You grow up, and they bury you

"It's a real simple story. You grow up, and they bury you. They keep throwing dirt on you, throwing dirt on and dirt on, and some guys they bury so deep they never get out. Six foot, twelve foot down. Other guys, something comes along and they're able to get some of it away. They get a hand free or they get free one way or another.

I don't think you ever really blow it all off, but the idea is to keep charging. It's like anything. Everybody can't make it. You can see the guys on the street who aren't going to make it, and that's a frightening thing.

That's what I'm talking about. That some people get dug in so deep that there's a point where it stops getting shovelled on them and they roll over and start digging down. They literally roll over and start digging down themselves.Because they don't know which way is up. You get down so deep that you don't know which way's up. You don't know if you're digging sideways, up, down, you don't know... until something comes along, if you're lucky, and shakes you 'til all of a sudden you have a certain sense of direction and at least know where you're going.

A lot of people don't ever get that. You go into the bars and you see the guys wandering around in there who got the crazy eyes. They just hate. They're just looking for an immediate expenditure of all this build-up. They're just screaming to throw it all off. But you can't and it turns into, like, death throes. A guy walks into a bar, a little guy, and he walks up to another guy, a dome, and the little guy's looking to get creamed. Looking to get massacred. He wants to. 'Look,' he's saying, 'I'm dying here and I don't know what the fuck to do.' It's a scary thing when you see the guys that ain't gonna get out, just ain't gonna get out.

But I guess it comes down to... You just see too many faces, you just see too many... It's a funny kind of thing. It's the kind of thing where you can't save everybody, but you gotta try."

Bruce Springsteen 1978