We thought we were all so clever defying the man, doubting reality. Denying the existence of moral absolutes. Look atcha. Like a rolling stone.

This is what we get and I still don’t know what to do.

It seems to me that Bob Dylan's principal achievement was to be bold and imaginative enough to take the history of American folk music by the balls and make it his prison bitch.

Saved

My dad had an old college friend, Tomas Bitter. A Swiss man, swarthy, manic. He and his wife Françoise lived up on a twisty flower-lined road, in a chalet overlooking Lake Geneva. They had a platoon of ruddy children, with a cantankerous, Germanic grandmother who lived in the little house across the street.

They were God-promised Calvinists, and this fact - probably told to me by my mother, so mundane and so derisive, one day, over her shoulder in a car - inhabited their home like some spectral presence. Everything seemed peculiarly clean and quiet, with inanimate objects - chairs and bookcases - manifesting unworldly gravity.

One day I was looking through their album collection - a sad, bourgeois and perfunctory row filling half a shelf as I recall, careful not to crowd the tchochkes. One of the kids had a copy of Bob Dylan's "Saved" in there and I pulled it out, mesmerized by the garish, bleeding hand. I must have been nine or ten - I don't think I knew that this was Christ's hand, reaching down from the heavens to the outstretched hands of his children below. I might have thought it was meant to be Bob Dylan's hand. However, I also knew that this album had something to do with the religion of the people who lived in this house and, more properly, with the solemn, pious spirit they shared it with. But the blood, the flesh; the trembling, outstretched fingers: it was so carnal. The idea that these two things might somehow be connected, I'll never forget.

I slept fitfully last night, the pillow soaked with sweat, specks of goose down sticking maddeningly to my nose and cheeks. In the meantime, I had a complex dream about Bob Dylan and Howard Stern. They were hanging out the way the rich and famous sometimes do, with a bond borne of an unspoken understanding of each others' unconventional burdens.

Sometimes I dream I can't hardly play the guitar at all and sometimes I dream I can play it a hundred miles an hour. Just the other day, I dreamt I was hanging out with Bob Dylan. He was his weird self, the Dylan everyone but no one knows. We rode over hill and dale in a Jeep, I think. He gave me a guitar at a certain point, and in my hands it was quickly reduced to some precious piece of porcelain, or scrimshaw, God knows what; I was meant to play it by plucking its delicate tines emerging in two toothy rows outta sorta half-shell of something all of a sudden, all sculpted and pretty. I did the best I could and made a honking twang or two, the noise of a fumbling ignoramus, like the toot you make on a flute after several breathy attempts, if you don't know from a flute. And last night I dreamt I sat down in a darkened living room with an unplugged electric guitar and played extremely fast, the pick flickering across the street, across the strings I mean - it was a dream but on the money - like a hummingbird's wings.

Last two, three days I been trying to memorize that Dylan tune Tangled Up In Blue. Waking up in the morning to the deep-deep-deep of the alarm, already bearing the cadence in my brain: Early one morning the sun was shining. Getting up, brushing the teeth. She lit a burner on the stove and offered me a pipe. A strangely difficult song to memorize, its language the authentic one of a single real man in the world, liable to tell you something one way or the other. She said over my shoulder we'll meet again someday. Stepping through the puddles on Canal and Hudson, animated from caffeine and work. And when finally the bottom fell out, I became withdrawn. A flurry from her cigarette, waiting for the light to change. A man and a woman push a car across the intersection. An entire car. I never did like it all that much and one day the axe just fell. A tall, hunched leather rocker with a despondent air chose a seat across from me on the L. She opened up a book of poems and handed it to me. She took off her glasses and placed them on the bar. I jaywalked across Fifth Avenue and the gypsy cabs and a man coming 'cross the other way. Her folks said our life together sure was gonna be tough.

I came back to the home, PC imploring the TV: No man, no. Don't do it. She's dead! She's dead already. On the screen a man was attending to the birth of his wife's child. His undead wife. She died, she's undead now. Don't do it.

The fat guy sitting in front of me at the Dylan show. With a Slowhand T-shirt. Like, it said Slowhand on the back, with the neck of a guitar, and you were supposed to know what it meant. He was loud, always talking behind his chubby and long-suffering girlfriend's back to his friend. They went and got beers and he had two beers resting on the top of the concrete wall before him and he caressed them masturbatorily, sipping from one then the other and then the one.