SONG OF THE DAY: Ridin' That Midnight Train

Tagging that midnight train, hoping somebody benches it in Georgia. Even wrote “El Hijo del Jim Croce” because I was thinking about that “Walkin’ Back to Georgia” song he does. One time I rode the Greyhound from Colorado to Keysville, Virginia, which was ten miles from my mom’s house. The Greyhound still went to Keysville back then. A long ass ride, and I was squeezed next to an old woman as we went from Richmond down 360 through Amelia, and I felt close to home finally. We talked about it, and she said she could see the twinkle in my eyeballs. The bus stop in Keysville was what used to be a video store/restaurant/country store/pool hall combo building, that’s now split it up into some other barely not failing businesses more appropriate for today, but there was no pay phone there, even though pay phones were still a thing back then. I walked the mile from Keysville’s Greyhound drop-off to the gas station by the building supply store, because the gas station had a pay phone. I sang, “Walkin’ Back to Georgia” the whole way, and then kept singing it after using the pay phone to call my mom’s house and use the “state your name” request to say rapidly as fuck, “It’s Raven, just got home, at the gas station in Keysville, come get me,” so that collect call said, “You have a collect call from it’s-raven-just-got-home-at-the-gas-station-in-keysville-come-get-me, do you accept?” Everybody knew not to accept and just do what the message said, because that was also a thing back then. The building supply store is now one of those temperature controlled storage unit places, and I’ll never speak to my mom again while we’re both alive. But if you see that dirtgod moniker in Georgia, and it says “El Hijo del Jim Croce”, that’s all the stream of thought that went through my mind in the twenty seconds it took me to write that on an empty grain hopper. Every single moniker is like that, an entire world of philosophy and experience and reality and subjectivity boiled down to a bare essence that gets scribbled onto the side of a train, like a message in a bottle, knowing maybe nobody will ever notice it.