Hemingway, Kerouac, and Fun Activities

Sulky and I were just juicing about The Sun Also Rises (you can tell he's reading it by some of the things he's been saying lately).

Sulks raised a question that comes up often enough: "I wonder how these people had the money to do these things?"

My gut response was "Maybe it was cheaper back then ... ?" which reeks of golden-age mythology that "everything was easier before."

I remember at 18 thinking how great it must have been in the 1950s to go drive around the country like Sal and Dean, and lamenting how America had gotten too dangerous and full of serial killers for anyone to actually hitch across the country anymore.

Living in Paris briefly a few years down the road, I felt the same pangs whenever I passed a cafe and saw a delicious-looking cake or some old guy sipping a little coffee and continued on because I thought I couldn't afford that kind of thing.

It's lamentable that hindsight allows us to slip into this bent nostalgia for activities that, when these authors did them, probably seemed as natural to them as several things that are readily possible for the children of the New Era Age.

So instead of getting sad about the faded glory of driving through Denver or lazing around in a Parisian flat, it's time for a catalog of awesome stuff we can still do.

1) Blogs (thanks to Sulky for the sugg): One day people will probably say "It must've been great when you could just sit around and blog, but now we have this other thing, so you can't do that anymore."

2) Fucked-up poor countries: The supposition being that eventually those will somehow disappear: "Man it must've been so awesome to go fight poverty and genocide in Darfur. Too bad we don't have that anymore."

3) Chinatown bus: When our generation's luminaries get discovered and it is revealed that those of them living on the East Coast used to ride these things, the Fung Wah and the 2000 Coach will seem like impossible relics -- cheap, dirty, adventurous links between some of the stinkingest cities in the world.

4) Poker: The Internet, Matt Damon and ESPN are already making/have already made this reckless toothgrind wholesome and common. Beware: Different forces are doing the same thing to recreational drugs of all varieties.

5) AIDS: When this gets cured, people will wonder about how thrilling and adventurous a dance with death sex had been.

6) T-shirts: I'm not sure what's going to happen to them, but the outlook isn't good.

And finally, several fun things that are now dying or being reinvented.

1) Zines -- now blogs.

2) Porn was once rare and harder to come by -- and sometimes controlled by the Mafia.

3) Race (???)