Hey Jack Kerouac

Notes on alcoholism and longing.

It’s been 30-odd years since I last read The Dharma Bums, Kerouac’s novel about the pursuit of wine and enlightenment in mid-1950s America. My friends and I took our creative writing, our nonconformity, and our intoxication very seriously in our 20s—so of course we idolized Beats like Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg. Now that I’m in my 50s, with a daily meditation practice and 17 years of sobriety under my belt, this book sure hits different—revealing layers I didn’t have the eyes to see the first time, but no less brilliant for that.

This isn’t a literary takedown or a recovery testimonial—it’s just what happens when the person who reads a book isn’t the same person who first loved it.

I encountered Buddhism before I encountered booze. I can still picture the book on my desk in the high school freshman world history classroom where we first read about the four noble truths. I was probably supposed to have read it at home before class, but homework was never my thing. I had already outgrown mythology and the idea of salvation through supernatural agency, but something about the simplicity rang true for me: life is full of suffering because we cling to or push away experiences, so the answer is to extinguish attachment, and here’s how.

I don’t remember being particularly concerned with suffering in my early teens—but I’d already learned that being genuine could be met with derision, though there’s no way in hell I’d have put it that way at the time. I suppose those few paragraphs buried in a textbook—written for kids and spanning history from cavemen to Congress—planted the seed that the human condition requires a fair amount of troubleshooting if you want to live a good life.

But clarity is fleeting when you’re young and desperate to feel everything all at once. By the time I found The Dharma Bums, that early spark of insight had been buried under the urgency of becoming—of identity-building, boundary-pushing, and binge everything.

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What spoke to me on the first reading was Kerouac’s seemingly successful blend of nonstop partying and enlightenment. I would try unsuccessfully to emulate this for years. Being fucked up most of the time made it easier to care less about the consequences of my actions—or karma, as the Buddhists call it. It wasn’t until after I got sober that I realized I was trying to open a lock with two keys at the same time; a hopeless endeavor.

As Zen teacher Kosho Uchiyama once wrote, “In the beginning, a person drinks sake. In the next stage, sake drinks sake, and finally, sake drinks the person.” If I’d gone to a zendo instead of a bar, maybe I’d have discovered the world of zazen instead of losing myself in the world of drink. But that’s not the story I lived—at least, not at first.

By college, I knew I was different. I leaned into it. I prided myself on it. I reflexively surrounded myself with people who made what I was doing look normal. Like Kerouac wrote about the conformist locals, “What did I care what the old tobacco-chewing stickwhittlers at the crossroads store had to say about my mortal eccentricity?”

I drank whenever I could—which was a lot—and there was no drug I wouldn’t try. I didn’t think I was solving for the human condition; I was just having a good time. Any contact with ultimate reality and the interconnection of all things was purely accidental, which is not to say I didn’t notice.

I had a lot of wild adventures over 18 years of work-hard, play-hard substance abuse. There’s a glamorous way to tell these stories—riveting, hilarious, even enviable. When I’m given the opportunity to work with people on the fence about their recovery, that’s the version I share. I let them admire the relentless, chaotic energy. Then I land the punchline: I’m sober now.

The Dharma Bums reads the same way. It’s a brilliant, breathless story of a man in constant motion—alive with ecstatic moments, sacred mountains, and spontaneous joy. But Kerouac’s punchline wasn’t recovery—it was an alcoholic death, vomiting blood, a recluse.

My re-reading doesn’t negate the joy or brilliance of the novel. It just adds something I couldn’t see the first time: the undertow. That hidden current of desperation underneath all the mysticism and movement. Here’s the passage that made me recognize Kerouac as someone trying to outrun the truth.

“See,” I said, “you wouldn’t have even written that poem if it wasn’t for the wine made you feel good!”

“Ah I would have written it anyway. You’re just drinking too much all the time, I don’t see how you’re even going to gain enlightenment and manage to stay out in the mountains, you’ll always be coming down the hill spending your bean money on wine and finally you’ll end up lying in the street in the rain, dead drunk, and then they’ll take you away and you’ll have to be reborn a teetotalin bartender to atone for your karma.” He was really sad about it, and worried about me, but I just went on drinking.

When we got to Alvah’s cottage and it was time to leave for the Buddhist Center lecture I said “I’ll just sit here and get drunk and wait for you.”

“Okay,” said Japhy, looking at me darkly. “It’s your life.”

He was gone for two hours. I felt sad and drank too much and was dizzy. But I was determined not to pass out and stick it out and prove something to Japhy. Suddenly, at dusk, he came running back into the cottage drunk as a hoot owl yelling “You know what happened Smith? I went to the Buddhist lecture and they were all drinking white raw saki out of teacups and everybody got drunk. All those crazy Japanese saints! You were right! It doesn’t make any difference! We all got drunk and discussed prajna! It was great!” And after that Japhy and I never had an argument again.

This is exactly what I’d have written at the beginning of the end—when I already knew my friends and colleagues were starting to worry, but I clung to moments like this as evidence that I was still in control. People I admired drank like I did. Great writers, brilliant musicians, charming weirdos with oversized appetites for life. I wasn’t spiraling—I was living.

I see it differently now. What I once mistook for liberation was just an attempt to feed an unnamed hunger. Not for thrills or rebellion, but for something older and deeper—connection, purpose, peace. Addiction isn’t just about pain; it’s about yearning.

Some contemporary thinkers, like Dr. Gabor Maté, frame addiction as a response to trauma and a search for meaning. While I don’t resonate with the trauma narrative—at least not in my own case—the second part lands. What I do recognize is the hunger for purpose, belonging, and transcendence.

That’s the deeper itch we try to scratch—often without realizing it. This is the human condition. We’re wired to seek meaning—by creating it if necessary. We’re wired for community, even as the loner-hero myth tugs at our recessive genes.

This is why we invent religions and ideologies: to create meaning out of happenstance and convince each other that there’s more to life than putting one foot in front of the other. Booze and drugs fit the bill as well as anything else: ecstatic and transcendent experiences with a community of like-minded people. We chant at concerts and worship at sports bars.

As Oren Jay Sofer puts it in Your Heart Was Made for This, “Without devotion we suffer from spiritual hunger... our need for devotion may become displaced onto addictions to accumulation, substances... entertainments and pleasures.” What we’re craving isn’t just escape—it’s something to surrender to.

This idea—that addiction is spiritual hunger in disguise—goes back further than many people realize. Nearly a century ago, Carl Jung offered the same diagnosis in a letter to Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson, wherein he recounts the case of a former patient. His language is older, more theological, but the insight is familiar: what some alcoholics seek is not intoxication, but transcendence.

His craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God. How could one formulate such an insight in a language that is not misunderstood in our days? The only right and legitimate way to such an experience is that it happens to you in reality, and it can only happen to you when you walk on a path which leads you to higher understanding. You might be led to that goal by an act of grace or through a personal and honest contact with friends, or through a higher education of the mind beyond the confines of mere rationalism.

Jung’s emphasis on the necessity of a personal and direct encounter “beyond the confines of mere rationalism” echoes the Buddhist ideal of seeking direct experience of nondual reality through meditative practice.

Now me, I didn’t get sober on a cushion. It took a different kind of practice—one rooted in honesty, service, and daily spiritual maintenance, handed down by others who had walked the same path. These days, I do my best to sit every evening after work, but my recovery didn’t begin in stillness. It began in connection.

I’m also too secular—and too skeptical—to fully embrace Buddhism. Despite my daily Zen-inspired meditation practice, I’m not qualified to weigh in on the quality of Kerouac’s enlightenment. But as someone who’s found a way out of addiction, I recognize the signs: a downward spiral papered over with a beatific smile. It’s like looking into a mirror and seeing my old self.

The Dharma Bums is meant to be joyful, this much I know. It ends with gratitude and a little grin as Kerouac heads “down the trail back to this world” after months of isolation on Desolation Mountain. The book brims with ecstatic beauty—wildness, wonder, and the aching pull of the infinite. My re-reading doesn’t negate that. It just brings into focus an undertow that may not be obvious to anyone who hasn’t trudged the road themselves. It certainly wasn’t obvious to Kerouac.

I don’t fault Kerouac for his denial. We were both hungry ghosts. The difference is, I finally stopped looking for meaning at the bottom of a bottle and started sitting still long enough to feel what was missing. Turns out devotion was there the whole time—I just hadn’t known what to call it.