Townes Van Zandt, your music is traveling through the auxiliary chord from my iPod into my truck's crappy dashboard radio. Wires and chrome and plastic, are the dome that cover the world and hide the sky, and I feel like that apple is just mocking me sometimes,- but tonight they join in to play “Rex's Blues” soft through the speakers and send dusty guitar strings’ plentiful picks drifting off into the atmosphere. The sounds twist with stars and walk the moon where I hope you and Gram and all the other country-loving, stoner sadsacks are lighting up with the aliens.

The sky is clear and air is cold, and I can smell the wood smoke from chimneys that'll soon be gone with the summer. It's springtime in the town where the sun never shines. Passenger seat is empty but that's not nothing new. Somehow you are here too, Townes, and it's 77, summer in Texas, live at the Old Quarter House. Beer glasses are clinking and jokes are told, but when you sing all the bar rats turn to mice. The crowd speaks in hushed whispers or not at all and I can hear the darkness of the bar and the smell of cigarettes and liquor sitting on the scruffy beards of its patrons.

The road I'm driving on is dark and dusty. Its the long route to city and it was once used often, but not anymore. Woods pass on either side and on my right is a drop off onto the paved highway below. Over to the east natural gas pipelines run through farms and stretches of forest, and sit behind modern developments. They weave in and out in their irregular and crazed patterns and look like they might go on everywhere and forever into the night.

Somewhere out there, though, those long lines disappear, or at least I hope they do, and there will be a land devoid of their mark and mine and therefore full of promise that I hope'll be difficult to squander. I'm dreaming of leaving this town behind again. Your sad and beautiful and true song is ringing in my ears, and its making me feel more poetic than your typical droll and lost teenager with skin sheathed in ribbons of insincerity and indifference has any right to be.

I don't wanna be just another broken man who has abandoned his home because its too far gone. Forced to regret the mistakes made when he was young. I just wanna "ride the blue wind high and free," as you'd say, and find myself in someplace better.

But the pipeline is guarded by robed and sulking figures through the dawn and it goes on forever, silver and blindingly bright when struck by the sun. In a hundred years it'll rusts and become another fixture of a scarred and iron land. This is all something of more density than metal and gas; the problems continue on past this town and nothing can be done by me to fix whats wrong.

I don't know how to continue if my rantings are true and there is no somewhere where the wind is blowing uninterrupted through the fields tonight, and there isn't a single person out there who knows what's right. If i left for the road now, would I be able to find the place where I could never settle down?

So should i just say screw it anyway and cross the bridge into someplace else? Burn it in my wake and shoot the horse and leave behind nothing more than the empty footprints in the dark that I have always feared and ensured would be the only friend to miss me.

Another dawn approaches, I can see a lightness coming up upon the western rim of the world. Your song's about sung and i know I'm not gone yet. Soon the sky will burst into day in a flurry of colors and emotions that can not be contained within the confines of a song. Admititly, it fits quite nicely into yours, since "I'm bound to leave the dark behind." Isn't funny, though, how when we get so overwhelmed with feeling that it feels like a hole is going blow straight through our hearts we can make them into words. Feelings taken plain are so powerful and crushing, and too frighteningly great to comprehend. But with a few strums on a guitar or strokes in a keyboard they're nothing but words on the wind. You must of thought about this as you slightly drunkenly strummed and croaked your way through these songs. I can hear in your voice as you sing the last verse that your only doing your best to make sense out of something massive.

I'll know I'll just keep "riding the blue wind high and free," right here on the dusty road behind my house, even as "she leads me down to misery," Townes. On the good days, though, when it sounds as pretty as it does in your songs, I won't mind so much.