Moments of . . . moments.

So I'm sitting here listening to Bad Finger on You Tube. I had nothing going for me back there in 1972. And I remember thinking that those guys got it made. Fame, fortune, etc. But things went bad for them. They ended up with nothing, and the lead singer and the bass guitarist ended up hanging themselves. Their song, Day After Day, came out in the winter of 1971, and it reflected some deep feeling inside of me concerning my life. And so I held onto it. When it was playing on the radio I knew I wasn't the only one looking out of my lonely room. But later when I was homeless and didn't even have a lonely room to look out from, the song no longer comforted me. My new adopted comfort song after that was Canned Heat's "On the Road Again." Alan "Blind Owl" Wilson recounting his experience on the road, saying:

Ya know the first time I traveled out
in the rain and snow,
I didn't have no payroll,
not even no place to go.

And there I was out in the rain and snow, drawing comfort from the song because it reminded me that I wasn't alone in this experience . . . until I had to admit to myself that Alan Wilson was dead, and I was alone, walking east because the wind and snow were coming from the west, pushing me down the road after sunset. Cold toes! What will happen to me? A barn up ahead. I could build a room out of bales of hay. And so I did, and thus had a lonely room from which to look out. But it was dark. Nothing to see anyway. Nothing. So I curled up in my beat up parka (with the snorkel hood) and I thought about the desert.

In the desert there are no illusions. The desert purifies because there are no contaminating sights and sounds. There is the sand and the heat of day, and the heat is honest, and so is its sister the cold of the night. And they never oppose each other; each gives way to the other, exchanging only a brief glance as one waxes and the other wanes--as one awakens and the other sleeps. Always the promise of a warm day. The desert.

Years before, it was nightime, and I was lying on the top bunk waiting for sleep to take me away. My brothers were on the bottom bunk. The band Matthews Southern Comfort is on Dale's transistor radio, and they're singing Woodstock. The song was the kind of song that belonged in the quiet time of the night, and like all such good songs, it offered a safe haven where fears of school the next morning and . . . life in general didn't exist for three or four minutes. But the song ended . . .