Whooee, I told my soul

Was thinking, if Donald Trump can "run for president," so can my Cat.
"Chess Pacific for President!"
Chess has perspective.
Once, politicians talking on TV, Chess with me on living room carpet.
(As cats will sometimes do), he abruptly twisted his agile body into a sort of pretzel-type shape, to peer briefly under his tail --
then glanced up at the people on TV --
and seemed to take note of the similarities between those two views ...

-------------------------------
On The Road .
Jack Kerouac wrote it in the 1950s -- people said it spoke for "the beat generation."
People who were -- "the beats."
Later, early sixties before the word "hippie" took over the scene, "beat" transmuted into common usage of "beatnik."
as in: "That guy she's dating is a beatnik."
----------------------------
[excerpt, On The Road]---------------------- We arrived at Council Bluffs at dawn; I looked out. All winter I'd been reading of the great wagon parties that held council there before hitting the Oregon and Santa Fe trails; and of course now it was only cute suburban cottages of one damn kind and another, all laid out in the dismal gray dawn.

Then Omaha, and, by God, the first cowboy I saw, walking along the bleak walls of the wholesale meat warehouses in a ten-gallon hat and Texas boots, looked like any beat character of the brickwall dawns of the East except for the getup.
...
"During the depression," said the cowboy to me, "I used to hop freights at least once a month. In those days you'd see hundreds of men riding a flatcar or in a boxcar, and they weren't just bums, they were all kinds of men out of work and going from one place to another and some of them just wandering. It was like that all over the West. Brakemen never bothered you in those days. I don't know about today. Nebraska I ain't got no use for. Why in the middle nineteen thirties this place wasn't nothing but a big dust-cloud as far as the eye could see. You couldn't breathe. The ground was black. I was here in those days. They can give Nebraska back to the Indians far as I'm concerned. I hate this damn place more than any place in the world. Montana's my home now -- Missoula. You come up there sometime and see God's country."

...
Eddie and I sat down in a kind of homemade diner. I heard a great laugh, the greatest laugh in the world, and here came this rawhide oldtimer Nebraska farmer with a bunch of other boys into the diner; you could hear his raspy cries clear across the plains, across the whole gray world of them that day. Everybody else laughed with him. He didn't have a care in the world and had the hugest regard for everybody. I said to myself, Wham, listen to that man laugh. That's the West, here I am in the West. ...
It was the spirit of the West sitting right next to me. I wished I knew his whole raw life and what the hell he'd been doing all these years besides laughing and yelling like that. Whooee, I told my soul, and the cowboy came back and off we went to Grand Island.
-------------- [end Excerpt]
{On The Road, by Jack Kerouac. Penguin. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. 1955}

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