digging now

“Oh, man! man! man!’ moaned Dean. “And it’s not even the beginning of it – and now here we are at last going east together, we’ve never gone east together, Sal, think of it, we’ll dig Denver together and see what everybody’s doing although that matters little to us, the point being we know what IT is and we know TIME and we know that everything is really FINE.” Then he whispered, clutching my sleeve, sweating, “Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they are counting the miles, they are thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there – and all the time they’ll get there anyway, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won’t be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end. Listen! Listen! ‘Well now,’ “he mimicked, “ ‘I don’t know – maybe we shouldn’t get gas at this station. I read recently in National Petroffious Petroleum News that this kind of gas has a great deal of O-Octane gook in it and someone once told me it even had semi-official high-frequency cock in it, and I don’t know, well I just don’t feel like it anyway . . .’ Man, you dig all this.”

- Jack Kerouac, On the Road, pp 197 – 198, Penguin Books, 1999, United States of America