I want to believe that we are -- all of us -- "dumpster divers of the mind"

Deep inside of me, I want to believe that we are -- all of us -- dumpster divers of the mind. That no matter the path we chose to take in life, we are all, at the end of the day, still bohemian dreamers. That we are Ginsberg’s “angel headed hipsters“, who haunt the halls of shopping malls amid old men and children. And wander empty city playgrounds in search of vanished voices, unsalvaged souls, whose songs we still whistle in small hours of the morning. And this page is for remembering them. And intertwining, for a while, our own lives and consciousness with theirs. In folding backward and casting forward our allotted portions of the canvas of time and space; in hopes of spending a little while together amid the ever advancing cadences of their words and the intense and raging rhythms of their songs. To celebrate their having lived. And to savor their names until we are damned, delightfully drunk on the words themselves:

“Come back Woody Guthrie, come back to us now…
And tear your eyes from paradise and arise again somehow…
Woody, there’s foxes in the henhouse, cows out in the corn.
Our Unions have been busted. Their proud red banners torn…
So come back Emma Goldman. Rise up Old Joe Hill.
The barricades are goin‘ out. They cannot break our will.
Come back to us Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.
We’re marchin’ into Selma, while the bells of freedom ring…”
(Steve Earl from “Christmas Time in Washington“)

So, let us also signal to the rest of them to join us now: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sören Kierkegaard, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre, Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, Karl Marx, Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, e.e. cummings and all those would be dreamers who ever dared to dream…Come back to us now.