Jack Kerouac is dead, so obviously these are what we call "vintage" rules to live by. (In fact, this coming year will mark the 40th Anniversary of the Beat Generation writer's death, which was due to cirrhosis of the liver.)

And while these chunks of wisdom, taken from his Belief and Technique in Modern Prose (or, at least, the style of rapid-fire modern prose he invented and brought down with him), are geared toward writers, they are words to live by in 2009-- so says us:

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

True, we don't understand half of what he says, but everyone can take a line or two and run with it. The man who once wrote "I want to marry my novels and have short stories for children" would have turned 86 this past year. 

Via Wikipedia.

Related:

3 Things We Wish We'd Gotten For Christmas, Or: Scanner Verena Is A Sucker For Infomercials

New Year's Celebrations Lacking Balls

What Do Cubans Really Think of Cuba?