Ninth Day in America....

And from Denver, Colorado, down (though it seems, somehow, that in Colorado there is only up, then further up, then further up again, from one mile high in Denver to over two miles high not far away) through New Mexico and Texas to El Paso and the Mexican border and across to Arizona and North again, there was hardly even one day without great music: In biker bars where the waitresses had more tattoos than skin left to put them on and that skin, cheerily, covered hardly at all by almost no clothes at all (and where we lost gloriously, and diplomatically, at pool though I'm, almost, sure we'd have been bought just as many Colorado Whiskies if we'd won): In old mining towns re-inhabited in the sixties by Hippies who still sang that last verse as if it was the beginning of the next with even better verses still to come and who were never out-sang and, by morning, would be seated in the Sunday sunshine on weathered wooden coffee shop verandas discussing, with few words and long contemplations, the mobility, habits and history of one hardly-blinking old hound dog called Sally.

And it seemed to me, when I was sitting there, and hardly a soul moving more than slowly out there on the street, no more important subject was being discussed anywhere in the universe than this.