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Johnny Cash, "Can't Help But Wonder Where I'm Bound"




* Johnny Cash's rendition of Tom Paxton's classic is hemmed in with grits and veils of smoke.


My train of thoughts always goes thus when journeying:
the nervousness propels the churn of my stomach growling for inexplicable hunger.
The mixed feelings of excitement and premature homesickness trigger multitudes of music notes in my ears.
Numerous music notes, play incessantly and intermittently, rush to and fro, like flies in net.
The melody blurs out with the increase of its speed.
As a result they all turn into awkward glossolalias,
the alien language I speak in some alien lands.

I love a journey without an end:
the prolong of one's expectation,
the expectation one relishes- I suspect it to be the only moment that is truly of one's own, the time one can truly relax.
I love a journey without a destination:
it is a reasonable excuse to shirk one's daily responsibilities and take upon adventures,
small scaled notwithstanding, life itself can be adventurous anyway.
And more expectations yet to come.

Because where you will land in might be none but a disappointment,
a disappointment that deteriorates your weary body,
a disappointment that makes you stare back several times and notice the unnoticeable:
the fly, the traces of smog, the red dirt on the bench, the candy-wrapper which hampers your way.
So you long for another journey.
That is how fickle lovers do:
they live in expectations,
they live without destination.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it."- John Donne, "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"

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