I haven’t had a chance to blog in a while because I had to finish proofreading and indexing my forthcoming memoir, Stunted: A Memoir of Delayed Manhood. Producing a back-of-the-book index was an exhausting, onerous project—especially because my book is loaded with medical terminology and pop culture references from the 1980s and 1990s. Example: U2 see also The Edge, The Joshua Tree, Mullen, Larry Jr.

My messy index in process.

To avoid having to write an index for my follow-up memoir, I’ll make it 97 percent fact and 3 percent fantasy and call it autofiction.

But that’s not why I wanted to post today.

I am re-reading the autobiographical novel The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac, which I think is a very underrated Kerouac work.

One passage caught my attention, and I wanted to share it.

The narrator, Ray Smith, has traveled from the industrial wasteland of Los Angeles to Riverside, California, as he tries to make his way to North Carolina to visit his mother. He camps for the night in a bamboo grove.

“And then I thought, later, lying on my bag, smoking, ‘Everything is possible. I am God, I am Buddha, I am imperfect Ray Smith, all at the same time, I am empty space, I am all things. I have all the time in the world to do what is to do, to do what is done, to do the timeless doing, infinitely perfect within, why cry, why worry, perfect like mind essence and the minds of banana peels.’”

And I know this is a quote I will revisit during stressful times. Have a good weekend, everyone.