The Twenty First Day in America....

That night, in El Paso on the Texas-Mexico border, driving late on the bright, long-malled streets, we met a dying man, not old, in a breathing mask and carrying a cylinder of oxygen, who talked of his love for God and of the good times he'd had in his life that might have led to this, his shortened life. And no one else to blame, he said, just himself. And he told us of a Mexican bar where we went that night and where a young band from Juarez played, with every molecule of their souls, everything you'd ever hoped for from Rock and Roll, like it was your own blood and heartbeat running up and down those guitar strings, every hope you'd ever had hammering on that drum's hard door, and where the walls of the bar itself were built extra thick just to keep in all this sound though the band still did their best to make it loud enough to share right across El Paso to that dying man and beyond, even to the love of God that he had talked about.