Jack Kerouac and Puberty, the sequel

I want to say I don't pretend to be a mature adult, but that's all I do is pretend.  My friend Rosie always orders margaritas 'on the rocks' so when the ice melts she can have what she calls, "second drink."  When she says "second drink" it is in a sweet sing-song child's voice even though she is nearly 27.  It is this voice I hear when I think about the current stage of my life: Second Puberty.  

Some people call it a quarter-life crisis, but it's not that dark and far more awkward.  Really, it's the same emotional and bodily self-esteem issues as the first round of puberty, only now the possibility that it is not 'just a phase' is terrifyingly realistic.  For instance, I am certain that the same synapses of self-pity and regret fired today as did when I was 12 years old.  This time it was on the bus when a girl (woman?) my age gave me her card when we talked about writing and McSweeney's Quarterly and I stupidly had nothing of my own to trade.  I was disgusted with myself just as when in seventh grade I was acutely aware of how much better my life would've been if I'd only bought Silver jeans instead of l.e.i. cords when I was school shopping with my mom.  It's so easy and so painful to spot people who shouldn't really have their shit together any more than I do, but absolutely do.  

I am also certain that I recently had the exact same conversation with my best friend about boys (men?) that we had when we were 14.  The only difference being that we are now slightly (slightly) more experienced and thus what we have to share has grown to include obgyn stories.  But don't think that just because our sex lives now encompass the clinical that we don't share what we hear at the doctor's office with the same fervor and vulgarity as when we would talk about what we learned from Haley in Homeroom--the only girl with a subscription to Cosmo.  

One good thing that has come from my current hopefully-just-a-phase stage is my new appreciation for On the Road, which has become my new, slightly more hip, Cosmo.  I've tried to read Kerouac and authors like him in the past to no avail.  I knew about them to hold intelligent enough conversations and to know that I both envied and feared that sort of Kerouacian (that's right, Kerouacian) lifestyle, but I could just never get sucked into his quick gloss over, no action writing.  But now!  Now I am actually living in that window of Second Puberty that Sal (the Jack character, for those of you like previous-me who have not read it) was wandering through.  Without school or a viable career plan, I am the least tied down I have ever been but am evenly torn between establishing myself as a responsible adult and taking advantage of this time in my life and fleeting around the country.  I'm stuck somewhere between the card-carrying woman on the bus and a kid who went to my high school, Ben Olson, who wrote basically an On the Road rip-off called Wonderlost about traveling around the country via train.  

Ben is a few years older than I am, so when I tried to read his novel ('novel' being a loose term) when it first came out in 2006, I had the same trouble I once had with Kerouac.  And while I searched for thinly-disguised references to the people I knew with the same excitement I scanned the newspaper police blotter for familiar names, I couldn't help but fault Ben for being completely unoriginal.  But now that I am the age Ben and Jack were when they collected the experiences for their books, I see that neither one was original.  And that's not a fault.  There's a reason it's almost cliche to go backpacking around Europe after college.  It's a developmental step, almost as much as periods and surprise erections.  I can't speak for Business majors or young brides who seem to navigate life by large landmarks, but the rest of us do get, as Ben aptly calls it, wonderlost.  Whether it's the Alps, the small towns of North America, or an array of random short-lived jobs, we explore.  And while this second pubescent stage is not an original one to write about, it's nature is individual to each of us who lives it.  Maybe this is why Jack Kerouac and Ben Olson don't show action, but just quickly tell us what happened on their trips.  They're not creating a new story for us to read, but merely recording their simultaneous stagnation and growth like a young girl with a diary, or a young woman with a blog.  They both have more to experience than there is time to write about it and no reader who can appreciate them needs the gritty details of their journeys.  The reason I can appreciate them both now is that I know where they're coming from and have my own life to draw from to fill in the details.  On the Road and Wonderlost are not novels to get sucked into and distract from life, because for a period of time, they are life.