Kerouac and me

I’ve got eight more days to finish Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur, which I’m borrowing as an ebook from the Eugene Public Library through the Libby app (or is it vice versa?). Now at the beginning of chapter 31, or 66%, I’ll make it easily. Big Sur features Kerouac (“Jack Duluoz,” the first-person narrator) suffering encroaching madness amidst alcoholic decline—but his prose flashes as brightly as ever, deepened by experience, pain, and sadness. The book documents a 1961 final trip to northern California—Jack flush with cash earned from his hit novel On The Road. (The text of Big Sur can be read online here.)

I don't have much in common with Mr. Kerouac, but we both created our own baseball solitaire simulation games as kids. He used a spinner. I used three six-sided dice, modeling my system on my buddy Greg's. But I abandoned my game when I bought the Sports Illustrated baseball board game, which came with charts for the 1971 Major League teams. I spent hundreds of hours playing it, making my own custom leagues and schedules—and I still get it out from time to time to play a game or three. My SF Giants lost the 1971 NLCS to the Pittsburgh Pirates, who went on to defeat the Baltimore Orioles in a fabulous 7-game World Series. My favorite all-time player Willie Mays was still with San Francisco, nearing the end of his career (finishing with the New York Mets in 1973). Pirates All-Star Roberto Clemente was killed a year later in the off-season (December 1972) when a chartered plane crashed taking supplies to survivors of a massive earthquake in Nicaragua. I was 12 at the time.