Status Updates From Questa terra è la mia terra

‘She glanced out the window at a stinging bee trying to carry a big load of honey and keep up with our car. “Looky!” This poor little old bee. He’s a havin’ a hard time tryin’ to fly with too much honey!” “Looks like even that little old bee’s all lined up workin’ fer Uncle Sam Deeefense!” her papa said, bending his neck and head around to see the bee.’

‘I strolled from town to town, my guitar slung over my shoulder, and sung along the boweries of forty-two states. Everywhere I went I throwed my hat down and sung for my tips. I crossed the continent twice by way of highway and freights. Folks heard me on the nationwide radio, and thought I was rich and famous, and I didn’t have a nickel to my name, when I was hitting the hard way again.’

‘Instead of getting you all riled up mentally, morally and sexually it done something a lot better, something that’s harder to do, something you need ten times more. It cleared your head up, caused you to fall back and let your draggy bones rest and your muscles go limber like a cat’s. Two little girls were making two thousand working people feel like I felt, rest like I rested.’

‘If a cyclone comes, a flood, a bus load of children freeze to death, a big ship comes down, an airplane falls in your neighborhood, or the working people going out to win a war, you’ll find loads of things you can make a song about. You’ll hear people singing your words, and you’ll sing their songs everywhere you travel; these are the only kind of songs my head or or my guitar has got any room for.’

‘So here in the moisture of the wind whiffing under the bridge, I scanned around for something to use as a mattress, for a pillow and for a virgin wool blanket. I found a soaking piece of wrapping paper which I shook the water off of, and spread on the dirt for my easy-rider mattress. I drew my muscles down into just a little pile of meat and bones, and shivered on the paper for about an hour.’

“Lemme dig a hole. I wanta dig a hole, an’ jist bury myself. I ain’t no live man. I’m dead. I been dead a long, long time. I’m gonna jist dig me a grave, an’ crawl off in it, an’ pull my sand in on top of me. Gonna sleep like old Rip Van Twinkle, twenty, thirty, or fifty dam years. An’ when I wake up, I want things ta be changed around better.”

‘An old white-headed man spoke: “All of this talking about what’s up in the sky, or down in hell, for that matter, isn’t half as important as what’s right here, right now, in front of your eyes. Things are tough. Folks broke. Kids hungry. Sick. Everything. And people has just got to have
more faith in one another. There’s a spirit of some kind we’ve all got. That’s got to draw us all together.”