OK Boys & Girls!

Time to share what we all got this wonderful Holiday Season!

I’ll go first.

On The Road — The Original Scroll: Unabridged on 10 CD’s, this is the “legendary first draft” of my boy Jack’s masterpiece. Why legendary? If you don’t know this story, you should. Kerouac wrote on the entire novel in, like, 3 weeks…from start to finish. Influenced heavily by improvisational jazz, Kerouac felt that you just needed to write — and do nothing else. Except maybe take speed. Which he took lots of. Doing nothing else meant things like no revision and even — get this — no putting another piece of paper into the typewriter once you got to the end of a page. So he had the girl he was banging at the time tape together reams of paper so Kerouac could just sit there and write. Or, if you ask Truman Capote, type. The words just flowed from Kerouac…like notes from, say, Charlie Parker — who Kerouac idolized. What’s this all mean? No punctuation. No paragraph structure. Fuck grammar rules! In other words, none of the bullshit you dealt with in English class. And using everyone’s real name! So, instead of reading about “Old Bull Lee”, you get to read about William S. Burroughs. And instead of “Carlo Marx”, you get Allen Ginsberg. Kerouac himself is “Sal Paradise” and Herbert Huncke “Elmer Hassel”. In other words, we get to hear it all. Which none of us got with the published book, cause you know how editors can be…plus, Kerouac’s publishers were a bit uptight about defamation law suits, cause most publishers are. The only thing better than hearing the scroll would be actually getting to read the scroll itself, but it’s so frail now that’s impossible. Plus the rich dude who owns The Indianapolis Colts owns the scroll now, too; he bought it at auction a few years ago for a couple million bucks, and he ain’t lending it out anytime soon. Well, actually, he kinda is: the scroll goes on tour from time to time, so if it comes to a city near yours, go check it out. It’s super cool to look at, and it’s in an airtight, properly-humidified clear case, which means it won’t deteriorate any time soon. (I suppose this is a good way to properly care for a multi-million dollar investment). I know all this cause I caught the scroll on tour when it made a brief stop in San Francisco.

Wow — that was kinda long.

I’ll keep the rest of this short.

I got more audio CD’s — these will teach me French.

I got some books, too. (Not like I need any more).

I got the Vampire Weekend record (ain’t it cool that a lot of the records these days come with a free digital download for your computer?) and I got some clothes and I got a Target gift card and I got a vintage cookie jar (it’s an Aunt Jemima look-a-like girl and yet another addition to my politically incorrect “Black Americana” collection) and I got a bag of Hershey Kisses and a kidrobot Munny Doll to color myself and one of Peskimo’s Bamboo Zoo and a Hef figure from Peecol, too.

Oh! My big gift was XBox 360!

Woot woot!

OK — your turn.