...but it's getting there.

If ya didn't know already, I guess I'll tell ya now.  I'm a big fan of Bob Dylan.  His music has made me feel like I'm not quite so much of a stranger in this world and that there's at least someone who's felt the way I feel from time to time.  A lot of folks are down on Dylan because they can't get past his voice.  "He's a great songwriter but I can't stand the way he sings." If I've heard it once, I've heard it a thousand times.  Meh.  To each their own.  For me, there ain't never been nobody who sings no better than Bob Dylan.  His voice is one of the finest instruments ever recorded.  Period.

So for some reason, the song Not Dark Yet has been in my head all evening.  I first heard the song on the night before my first wedding. A friend and I spent the evening relaxing with some adult beverages and dry goods.  In addition to the intoxicants, he also brought along a copy of the soon-to-be-released Dylan album "Time Out of Mind".  He'd gotten it from a friend at a concert a week or two before who handed him the tape and said it was "spreading like a virus".  And so it was.

An ominous way to begin a marriage, no?

The marriage didn't work out so well.  But that's okay.  It was my fault.  I'll accept that.  I was a lost man-child who didn't know how to deal with life and real adult relationships.    I just hate that I wasted so much of her time.  She was a good woman but I pushed her too far one time too many and she did the smart thing and left.  Not my finest hour.

But back to Bob.  He's been a constant presence in my life since I was 16 years old.  I'd heard "Like a Rolling Stone" on the radio and was floored.  Who is this guy?  What's he singing about?  It's like poetry but it's music but it's not the Talking Heads or the Violent Femmes or the Eagles or anything I'd ever heard before.  This stuff was... foreign but somehow so familiar.  In short order, I went out and got a copy of Highway 61 Revisited on cassette and went driving off into the North Carolina 

night.  I drove through the back country roads with the top down on my '66 Mustang, Dylan blasting into the night.  Driving back roads at night can be a bit spooky in and of itself, but when you're sixteen years old and feel like you don't fit in anywhere in this world and the only thing you've got 

are your thoughts and the open road, "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" can rattle your very soul.  And  so it did.  That night, as I drove through the darkness, the music changed me forever.  

For several years, Dylan's music was my dirty little secret.  I didn't play it around my friends because I didn't think they'd get it, or was afraid to be judged, or was afraid that they'd ridicule it and this precious musical gem would be forever scarred in my mind, rendered worthless by the disapproving words of people who might not get it.  So I lived off of a diet of heavy metal and punk rock (which I still enjoy).  

Highway 61 Revisited was a pivotal record to me, and I so adored it, I was afraid to pick up any of Dylan's other work, for fear of being disappointed.  I eventually bought Blonde on Blonde, which kicked the doors of perception open just a little bit further, but didn't dare venture much further than that.  I'd read or heard somewhere that Dylan had converted to Christianity and was only making gospel music.  I was looking for something to expand my mind, not gospel music.  I grew up on  gospel music, and if Dylan was making that kind of noise, I wanted no part of it.  (For those who don't know, Dylan did convert did in late 1979 and put out a few gospel records early 80's, but it was just a phase.  In fact, I eventually came to love those records and my left shoulder is adorned with a  tattoo of the cover of Dylan's Slow Train Coming album.). So I stuck with the two Dylan records I could handle and eventually picked up his Greatest Hits album (the first one).  But didn't dare venture beyond that stable ground... For a while.

In 93 or 94, I started working in a record store.  Actually, it was a CD store.  They didn't sell vinyl or cassettes, only CD's, a revolutionary idea at the time.  But I always call it a record store because that's what it was in spirit.  It was during this time that I met the aforementioned friend.  He and I worked together at this record store and he turned me on to Dylan's other work and the world of ROIO's (Recordings of Indeterminate Origin), better known as Bootlegs. I vividly recall the first time i heard the "Royal Albert Hall" version of "Like a Rolling Stone". It was like hearing Dylan for the first time all over again.  (This same fellow also turned me on to the Grateful Dead and a host of other musicians and music which have infinitely enriched my existence).  He and I reconnected via Facebook a few years ago, and it was as if no time at all had passed.  I'm blessed to have folks like him in my life.

Some relationships are like that.  They have the power to transform.  The relationships can be with people you hardly know (or never even met) or they can be friendships that grow and evolve over the years.  Ya just never know when that person (or song) is gonna enter your life and change it all around.

Writing this is helping.  Although I know how I physically feel, (and it ain't good) there are moments where my discomfort isn't the dominating force in my life.