lonely roads

so on a star lit night I complained to that wise frood* of the woodlands Alex the Scott:

man, I'm so fricken' bizarre that not only do I not fit into normal society, but even the strange ones don't really know what to do with me. I feel pretty lonely freakish right now; pretty cut off.

to which he replied...

dude, you're in the company of the best of men. what great rocker or poet or thinker hasn't quested his way from the ordinary to the strange and found himself deep in the proverbial woods?

and he sang,

"I walk a lonely road/the only one that I have ever known/don't know where it goes/but it's only me/and I walk alone..."

so I'm listening to Green Day's Boulevard of Broken Dreams again, still as bold and fresh a CD as when I heard it in a very dry place last summer. "ring out the bells again/like we did when spring began...here comes the rain again/falling from the stars/drenched in pain again/becoming who we are"

JRR Tolkein's words are on the back of my new STEP t-shirt:

"Not all who wander are lost."



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*from the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value — you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you — daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Hence a phrase which has passed into hitch hiking slang, as in "Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is." (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; Hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)