Page:Big Sur (1963).djvu/97

RV 89 (BIG SUR89) is my mouse—It’s lying there dead—Like the otter in the sea—It’s my own personal mouse that I've carefully fed chocolate and cheese all summer but once again I’ve unconsciously sabotaged all these great plans of mine to be kind to living beings even bugs, once again I’ve murdered a mouse one way or the other—And on top of that when we come to the place where the garter snake usually lies sunning itself, and I bring it to Ron’s attention, he suddenly yells “LOOKOUT! you never can tell what kind of snake it is!” which really scares me, my heart pounds with horror—My little friend the garter snake turns therefore with my head from a living being with a long green body into the evil serpent of Big Sur.

On top of that, at the surf, where long streamers of hollow sea weed always lie around drying in the sun some of them huge, like living bodies with skin, pieces of living material that always made me sad somehow, here’s the young hepcat lifting them up and dancing a dervish around the beach with them, turning my Sur into something seachange—Something brainchange.

All that night by lamplight we sing and yell songs which is okay but in the morning the bottle is gone and I wake up with the “final horrors” again, precisely the way I woke up in the Frisco skidrow room before escaping down here, it’s all caught up with me again, I can hear myself again whining “Why does God torture me?”—But anybody who's never had delirium tremens even in their early stages may not understand that it’s not so much a physical pain but a mental anguish indescribable to those ignorant people who dont drink and accuse drinkers of irresponsibility—The mental anguish is so intense that you feel you have betrayed your very birth, the efforts nay the birth pangs of your mother when she bore you and delivered you to the world, you've betrayed every effort your father ever made to feed you and raise you and make you strong and my God even educate you for “life,” you feel a guilt so deep you identify yourself with the devil and God seems far away abandoning you to your sick