Black Throated Wind...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nqou2V…
The Grateful Dead
"Black Throated Wind"

Bringing me down,
I'm running aground
Blind in the light of the interstate cars.
Passing me by,
The busses and semis,
Plunging like stones from a slingshot on Mars.

But I'm here by the road,
Bound to the load
That I picked up in ten thousand cafes and bars.
Alone with the rush of the drivers who won't pick me up,
The highway, the moon, the clouds, and the stars.

The black-throated wind keeps on pouring in
With its words of a life where nothing is new.
Ah, Mother American Night, I'm lost from the light.
Ohhh, I'm drowning in you.

I left St. Louis, the City of Blues,
In the midst of a storm I'd rather forget.
I tried to pretend it came to an end
Cause you weren't the woman I thought I once met.

But I can't deny that times have gone by
When I never had doubts or thoughts of regret
And I was a man when all this began
Who wouldn't think twice about being there yet.

The black-throated wind keeps on pouring in.
And it speaks of a life that passes like dew.
It's forced me to see that you've done better by me,
Better by me than I've done by you.

What's to be found, racing around,
You carry your pain wherever you go.
Full of the blues and trying to lose
You ain't gonna learn what you don't want to know.

So I give you my eyes, and all of their lies
Please help them to learn as well as to see
Capture a glance and make it a dance
Of looking at you looking at me.

The black-throated wind keeps on pouring in
With its words of a lie that could almost be true.
Ah, Mother American Night, here comes the light.
I'm turning around, that's what I'm gonna do

Going back home that's what I'm gonna do
Turning around,
That's what I'm gonna do

'Cause you've done better by me
Than I've done by you. . .

---

Lyrics and the following taken from this website...artsites.ucsc.edu/GDead/agdl/b…

Being a practicing Buddhist, I found this tid bit interesting:

From the 25th Chapter of "The Sutra Of The Lotus Flower Of The Wonderful Law," by Banno Kato's 1930 translation

"If there be hundreds thousands of kotis of beings who in search of gold, silver, lapis lazuli, moonstones, agate, corals, amber, pearls and other treasures, go out on the ocean and if a BLACK GALE (my caps) blows their ships to drift upon the land of the rakshasa-demons, and if amongst them there be even a single person who calls upon the name of the Bodhisattva Regarder-Of-The-Cries-Of-The-World, all those people will be delivered from the woes of the rakshasas."

(Kato, Bunno, trans., The Sutra Of The Lotus FLower Of The Wonderful Law (Tokyo: Rissho Kosei-kai, 1971), p. 405.]

On the same page, as a footnote, Kato defines the black gale as "a black wind. There are six kinds of wind, viz., black, red, blue, of heaven, of earth and of fire."