The Essentials According to Jack Kerouac

I took a leaf from Mayee's book and answered the "What Kind of Writer Are You" quiz in Facebook. The result says I'm the "Jack Kerouac kind". Not sure what that meant, I immediately googled his name. Voracious reader as I am, I honestly can't remember having spent sleepless nights devouring words from his books.

I found his list of thirty "essentials" interesting and for fun I checked out how close to being his kind can I ever get:

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy - check
   
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening - check
   
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house - work in progress
   
4. Be in love with your life - check
   
5. Something that you feel will find its own form - hmmmm, still thinking
   
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind - i think
   
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow - work in progress
   
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind - work in progress
   
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual - hmmmm not sure
   
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is - check
    
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest - needs pondering
    
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you - check
    
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition - uh-oh...will work it
    
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time - hmmmm
    
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog - check
    
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye - check
    
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yrself - check
    
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea - check
    
19. Accept loss forever - work in progress
    
20. Believe in the holy contour of life - check
    
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind - check
    
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better - check
    
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning - work in progress
    
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge - work in progress
    
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it - not trying
    
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form - not sure
    
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness - check
    
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better - check
    
29. You're a Genius all the time - the secret
    
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven - work in progress
    

Now, if only I could get a good serving of his talent I'd probably be writing to my heart's content somewhere in the boondocks.