This should be one of those songs where people go, "This song is cool! Thanks!"

I just spent all my writing time reading this article in the LA Times about a couple of kids who ride trains like hobos. It's a fun story (in a way) and it made my eyes tear up a little bit. It's got a lot of nice details:

Freedom to roam the country's 140,000 miles of freight track meant being at the mercy of a fixed grid. Once, they gambled on the wrong boxcar and found themselves stuck in Wichita, Kan., in winter, a place so miserably cold they risked escape in a locomotive engine.

They ate from trash bins and begged on street corners. For shelter, they threw their sleeping bags under bridges and pried the plywood from the windows of abandoned houses. They shared three bottles of cheap whiskey a day. They found a stray husky they named Captain Morgan and a rabbit they called Dinner.

I also read this article about student lawyers trying to get three-strikes inmates released when their childhoods are especially horrible.

At 11, he was discovered by social workers alone with a younger sister in their South Los Angeles home overrun by flies. Windows were broken out. Trash cans were filled with rotting garbage. The bathroom was filthy and reeked of excrement. There was no food in the home.

Social workers took the youngest children, including Norman, into custody. He and some of his siblings told the workers that they had been raped by friends of their mother's, according to court records. His mother's boyfriend whipped him with electrical cords.

So, what did we learn? If you read both articles, you should take away this completely sound conclusion: When you treat your children like you're their friend, you end up with kids unable to cope with reality and run from it. When you treat your children like crap, they wind up end jail. And when you treat them with benign indifference, they start blogs!

Benign indifference FTW!