His name was Red

His name was Red and we were the best of friends.

That evening, around the usual cans of the sweet nectar that makes all men happy and miserable at once, displayed in a ragged towel spread across a classic wooden table, we'd gathered to celebrate the emancipation of all people on Earth: the horrible year where everything had died was at an end and we could at last revel in the feeling that the Beats of old had known all those years ago. The 21 guns fired worldwide and I shoted out a  "FUCK!" which landed, unfortunately, in the yet uneducated ears of a young victim. A breath was less than what I needed at the time. 

Red smoked with a grin, I didn't. He wore glasses, I didn't.
Those were the surface differences in this holy bloodline of the sacred and benign. 'Look, man...' he'd say, can in one hand and two measly fingers holding up smoke on the other '... you can give a man the finest baked good, the slice of his dreams, and a single lettuce leaf wouldn't ruin it for him, but that man would be stupid. Fascism happens when that becomes a salad. A brutal takeover of the dish!.' between sips and drags and I'd reply with 'Well, we dispose of the lettuce! The cake has to be conserved. I mean, what will the bakers think?' and condense the planet into some of kind of cookbook. A side of salad on a dessert didn't make sense to either of us. 'And... we add strawberries to this baked good!' I'd add, appeasing Red's communist urges. Then, after a smile that was more crimson than white, the discussion would turn to either what the best type of cake was or what kind of food politicians would enjoy. 

And just like that, the Earth was spinning around us while we confessed our fear of the cosmos, on the verge of a discovery, the queer poet with the dry wit and the trenchcoat glass-eyed therapist of humanity... We talked all night about meaningless things, but we never found the prophesied it that the Americans and whatnot had talked about. Even now I wonder if it even existed, the feeling that you've discovered all the truth of the surrounding universe, that you, at that moment, possess all the answers that aren't just assortments of things you've heard in the pictures of read in those dusty books you haven't picked up since you finished them except for quick glance, in remembrance of how good they are. Despite my doubt, I don't think so, Kerouac was full of shit.