Dear Mr. Bageant,
I've been reading your work for sometime now and thank you so much for never disappointing and always bringing a bit of a smile to my face.
I am twenty-five years old and work at a Costco in California. It's an awful, obscene place where Americans barely capable of walking sweat up and down the aisles looking for the sixty gallon drum of mayonnaise or the 300-inch television or the ten pound bag of pre-shredded cheese, while breaking from their binge gluttony only to queue like bipedal cows before the sample tables. It's very depressing and in futile protest I've stopped eating anything while at work.
I don't know what's happened to us. Was this corruption always there but just latent or unattainable for most?
I love my country and consider myself a patriot of the first order, but the America I love was pretty much dead before I was ever born. Kerouac is gone. Miles Davis and Lester Bangs are gone. Bukowski, Burroughs, Tennessee Williams, Skip James and Son House -- all gone. Even R. Crumb got out while the gettin' was good and he now lives in France.
I don't mean to minimize the savage injustices of America's past (they're known) but there seems to be something free and wild and ALIVE about America's yesterdays that I just don't see today. People, especially people my age, seem happy to drive gas guzzling status symbols or chat on their cellphone, computer, videogame, colon probe, or, glory of glories, slurp Starbucks -- and they're not bad people. They say "good morning" and are kind and give my car a jump when it needs it. They just aren't eaten alive by all this shit (the war, the greed, the pollution and exploitation, etc.). Or maybe they are but don't talk about it and just drown their screaming men in the shit ocean of consumerism. Whiskey works better for me.
So I'm gone. I've got some cash saved and as soon as I get enough I'm leaving for Southeast Asia where money lasts longer. I'm scared to fuckin' death of the idea of busting my ass for the rest of my life just to get by and not starve in the fuckin' street. I'd rather have more time and less stuff.
You're a good man, Mr. Bageant. I'm drunk at three a.m. with the next day at my heels I couldn't ask for a better friend. Thank you again.
Sincerely,
Adam
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Hi Adam,
Judging from the many young friends and readers who have come through my house in Virginia, and from emails, you speak for am helluva lot of people in your generation -- or at least far more than you may suspect. I've felt the same way for a couple of decades, and for a while deluded myself that it was just the nostalgia of age. But the truth just wouldn't go away. And now, by fuck and bejeezus, I hear your voice and the voices of thinking and passionate younger people building and building, mostly on the Internet.
And I cannot help but think that Allen Ginsberg, perhaps happily reincarnated as a pole dancer in Bangkok, or Bukowski and Hunter getting sloshed together in hell, are toasting your defiant feral 3 A.M. howl at the face of Moloch himself.
So before you finish that bottle in the blackest hour of this good night, pour a few drops on the floor for the Buk, Hunter, Robert Johnson, and Kerouac. And when you get to Asia, and if a pole dancer knowingly winks at you with a saintly twinkle in the eye, wink back. These glorious American bastards are your spiritual fathers.
In art and labor,
Joe
