"Holland Tunnel" John Phillips-John, The Wolfking of L.A.

There's a decent amount of bullshit in the late 60's, 70's singer songwriter movement.  This song is not a part of it however.  As someone who has traversed this country on the blue and red roads over the years, there is not a more liberating experience, a panacea for the doldrums of a life of consumerism played out within the confines of a cubicle with only a mild reprieve on the weekends fueled by booze to the extended family and a trip to Whole Foods before you turn in Sunday night to slave at it all over again.

And maybe there is some nobility in working towards a cause and the responsibilities of a family, extended or the nuclear kind, but like I'm calling Gordon Lightfoot out on his bullshit I am officially laying down my treaty on a way to live.  To embrace the Deus Ex Machina of that convertible Eldorado and then lose yourself within its confines and see the world that has slipped your consciousness while trapped under fluorescent lights and subways with fellow slaves in some sick Dostoevsky-Dantian hell of which there is no escape.

But that is what they want you to think, conjure up that spirit of the 60's, fuck the man and release yourself from their oppressive grasps.  All it takes is to make that first step, it is always the hardest part...you think you would have learned that when you were fifteen months, stop shitting your pants and grow.  Grow, let the blue skies of this grand land be your intoxication, the black tar of the highway your only sustenance, and the feeling in the pit of your stomach be your navigational guide through the badlands, the prairie fields, staccato Rockies, across the Continental Divide (take a piss on it and feel your excretions touch both oceans) and out to the glorious land laying on the Pacific.  The desert as lush and green as Eden itself kissed each morning by the mist of the cold currents that move south from Alaska.

Meet someone new and drink on the beach near a campfire until you discover who he truly is, flirt with that blond you were eyeing in the store while picking up a soft pack of Lucky's and a bottle of screw cap wine until you've tasted her and then smoked them afterwards while breaking off that cap under the stars, waking up after a night of spooning with sand in between each others' toes, watching her face in the morning light and brushing the sleep from her eyes.

And let this song start the adventure off, let it be the coaxing whisper in your ear and let it never forget that the chances you haven't taken are the ones that you lose, the ones that resign yourself to your Sisyphean existence under those cold, shitty lights and the nightmare of what laid out there if only you made your way through that tunnel.