We are also what we have lost*)

But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirious of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the starts and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awwww.....!"

*) alejandro gonzalez innaritu

These lines have been a way for me to start a new (western) year. I emailed it to someone three years ago, as a 'whose lines?' riddle. His every timely, eloquent response:
Well I hope I didn't put you too much on the spot with that surprise phone call the other night. Hehe........guess I just wanted to show off as soon as I recognized the passage from "On the Road"? Maybe more than just showing off........once that passage, and others, meant a lot to me. That was half a liftime ago..........and jolting to read it again out of nowhere.Perhaps I read Kerouac earlier than many other people. My father bought me "On the Road" in Paris 5 December 1987 - the day of my fifteenth birthday. I started reading it that night too. At that age, the book was full of promise - making me dream of the places that I would go, things I would experience and people that I would meet in my own life. There were things in there that I could connect with already too - I was already interested in Buddhism (after the first trip to Japan at the age of 10) and I was already crazy about punk rock, so ready to learn about the counter-culture of an earlier era (though it would be years more before I really came to understand the counter-culture of that book - jazz - properly). Half a life-time later, maybe it's unpleasent to think about how the promise of that book came true and how it didn't. I have been on some long journeys, physically and mentally. And I have been lucky to meet all kinds of people. But in some ways I haven't travelled very far from the world that I wanted to escape when I was fifteen. At the time the year in paris was just a brief interlude - interlude from the world of middle class Melbourne. World of private schools and anglo-saxon ignorance. And despite all the things I've done since then, it seems like I've not really escaped. After years of immersing myself in so many different counter-cultures, how did my life end up at "Australia's pre-eminent law firm" (hahahahahaha)? Surrounded by so many people who went to the same kind of private schools, who have the same kind of arrogance. I am in this world, but not of it I hope. And funny how what to most people would seem like "success" only seems to me like the deepest failure [sic!]. But finally it is only myself to blame - why the hell did I continue to study law and have some small succeess at it, when I was decorating my life with so many other things. (10/11/02).