Breathe.
Thats 'stalking' as in a starving caveman pursuing a cagey mountain lion across some ancient wind-swept plateu in order to survive. Not 'stalking' as in some creepy old bastard with dirty nails having a back ground check run on ya.
Stalking/hunting. Thats blog title explanation part one.
Part two would be the name: Bobbi McGee.
Ok, first off, according to Kristofferson who penned and compose the original song "Me and Bobbi McGee" back in the mid-1960's , 'Bobbi' is absolutely the proper spelling and the character is without question female. Janis Joplin, unattractive folk singer/junkie of that same free-love era popularized and masculinized the song with the misnomer 'Bobby McGee'.
But screw JJ, she was weird anyhow.
So the blog title is explained and the gender of Bobbi is obvious.Now exactly who the hell IS she?
Kris doesnt really answer this when pressed and takes an evasive tact when asked, eventually calling her a 'composite'.Quick snap-shots character-wise of several women Kris had known all squeezed into one chick.
But she's more than that to most listeners of the song as Kristofferson's explanation is way to subjective to apply to anyone other than himself and his own view.
So what Bobbi became is a representation. An icon for that free-thumbing hitch-hiker chick in cut-off jeans and a striped shirt and wild brownish red hair on the side of some lost highway. In another era, an era lost on the wind.
At least to guys like me.
Shes part hard ridden earthy girl, part tender woman searching for something lost. She's every mans dream and no mans possession.
Shes there, regardless, shes a survivor and much much more importantly, she knows her opposite number. She knows what men ARE, what men want, how we think.She radiates sex appeal blended with an edge and tempered in the oven of sheer feminine mystique that makes all men want her.
But, like her vagabond image that she aquires in the song, she is always just out of sight--just caught a ride in a Kenworth and is headed east , just around some next bend in the road that we can just never quite reach...
At least I can't.
And it dawns on me as I write this that the reason she cant be caught, the reasons the common guy cant offer her a ride into the night is because that very act of catching her would change her, transforming her into something she can never be.
Bobbi McGee, free-living-chick-that-knows becomes every other woman.
A real damned shame, that.
