Zombie Future

Ben Gibbard and Jay Farrar (words by Jack Kerouac) - California Zephyr

This song is from the soundtrack of One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur, a documentary about the period of time in Kerouac’s life when his alcoholism began to spiral out of control and he began spending time at a cabin in Big Sur in an (ultimately failed) attempt to dry himself out. It was during that time that he wrote the book Big Sur.

I’m posting this song for a number of reasons.

Like every other guy who dresses like I do, I love me a saccharine sweet acoustic Ben Gibbard song.

But more importantly, I was obsessed with Kerouac when I was 17. (Yes, I realize this is not unique.) I was a naïve, skinny kid from a crappy little town in Pennsylvania. Delaware was the furthest I had ever been from home and that was on a family vacation when I was little. In high school, I used to fall asleep at night to cd’s of Kerouac’s spoken word recordings. On the Road was probably one of the main reasons I skipped my graduation to climb aboard a bus with a one-way ticket to California. Which means it was one of the main reasons I got hustled for $20 by a one-legged man before I even hit the Mississippi on that 72-hour bus ride (not the last 72-hour bus ride I’ve been on, if you can believe it). It also means that book might be one of the reasons I’ve ended up doing some of the most interesting crap that I’ve done in my life.

During those two years or so that I spent traveling around, I crossed the country on the California Zephyr twice. This might be kind of a cheesy song, but I’ll tell you what—when I was a 17 year old kid, sitting in the snack car of the California Zephyr long after it was closed for the night, scribbling in my journal and sipping from a big, steaming mug of instant coffee while the desert—the fucking desert—slid past the window, I felt transcontinental.