I write in a rush of mad ecstasy, without self-consciousness or mental hesitation.
—Neal Cassady

So, it’s like this: what Neal is blathering about as we tool down the Mother Road in Jack Kerouac’s 1949 Hudson Commodore on a pilgrimage to redeem the American soul is that if we cleanse our punctuation and our lives of periods, we can live in the Eternal Now of the never-ending sentence, giving no weight or nuance to how each word fits with what came before or what will come after, leading to a state of timelessness and immortality, which convinces Kerouac that if there are no periods he shouldn’t stop when we see Ken Kesey thumbing a ride because his psychedelic bus with the Merry Band of Pranksters has broken down, so of course he gives us the finger as we blow past him, prompting me to argue that if we don’t stop we can’t experience the closure only a period can provide, besides which I need to take a whiz since we’ve been driving for three-hundred miles since leaving Tucumcari this morning, but everyone ignores me, and that’s when Bill Burroughs chimes in with, “You’re not going to find any periods out here, only the truth of the Giant Spider,” but we figure it’s the Benzedrine talking so we don’t pay him any mind as Kerouac floors it and says, “Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road,” and my thoughts start running together the faster we race through this too-huge world as Kerouac calls it so I scream, “We need a period now!” forcing Cassady to reiterate, “Without the finality of the period there is no death and my sentence goes on forever,” which inspires Sigmund Freud, the backseat driver for all the Beats, to say, “Don’t listen to him; the aim of all life is death,” and I respond, “I think all of you are full of it and Victor Frankl was right when he said, ‘The greatest task for any person isn’t to avoid death; it’s to find meaning in life,’ but how am I supposed to find meaning without a period to provide a full stop, how do I find meaning when life is a never-ending stream of consciousness or maybe a stream of cabbage, I can’t remember, I can’t remember anything anymore because you jerks have stripped the past and future away from me,” and what do you know, there’s Kesey again, standing next to a gleaming, black period resembling a giant bowling ball, and now Burroughs is comatose, or maybe he’s comma-toes, since we seem to have plenty of those punctuation marks, and Kesey grins at us as he rolls the period onto the road, but when Kerouac tries to avoid it I yank the steering wheel, forcing us to plow into that final punctuation mark full speed, resulting in my dependent clauses flashing before my eyes as meaning and certainty return, signaling that Neal’s mad, ecstatic sentence has come to an end.

John Christenson lives in Boulder, Colorado with his wife and a cat who is fond of penguins. His publications include short stories in the New Mexico Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Whisky Blot, MoonPark Review, and several anthologies.