when I was in my 4th yr. of college - about 10 yrs. ago, I used to work summer maintenance in the dorms at Northwestern College - I'd go from room to room a couple times and we'd fix stuff and move on - I used to listen to Indigo Girls "Swamp Ophelia" - Mary Chapin Carpenter's "Come On, Come On" and a whole host of crappy cassettes before I could afford a CD player.

In the evenings sometimes I'd intern in radio...other times I was working a 2nd radio job and killing myself - it would be warm and I'd read computer ads and dream of buying my first PC - a 486DX -

or I'd be working on an independent study credit (needed 1 eng. credit to graduate) - - reading the Leatherstocking Tales and noticing inconsistancies between the development of the Natty Bumppo character - we'd shoot bb guns in the dorm room, watch tornados form and get ready to run for our lives - wander the campus grounds - and life was light and carefree, despite being broke, wore out, hard worked, and hornier then a dog in heat and not getting any cause all the girls were waiting till marriage :) -

or I'd have a girl want to date me one week and not the next - and I'd not give a shit - and I'd have friends calling me, and I never dreamed or wanted booze -

and I'd listen to MCC's "I am a town" and dream of roadtrips in a crappy '79 Toyota to North Carolina -

I wonder what happens to a person in those 10 yrs. that changes life so drastically - that alters our visuals of what makes a person fundamentally happy and fundamentally sad...

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I'm a town in Carolina, I'm a detour on a right
For a phone call and a soda, I'm a blur from the driver's side
I'm the last gas for an hour if you're going twenty-five
I am Texaco and tobacco
I am dust you leave behind

I am peaches in September, and corn from a roadside stall
I'm the language of the natives, I'm a cadence and a drawl
I'm the pines behind the graveyard, and the cool beneath their shade,
where the boys have left their beer cans
I am weeds between the graves.

My porches sag and lean with old black men and children
Their sleep is filled with dreams, I never can fulfill them
I am a town.

I am a church beside the highway where the ditches never drain
I'm a Baptist like my daddy, Jesus knows my name
I am memory and stillness, I am lonely in old age;
I am not your destination
I am clinging to my ways
I am a town.

I'm a town in Carolina, I am billboards in the fields
I'm an old truck up on cinder blocks, missing all my wheels
I am Pabst Blue Ribbon, American, and "Southern Serves the South"
I am tucked behind the Jaycees sign, on the rural route
I am a town
I am a town
I am a town
Southbound.