"The heart sees deeper than the eye"

What if the Creator is like Rainer Maria Rilke's God, "like a webbing made of a hundred roots, that drink in silence"? What if the Source of All Life inhabits both the dark and the light, heals with strange splendor as much as with sweet insight, is hermaphroditic and omnisexual? What if the Source loves to give you riddles that push you past the boundaries of your understanding, forcing you to deepen your perceptions and change the way you think about everything? Close your eyes and imagine you can sense the presence of this tender, marvelous, difficult, entertaining intelligence.

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"IT"

“Here’s a guy and everybody’s there, right? Up to him to put down what’s on everybody else’s mind. He starts the first chorus, then lines up his ideas, people, yeah, yeah, but get it, and then rises to his fate and has to blow equal to it. All of a sudden somewhere in the middle of the chorus he gets IT- everybody looks up and knows; they listen; he picks it up and carries. Time stops. He’s filling empty space with the substance of our lives, confessions of his bellybottom strain, remembrance of ideas, rehashes of old blowing. He has to blow across bridges and come back and do it with such infinite feeling soul-exploratory for the tune of the moment that everybody knows its not the tune that counts but IT”

—Jack Kerouac

Thin Men, Yuppies, Saints, X'er's and well me...

“A yuppie most nearly approaches sainthood,” the book noted, “when he or she is able to accomplish more things in a single day than is humanly possible.” (The Yuppie Handbook)

"All of which means that the archetypal yuppie of the eighties sounds precisely like, um, everyone you know."

"By now, in fact, an argument could be made that the yuppie phenomenon is the most enduring and influential social movement of the past 50 years. The boomer media love to get all swoony over the Woodstock era, but how many real hippies do you know? The only remaining trace of hippie ideology can be found in supermarket aisles full of organic, farm-raised food—but don’t kid yourself: Those people creating a boom market for Whole Foods and organic baby food are yups, not hippies. Dead rebel artists like Burroughs and Kerouac were long ago turned into useful “bohemian” brands, tailor-made for Gap ads, but nobody actually aspires to be a beatnik anymore. (At this point, beret might as well be French for dickhead.)"

"Even back in 1991, novelist Douglas Coupland, the man who introduced the term Generation X into the mainstream, was picking up on a generation’s natural vulnerability to comfort. “When you’re 27 or 28, your body starts emitting the Sheraton enzyme,” he told People. “You can no longer sleep on people’s floors.” By 37, the Sheraton enzyme mutates into the Four Seasons endorphin. People, like neighborhoods, have a tendency to gentrify. On my recent trip to the West Coast, I went back to the section of Pasadena that used to be my beloved slacker drag strip in the eighties—a scrungy wonderland of pawn shops, Bukowski-approved dives, vintage clothing shops, used bookstores, greasy taco trucks. As I poked around in this," "it came as a shock to see that every last drop of that suburban boho-scape was now gone, replaced by upscale trattorias and tapas bars, boutiques and Pottery Barn and Tiffany’s.

A shock, but only a minor one. While the yuppies were colonizing my favorite neighborhood, apparently they were doing the exact same thing to my brain."

Jeff Gardinier (The Return of the Yuppie)

Do not go where the path may lead,

go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

Ralph Waldo Emerson