George Jones You Old Cowboy

Sometimes I think I need to knock around this big world of ours a little more. A man listens to good ol' boys like Willie Nelson and Merle and George Jones and Hank and he can't help feeling like a big fat big city pussy. It's not just the song themselves, but the assumed hard living far traveling persona that is assumed with the songs. I've traveled enough to know roaming is rarely (if ever) as glamorous and fun as it is in song, book, and movie format, but I've also traveled enough to know there's something absolutely honest and expansive about it, too, a sort of stretching that comes with miles beneath your boots. How many people regale audiences with tales of a steady, if unremarkable, lives? How you worked in an HR department for thirty years, or taught comp classes?

I'm not taking about vacations. Vacations are nice, but that's not good ol' roaming. Roaming is when you feel like a hobo and each night you sleep somewhere you did not plan to sleep. Roaming is getting in your car to go buy Coke Zero, decide fuck that, and push that accelerator to the floor all the way to New Brunswick, stopping along the way to drink with locals and perhaps buy a tent.

Of course, it's hard to live that way for more than three or four weeks, and even the grittiest musicians sing about being homesick.

Ah.

Well then. I guess if all the answers were easy, they wouldn't be worth figuring out.

Or something.