Freight train by Elizabeth Cotten


You can't be me, I'm taken

Some are ex-railroad guys who can't get it out of their system. One system is to have your retirement check mailed to a PO box in, say, San Diego, and stop by there every few months. It's tough if you don't know how the railroad traffic is routed, but they do.

Others are homeless who sort of aimlessly travel around. The main informal camping areas in Colorado Springs are all near the freight yard, so you can pick up a ride pretty easily.

"Steel Don't Bend" is an interesting short documentary film about modern hobos... Here's the promo, but I don't know how to link to this sort of a movie file:
http://www.boomswagger.com/pop_sdb.html

Completely off topic, but I still have "Belief and Technique for Modern Prose" posted on the wall:

Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
Submissive to everything, open, listening
Try never get drunk outside your own house
Be in love with your life
Something that you feel will find its own form
Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
Blow as deep as you want to blow
Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
The unspeakable visions of the individual
No time for poetry but exactly what is
Visionary tics shivering in the chest
In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
Like Proust be an old teahead of time
Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
Accept loss forever
Believe in the holy contour of life
Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
You're a Genius all the time
Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

2.  The hobo song with which I am most familiar is the one taught to American grade-school children:  Big Rock Candy Mountain.  Eerily, it is about a hobo Utopia...

3.  There are still hobos.  I knew some kids who ran away from home and lived as hobos.  Like street kids, only riding the rails.  All very dangerous and anti-establishment.  

4.  Which brings me to this.  It's all very romanticized now, but looking at the circumstances which turn people to hobodom: Great Depression, domestic abuse, etc., I suspect most of us would rather be paying customers.

"Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms." -Dostoevsky

guitarist James Burton is from Elvis' band (and Gram Parsons!)

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

I missed this.

The Wabash is a north-running river in Indiana.

But, the reference here is probably to the Wabash Railroad, one of the less prestigious among the dozen or so competitors from Chicago to the East.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}