearing make up, especially eye-liner, but I am crippled by the fear of wearing in public; being a clown gave me an escape, it let me explore that part of myself and let me see who I was and what I wanted to be. My best friend at the time started doing drag while being a clown, blurring the already hazy lines that existed when people looked at such a beautiful boy until no one could tell and no one cared.

I know clowns can be creepy; there’s certainly media shoehorning them into it. I know many people don’t like them, but being a clown has only ever brought me, my friends, and my family a sense of joy and understanding.  I love clowns.