Soooooo, remember that post a few days ago when I swore I’d spend NaNoWriMo (or “Novel November,” or whatever we’re calling it this year) finishing a couple of nearly-there drafts instead of starting yet another shiny new work-in-progress? Remember how I said I was going to get organized, give everything a “zeroth draft,” and actually be a responsible writer with output? Oh, and remember how I also said that this promise was subject to sudden and catastrophic failure?

Yeah … about that.

I’m not saying I’m about to rebel against my rebellion by going back to the spirit of NaNo and start a brand-new WIP, but I was messing around with a writing prompt last night and came up with an idea for a post-modern, beat-generation-style road book with a high-tech twist. Maybe it’s a spectacularly stupid idea. Maybe it’s too self-serving. Maybe my mind is too highly trained, and the world hasn’t caught on to my ideas. Maybe it shouldn’t be a book. Maybe it should be a series of blog posts. Not sure yet. Maybe you should hear me out and quit interrupting …

Jack Kerouac, one of my literary heroes, hit the highways in the ’50s chasing God, jazz, and Benzedrine enlightenment. I’ve always wanted to do that in the form of a road trip that retraces the towns I grew up in and see what became of them. Knowing my luck, though, I’d break down in Mulberry Grove, Illinois (again) and end up at the mercy of the only mechanic within twenty miles, waiting at the town’s only diner for a fuel pump to arrive from the thriving metropolis of Vandalia.

Realistically, that’s a lot of driving, and nobody I know is going to volunteer to be my Dean Moriarty touring the rural south, visiting places where I have to man-splain why they’re so cool, and I want to keep my friends, so I won’t do that to them. Maybe I don’t need to leave home at all. Maybe I can tour the ghosts of my old hometowns via Google Street View and Wander, cruising down memory lane in my Oculus headset like a broke time traveler. Same spiritual hunger, less gas money, and zero chance of hearing banjo music from a nearby thicket when I break down.

I’ll grab my keyboard, my VR headset, a mug of good coffee, and revisit the small towns that my old friends who stayed behind warned me to avoid because they “went downhill after I left.” Maybe just the small-town southern ones, anyway. I don’t think a retrospective of the Woodfield Mall food court in Schaumburg, IL, or the Giant Eagle in Solon, OH, will appeal to anyone.  

But the Thornton’s Market in Herrin, Illinois, where we bought baseball cards during our bike ride home from school? Surely that’s still there, right? The Pizza Hut, the Putt-Putt, the movie theater where I had my first date? Well, I already blogged about how it’s gone. What about the gas station someone built out of an old airplane in Powell, Tennessee? Roller skating in Tupelo? Jambalaya in Shreveport? Is the Natchez Trace still gorgeous, or did they pave paradise and put up a Starbucks every five miles? Instead of driving, I’ll glide through it all, clicking forward every ten feet like I’m trying to outrun my own past.

I could visit all the places that once mattered and see what’s replaced them. Spoiler alert: they’re all vape shops and dispensaries. I can see it now: The old bowling alley in Manhattan, Kansas, is “King Kole’s Pipes and Bowls.” WL Currie’s Diner in Starkville, where the cook never took the cigarette out of her mouth when she asked if you wanted fries, has become “H.R.’s Puff and Stuff.” The record store where I bought my first Black Sabbath album is now rebranded as the flagship of the “Vape Against the Machine Head Shop” franchise.

It’s an archaeological dig, but instead of digging up bones, I’ll try to dig up something that isn’t dead and gone. To make it multimedia, I’ll dive down the SoundCloud and YouTube rabbit holes to hear what the local kids are creating. I’ll lurk through local blogs and social media posts where the grandkids of my old friends are probably complaining, “nothing ever happens here,” from the same street corners where we once said the same thing. It’s the circle of life, powered by WordPress.

I swear the point isn’t to wallow in nostalgia. Maybe slosh through it in sensible galoshes once in a while, but not wallow. I want to turn Kerouac’s idea inside out. He went on the road to see America and find himself; I’ll stay home and visit digital echoes of places I left behind to see how they got along without me. The machinery has already preserved them in the archive of the web, but how real is a digital specter? Can imagination, memory, and flaky Wi-Fi conjure something transcendent?

This may be the new enlightenment, a broadband pilgrimage with ping lag as your holy burden.