Essay

So I'm going to try to write an essay. Topic is, what is beat in the 21st Century? I mean, what does it mean to be beat now as opposed to back in the Jack Kerouac day?

It's the same form with a new red dress, I guess. Beat is not depression, which is all gray, nothing looks beautiful and you want to die. Beat, well you're suffering, there's pain and anguish and grief, immersed in the helpless and exquisite beauty of life. Seeing suffering humanity, knowing the world is all just a passing show, nothing lasts, you can't take even a hair with you after you go, everything you have done, said, felt, owned, all is for nothing in the end. Like Son of David in Ecclesiastes said, yeah, he sure was beat.

But that was way back, and I am writing of now. Here and now. When you're beat, you take it on, take the suffering on, full and pure, no going back, no excuses, no escape. Wrap that suffering around like a mink stole, warm in the beat, the beat of the human howl, the wonderment at all being nothing yet all being beautiful, just because it doesn't last, never will, never did.

When Jack lived, it was blue light of TV screens seen through suburban windows mummifying snug homebound families, as war machines got built in cheerful union factories and everyone had bread in the belly. It was air conditioners and big fast cars driving down new interstates. It was post world war two booms of babies, booms of industry, forgetting in lotus orgies of deodorants and Madison Avenue salmon colored ads with aproned housewives and blacksuited men, little cherub cheeked white children with curls.

Now the same toils in bomb factories with high tech videogame screens where enemies can be robotically eviscerated, housewives are now big wage earners in masses of pointy toe and stilettoe heeled shoes and designer suits walking halls of huge corporations, going home to microwave dinner, blue light transformed to glowing computer screens in every room, teenagers weirdly slammed between messages of lubricity and abstinence, the beat, the beat, muffled by modern media and glittering commodities. Same beat, different tune.

And even in the evils, the massacres and madnesses, still there is beauty, with unbearable light of sheer mad existence, each second alive an eternity of bliss and suffering.

So it's still all beat. I'm beat. I hear it every day I live it every second, it screams inside me like steamtrain whistle, like blues in junky corner of sad alley, like subway "screeeee", like hot days on hot planet that cooks me like hotcake on griddle, like skyscraper ecstasies, millennial beat, beat, beat.