Ask yourself: "but how the heck did it get this way?" Pondering Minds is the multifaceted, weird, and genre-transcending brainchild of New York-born, Austin-based musician and poet Paul Clancy. At once a tale of his travails hitchhiking across the United States in the late 1970s and a chronicle of late-night subway rides away from ten dollar rooms in Hoboken, Clancy's memoirs reveal a cross-section of American life and love at the tail end of a freewheeling era. This unique collection of fifty years of songs, poems, art, and original journal entries exchanges the grit of the road for backyard encounters with squirrels, opinions about rocks, and an exposition on the Problem of Stupid Heads today. Whether you too were a hippie now in search of nostalgia for bygone days, or are a budding songwriter or poet looking for inspiration, Pondering Minds will leave you asking of a former world hidden just a scratch beneath the surface, "where the heck did it go?"