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Someone asked me how many blogs I wrote a few years ago. I looked around and was quite impressed. I never thought I would last the year. But it's not a race, it's just that I gotta lot of stuff to show, even now.

And wonder how far they can stretch it.

But I do have a way to keep going.

I have the movie industry. And it goes back to the Greeks. In fact it was the Greeks. Before that a lot of writing on the rock. Lotta rocks still hanging around today too. And we managed to find a lot of
these writers. Maybe they always had a rock guy to tell stories, he'd hang around with the ladies maybe.

But it all comes to now. Stories. Everybody has stories, made up or heard and even stories.

I wrote my first story in Grade 6, something about a guy who fell in love with his schoolteacher who was eight years older. But never forgotten. I grew up in the black and white TV series era, just at the edge of color. A 21-inch TV was almost as good as a movie.

My mom said I would have to have glasses if you don't hurt yourself. I would go to any movie I could pay for, twenty-five cents! I also bought "comic" books. And I kept them until I was married and my mom threw away about 200 or so.

Then, I discovered a new book. Well, actually not new, but the book was new to my life. Some of you probably have seen the person. Jack Kerouac. If you haven't you should.

Kerouac was one of a large group who, after the 2nd World War would hang out with university students and drive across the U.S. just for the hell of it. They weren't in the war but began to be what would become the "Beat Generation", which would lead towards writers who led to "Beatniks". Jazz and blues flowed through college campuses.

So you can imagine what this 15 year old kid was reading. I took it from the library whenever it was there. It was "On The Road". (And I still have one of the books). I began reading Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, two others who hung with Kerouac.

But there was another part to my story. My father would always take us to visit family across the country often and finding motels and statues of Pal Bunyan in the mid-west. And food we never knew of, like something called pizza.

You can begin to see things?

I went through a good Catholic school where we drove Sister Anna Catherine crazy. By now I was reading more of Kerouac and his companions who really brought in the hippies and Vietnam. And you know what that led to.

When I graduated from high school I had no idea what I was going to do. I lived in a small automobile factory across the river from Detroit but my heart was in that city. 5 million people. I went to a college there and wasn't really exciting about anything except that Vietnam had begun
across the ocean. And friends of mine could go there to fight. Since I was Canadian I didn't have to worry.

But those days were great for me, I had American cousins and so spent lots of time in a tough city that was ready to explode besides Vietnam. I remembered very well when Detroit exploded with black and white. When I crossed the tunnel border we were stopped by National Guard soldiers who said that they would not accompany us -- and we were on our own.

Of course, we weren't in real danger, but possibilities. But downtown Detroit was dangerous, smoke and fire. And a lot of people died.

But now I had two years and wondering what I would be doing. My friends tried working in the factories of both cities but weren't sure either. Three of them decided the easy way - school teacher.

Someone told me about getting cars from Detroit to car dealers in the west coast and it didn't sink in until I remembered Kerouac and "OnThe Road". He was born in 1922 and died while I was still alive and living. And I was "on the road" myself driving across America in some salesman's vehicle that would be put up for sale somewhere near Seattle, a city I never knew much about.

After that I would fly to Vancouver to see my cousin and my aunt and uncle. But right now I was travelling alone and I was as close to Kerouac as I could ever know. And the beginning of a life with highways and movies.