Just found some transcriptions of Utah Philips’ Stories, from which this, a favourite of mine:
That’s when [Fry Pan Jack] told me – you know, he’d been tramping since 1927 -he said, “I told myself in ’27, if I cannot dictate the conditions of my labor, I will henceforth cease to work.” Hah! You don’t have to go to college to figure these things out, no sir! He said, “I learned when I was young that the only true life I had was the life of my brain. But if it’s true the only real life I have is the life of my brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain to somebody for eight hours a day for their particular use on the presumption that at the end of the day they will give it back in an unmutilated condition?” Fat chance!
One reply on “The only true life i have is the life of my brain…”
Thank you for the Utah Phillips link. My favorite Utah Phillips quote:
“I’ve worked at every kind of dumb job you can imagine, every kind of scumbag boss believable. Miners for Delmonte all the way to working as a State House in Utah as rat in the basement. I used to go to work at five o’clock every morning…I was taking the stairs up and the governor was taking the stairs down, and we’d shake hands as we passed each other in the hall. My, my, the kind of thing that’ll drive you crazy. I mean, not mad, I’m already mad, I don’t mind that, that’s what the situation requires. I mean crazy, which is, uh, mildly uncontrollable.”