The Day After The Election

There’s this place in New York, in the middle of Central Park, a bit of wilderness, lostness, frontier, virgin forest, I don’t know what you call it, but its official name is The Ramble, which is what you do there, ramble along these little paths that twist about and turn the world around. I’m always walking through there with my dog and finding I’m facing south when I thought I was facing east, that kind of place. Special.

Walk through today and it’s like it always is — compelling, drawing me deeper, kicking my head into another place, which is amazing considering you’re actually standing in the middle of New York City, trees and birds and squirrels — and rats and bugs and snakes probably too, but there I am today and then I hear up ahead a guitar. And a voice.

It’s a refugee from Woodstock. A guy who looks like he was actually there, and he’s singing: “You won today, but you cheated, and you know who you are, you cheated to win and you disrepsected my president and you’ll ruin the country and you’ll be the downfall of us, you liars, you cheats, you misery.”

He goes on as I walk and I listen and I can tell he knows I’m listening, but maybe it’s a too little intimate here, alone in the urban woods, to stop and listen, to engage this vagabond troubadour, but I get the song anyway, get the idea and like the protest, the rant, the stumbling flow that somehow all works, the ramble. Perfect.

“You liars, you cheats, you misery.”

It’s the day after an election. He’s feeling it and he comes here to blow it off, singing to the birds, and the rats, and any stranger who happens to ramble by.