Old Roommates, Neil Young, and Me
A second Neil Young concert
In the early 1980s, during my graduate school days, I lived with a guy named Mark for a year in a cereal box apartment building. Mark was a fascinating guy, and he might have finished that dissertation on William Blake, William Wordsworth, and WB Yeats had he not worked each night with a bottle of Heaven’s Hill bourbon on one side and a one-hit bong on the other.
While those poets were dreamy Romantics/Modernists, and being in the clouds yourself, as you tried to comprehend and unify them into a common theme, could have brought a different sort of illumination. Mark’s chosen path led only to dead-end roads of un-transcendence. So one night, with an old friend, Mark decided to take another kind of road trip… to Mexico… in his old, weather-beaten dark blue VW Bug.
When he and his friend departed, carrying the bong and the Heaven’s Hill for the ride, I wished them safety and luck and went to bed. The following day, I found them sprawled in the front room of our apartment:
“We got as far as Chattanooga,” Mark said, “listening to Christopher Cross’s ‘Ride Like the Wind’ the whole way:
“Well I’ve got such a long way to go,
To make it to the border of Mexico….”
