Show Off What You Geek

jakegeeksbeatprose&poetry

When I was 13, I saw an episode of Freaks and Geeks where Lindsay and the slackers were assigned On the Road for their English class. The controversy caused by the book's subject matter alternative/outsider idealism and drug use during the episode led me to immediately go out and steal a copy. I was young then, and would never do such a thing now.

I read it cover to cover in three days, and would have finished sooner had the book not been taken away from me from the first day forth for reading during school hours, after being found hiding out in the bathroom for an hour desperately trying to finish part one of the book.

After that, I began going to my local library, where aside from Kerouac, I discovered Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, William Carlos Williams, Richard Brautigan, Robert Creeley, and outsiders Leonard Cohen and Charles Bukowski. As well as my personal favorite, William S. Burroughs, whose complete published works I have read and now own. I still remember reading Naked Lunch in one day on a Saturday from 10 a.m. until right before close at Zablocki Library in Milwaukee.

It was only a few weeks later that I rode the bus by myself to the Milwaukee Art Museum, somewhere my parents or public school failed to take me. But ‘I had to see what these guys were talking about.’ I remember telling my mother who was furious and worried sick, but looking back I know I had made her proud because I was beginning to educate myself about things my parents were never taught or exposed to. In the end, my parents not only didn't ground me, but discussed with me the things I had seen during my 'big day out,' which was only the beginning of the travels that lay ahead of me, and which reaffirmed the wanderlust I had already begun to feel while reading On the Road in that old Catholic School toilet stall.

The Beats and their collective bodies of work have shaped my life in more ways than I could ever imagine, expanding my tastes in music, art, film and philosophy. And without the library to inspire me to be something greater and cultivate my passions, sensitivities, and eccentricities, I may have fallen prey to the negative lifestyles of my peers, and maintained the ignorance which has been a primary source in their failures to rise above their means, the hateful kind of ignorance which I can still sadly hear not only in their voices today, but now the voices of their children. However, they are still young, and I can tell already much wiser that my peers and I at that age. I just hope they are able to find their own passions, as I did, and learn while they are young that you will only get done what you do for yourself.