When I arrived Dylan was making banana bread with David Bowie playing at max volume. He had already made cornbread and greens and blueberry pie. Above his bed hung a Kalashnikov. Next door, Nic made wine with his mother. Jenny ran the hostel.

After dark and after eating we drove for 3 minutes into “town” to the gallery co-owned by Nic. A friend called Patrick is there playing a guitar into his computer. His girlfriend sits in the corner facing the wall, throwing a pot. Nic picks up a bass guitar and begins to walk it. Patrick turns up his delay pedal and washes out a wave of humming buzzing echoing strings.

In the hypnosis of the music Dylan gets excited, turns off all the lights and delicately places lit candles all around the room. He walks up behind my and whispers in a drunken heaviness,
“Do you smoke marijuana?”
“I don’t know”, I say and he’s delighted.
“Good answer” he says.

In Asheville, NC I meet a man at a bar. He tells me he has nine university degrees, speaks 13 languages, that his father worked on the Manhattan project, that he served in both the Israeli and American armies, had a private discussion with Buckminster Fuller, jammed with Hendrix, organised a Miles Davis concert, flew to work everyday in a friend’s Learjet to teach philosophy at the University of Florida, and so on. His name is Eric and now he runs a second—hand record store.

At the hostel I meet someone called Cosmos. Cosmos will be sleeping on the bunk below me that night at which point I will learn that he snores very loudly. "Nice to meet you” I Englished at him, “Yeah” he drawled back all Southernly.

That night, a Saturday, I walk up and down along Nashville’s lower Broadway. There are neon guitars, pretensions of country music and crowds, all sweaty and squeezed into cowboy boots. Horses walk by blinkered (to save their souls) pulling swaying people through the traffic.

There was heavy rain this morning on Interstate 40. Streaks of lightning appeared once or twice out of the grey. At times, the cars a few meters ahead were visible only as dark blurry apparitions. The road, with the rain bouncing off it, became indistinguishable from the sky. After 100 miles or so everything is cerulean and the sky is emphatic in its protests of innocence.

There’s a dead armadillo tipped over onto its curved, ribbed back. Its short muscular rear legs are curled inwards while its snout does the same in reverse, almost completing a fleshy ball. A comic kind of proven mortality.

On the radio I head a phone—in show with someone who called himself “The General” (he referred to his listeners as “Lieutenants”). The program specialised in “Cigars, spirits, and diversions”, the latter being a code word for right wing rants. His main gripes on that day's show were the non-US-manufactured nature of the US Olympic team's uniforms, and bans on smoking in parks in Atlanta. One listener phoned in to complain about Obama, “our Muslim in charge” (the General chuckled).

In the evening I eat fried catfish with fried okra, hush puppies, and Cajun cabbage.