Beat icon Neal Cassady died on February 4, 1968.
Walking home from at party in San Miguel de Allende Cassady fell asleep by train tracks. The night was cold and wet. The next morning his 3D body was discovered in a coma. This death from exposure launched the outlaw traveler from this 2D world into 4D eternity.
Time has been cruel to the memory of Kerouac’s road legend. Critics have called him a fool. Milleniums see his antics as the act of an addict. Having recently read ON THE ROAD I was enthralled to accompany Neal across the country. Cassady had been reared by a wino father on Denver’s skid row.
“Among the hundreds of isolated creatures who haunted the streets of lower downtown Denver there was not one so young as myself. Of these dreary men who had committed themselves, each for his own good reason, to the task of finishing their days as penniless drunkards, I alone, as the sharer of their way of life, presented a replica of childhood to which their vision could daily turn, and in being thus grafted onto them, I became the unnatural son of a few score beaten men.”
Neal Cassady lives in the minds of wanderers.
And all straights consider us ‘fools’, because they know nothing of the road and even less of friendship.
To hear PULL MY DAISY by Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, and Neal Cassady please go to the following URL
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3BxcGz_4ns