Been thinking about hobo-ing. I've defined myself as an artist. I've considered being a monk. Put hobo and artist together and you have a troubadour, a traveling player, a minstrel. Can't romanticize the life, though some hoboes do prefer their wandering lifestyle and consider it a vocation. The monk, St. Francis of Assisi, was a troubadour in service of his main love, Christ. Christ was a rabbi, a teaching troubadour in service of his main love, Abba.

Bob Dylan sang a song in his "religious period" called "Gotta Serve Somebody." There's resistance to this idea in the archetype of the hobo. He's someone who refuses to work for the man, on the clock, dinner at 5:00 with the wife and two kids, inside the picket fence. America despises the hobo for all this but on some deep level admires him, because America despises the idea of having to serve anybody.

But to me there's something beautiful about the paradox of someone who refuses to live normally - who lives independently, dangerously, crazily, on the margins of society, dirty and tattered and torn and despised - but who also surrenders to something or someone, at least for some time if not for all of the time. There's also something beautiful about living normally and surrendering to no one, nothing.

Today I practiced decking a passenger train - riding on top in the open-air - with sleet and snow pelting like ice bullets, with smoke and cinders from the engine, watching out for the railroad bulls who might smash my head in with the back end of a pick axe, toss me off to get rolled under the train, or shoot me. Keeping low to the car, hugging my body to it like a lover.

Back to my least favorite definition right now: artist. The train I caught twenty years ago - my beloved world of freaky contemporary intellectual interdisciplinary dancers - is weirdly snagged on an elitist but destitute track. It's holding on for dear life. It's trying to jump tracks, to varying degrees of of sincerity and success. To really succeed it might have to surrender more than it wants to. Or try harder than it wants to.

My attitude these days, from Keith Richards: "As far as I'm concerned, art's just short for Arthur."

This song, which I loved when I was young, is a hobo ballad:

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
You never change your socks
And little streams of alcohol
Come a-trickling down the rocks
The boxcars are all empty
And the railroad bulls are blind
There's a lake of stew and whiskey too
You can paddle all around 'em in a big canoe
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains