Intriguing Maladies and Mysterious Afflictions

I never started off trying to write a novel. Instead I felt I might be at the end of my rope and I knew I had never come close to writing my masterpiece. Still, in my 25 years I had written some things I thought were good. Good not in they were masterful words magically arranged on a page that would change the world. Good for me at the time was having been able to write something that accurately captured the mixture of feelings and thoughts that something, somebody somewhere had inspired me to feel the need to figure things out on paper.

Once I began compiling my favorite examples of my writing I noted there was a pattern to what I considered samples of my best: that all the writing was about how hope was the sum between love and inspiration. And that elusive combination was the most powerful elixir. Finding the moments, memories and dreams that were powerful and unique that I bothered enough and inspired enough to come home and write about. I didn’t understand the inspiration, why a particular person or event was so meaningful not only to figure out what it meant, but to express how it changed me. The common connection was feeling love. I was falling in love with someone; I loved a song, a movie, a book... And what did this connection between inspiration and love leave me feeling? Hope. Hope that I was headed to something better. Hope that someone would be there with me. A shared experience that I felt compelled to share.

In collecting my writing together in one place I noticed recurring themes of inspiration, love and hope that ran throughout my favorite pieces. I wanted to write the connection between them and it occurred to me I could tie them all together in a novel. That revelation was huge, More enlightening than the most powerful anti-depressants. Realizing the line that separated reality and embellishment was razor thin. By turning nonfiction into fiction, I had the right to express other people’s feelings and thoughts about particular events about me (the protagonist). I could take whatever creative license I wanted to tell the story I wanted to tell.

What story did I choose to tell? How one character (me, on my better days) was watching another character (me in my reality) disintegrate and it equally horrified the witness and disgusted him. He chronicled the wasting of one more talented into a cesspool of self pity and depression. It kinda was like a poor second cousin rewrite of ‘Amadeus.’

For the past several years I’ve been writing a shared memoir with Marisa. The idea was to write about events that made us who we are individually, how we met, and how we’ve connected despite two completely different life stories. The challenge has always been feeling adequate telling her story because I can imagine but I can’t know how a particular event left her feeling. And her life story towers over mine in the drama and pain.

I’ve thought about overcoming these obstacles by turning to the tried and true- turning it into a novel. A piece of fiction. I’ve also thought about turning it into a self help book: here’s what we did, you want to avoid doing the same things at all costs. Lately, I’ve noticed a connecting theme in our shared story is that life doesn’t have a master plan no matter what we were told as kids. Life is a series of forks in the road and you make the best decision you can based on past experience, best guess, best intuition, and how much you trust your decision making at the moment.

It’s not exactly a tale full of love and inspiration. There is a scent of hope that what we’ve shared the past seven years has been life changing for both of us because we were able to share it together. It’s our cubby hole moment.

“Sometimes it's not enough to know the meaning of things, sometimes we have to know what things don't mean as well.”

Mr. Cameron, my high school creative writing class teacher, once asked how I was doing. I said I was doing OK. He said that was too bad because great writing comes from times in our lives when we are struggling.

In the early days of Cheapo, in the wake of the free fall, there was a day I was taking my lunch in the cubby hole built to show kids videos while the parents shopped and dropped their hard earned cash. I was joined by the newest employee, the girl with a limp from a skiing accident who I already had a huge crush on. Stephanie Jane was hired during my hospitalization. She technically might have replaced me during my indefinite leave. I knew she knew I was sad. So as I ate my PBJ and she ate a salad she probed a little, not too far, not too personal. I revealed I was haunted. That my memories turned to demons. I didn’t tell her the doctors suggested treatment was electroshock that they said would probably help with the only side effect being short term memory loss. That tempted me if only for a few moments.

Stephanie Jane then said the thing that will resonate more than anything else anyone else in my entire life has ever said to me: “Then we’ll just have to make new ones to replace the old.” And we eventually did leading to a cross country trip that was the basis for being able to write a novel.  But maybe the cure ended up being worse than the disease, winning the battle only to lose the war.

All this led to my first paid writing gig, the Cheapo Newsletter’s editor. The opportunity was a gift given to me toward the beginning of Bob Dylan’s self denied ‘Never Ending Tour.’ But the spirit of that tour inspired me. Bob was playing gigs nearly every night in smallish venues throughout the world. The setlist changed every night, the arrangements of the songs were fluid. And that was what inspired my Cheapo newsletter columns. If I wanted to be a writer I needed to put my depression, my past, my angst, my baggage behind me. I just needed to take advantage of this incredible oppportunity to do the thing I love doing best, create and express myself and then share it through my writing. Just write no matter how wrong.

The new memories Stephanie Jane promised were meant to inspire me to reconnect with my muse, the thing that balanced me: my writing. I suffered long and hard once that muse disappeared. Hope, the bridge between love and inspiration burned down. Eventually I gave up believing in the myth Mr. Cameron’s lesson. Being a writer didn’t mean being tortured. Being a writer simply meant writing, being willing to share my writing warts and all, and being strong enough to accept the consequences.

They always say fill a room full of monkeys at typewriters and they could produce something Shakespearean. Give me a weekly writing gig for 14 years and once in a blue moon the self conscious filters let my muse express something true, authentic, that somehow manage to straddle the line between intimately personal and universally relatable.

The raw intensity of love inspires me to write something that came out of nowhere, that almost felt like it wrote itself and I just needed to get out of my way. Rereading my Cheapo newsletter columns the best are the ones that were inspired by things like Mr. Max enjoying green beans fresh out of the garden, attending Bob Dylan concerts and Sandra Bullock movies.

The lesson I’ve learned in trying to write a memoir is that the older you get you learn new memories don’t replace the old ones. They can add to them or enhance them or make you feel said because they don’t have the same meaning and power. Memories are like waves; they move forward and splash back and in the middle they intertwine. Watching my Dad die from Alzheimer’s/Dementia, it was heartbreaking and illuminating that in the end he could remember things that happened 50 years ago better than he could something that happened five minutes before. It was like the moments that were worth remembering, that initially ingrained themselves so powerfully retained their power or at least because he had remembered them so strongly for 50 years he remembered them until the very end.

Recently, I woke up around 1:30 a.m. and couldn’t fall back to sleep, a lifelong affliction. So I went down to the living room to try and fall asleep on the couch. It dawned on me how many years of accumulated stuff I have. The love seat is Katie’s, her first splurge purchase after finding a new life. The couch is from Niki, Jenny Engh’s former administrative assistant. The piano is from my sister Donna. The coffee table was a gift from us kids to mom and dad on a wedding anniversary. The rug was a housewarming gift from mom and dad. The drapes are from Amy. The TV was the one Pistol Pete and I bought (Stephanie helped move it from Linwood to Raymond). The receiver attached to the TV is the first stereo I got, the one I got in junior high and used to do my imaginary WQSR programming on. I’m made of the memories that the stuff represents.

But what the wave has taught me as I bob back and forth from that day in the cubby hole with Stephanie is a lesson that’s taken me 30 years to learn: that creating new memories and moving forward and not being haunted is a definite must. But it’s that shared singular moment, a true moment of kindness and hope, and sharing it with someone living in the moment, that’s equally important. Be here now.

Down in the Groove

Back in the old days, when I used to walk through snowdrifts up to my hips wearing nothing but bandaids on my toes, there was a ritual known as new release record day. Record companies released the major new releases on Tuesdays. The record store that employed me stayed open past midnight on Mondays just to be the first place in town that people could buy the album they were dying to hear. The last new release I remember buying ‘round midnight was Bob Dylan’s ‘Time Out of Mind’ back in 1997.

These memories came rolling back the past few weeks with the out of nowhere news that Dylan’s first album of new songs in eight years, ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways,’ was about to be released. True to his most Boblike behavior, Dylan had surprised his fans by releasing three songs during the pandemic at midnight on random days with no warning no hype. The timing, with the stay at home to stay safe from a deadly virus apocalypse upon us, couldn’t have been better for those of us who have learned to view the world through the lens of Dylan’s many many many great songs. The three new songs didn’t disappoint (particularly ‘I Contain Multitudes’). They were stream of conscious yet deliberate songs that I can’t think of another songwriter being capable of writing, full of jarring juxtapositions and references to artists and songs and history from all over the place. And all of it seemed intuitively relevant in this strange new world of 2020.

In 2020, it’s no longer necessary to depend on your neighborhood record store staying open past midnight in order to hear a new release when it’s released. The semi-Luddites like me can now download it from multiple music services, and the kids can listen from streaming music services. I bought the iTunes pre-order and actually stayed up past midnight on release day to see that it was now available on my iPhone. I decided I wouldn’t stay up and listen, having a lot of work to do in the morning.

I got up early to hear what Bob had to say. Like 1997’s ‘Time Out of Mind’ all the people who had heard the new work prior to its release had written over the top positive things. The general consensus seemed to be it was unlike anything Bob had done in the past, yet it was connected to everything he has done in his career and could sit proudly next to his greatest works.

I went down to the kitchen to put on my pot of coffee and feed the boyz. I paired my iPad with the Bluetooth speakers in my kitchen. I pressed play and the opening track, ‘I Contain Multitudes,’ began to play. And then it stopped. I did some pigeon I/T work and noticed the Bluetooth pairing was no longer in place. So I ineffectively tried everything I could think of to re-establish the connection. I unplugged the speakers and tried again. Nothing. I restarted my iPad and when I opened iTunes my library was gone and I had to reload it. Seemed like someone (probably Russian hackers) didn’t want me to hear whatever Bob had to say. I remembered the days when listening to music meant dropping a needle into the grooves of a slab of vinyl. Things were so much simpler then.

So does ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ live up to the hype, the buzz? Strangely the two LPs it most reminds me of are ‘Time Out of Mind’ and ‘Blonde on Blonde,’ which really are very different LPs. The sparse arrangements echo ‘Time Out of Mind’ and the bluesy songs with playful and complex lyrics hark back to ‘Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat,’ and ‘Stuck Inside a Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,’ not to mention ‘Blonde on Blonde’ era outtakes like ‘She’s Your Lover Now,’ and ‘I’m Not There.’

The 10 songs on ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ contain connected themes referencing pop culture from the beginning of time yet applying name drops and inscrutable couplets to the contemporary world of a country coming apart at the seams. A friend called the lyric writing method “intertextual.” That’s perfect. Some have likened the lyrics as a continuation of Bob’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech where he referenced Moby Dick and Lou Reed and everything inbetween that had inspired him.

Early favorites are ‘I Contain Multitudes,’ (“I play Beethoven’s sonatas and Chopin’s preludes, I contain multitudes...”); ‘My Own Version of You,’ that sees the singer collecting body parts like Dr. Frankenstein to build his soulmate. It’s probably the darkest yet funniest song he’s ever written; and ‘Mother of Muses,’ which hit me personally as I’ve been thinking a lot, during the social distancing I invented throughout my life, about what the connection is between the handful of muses I’ve met in my life. “I'm falling in love with Calliope/She don't belong to anyone, why not give her to me?/She's speaking to me, speaking with her eyes/I've grown so tired of chasing lies/Mother of Muses, wherever you are/I've already outlived my life by far...”

Perhaps my favorite Dylan album (depending on my mood) is 1978’s ‘Street Legal’ that is Bob at his most confused. ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ is Bob at his most assured. There is a swagger, a deliberate obtuseness mixed with startling insight. He ain’t no false prophet (yet the timing of the release is another example of his observational finger on the world’s pulse similar to releasing ‘Love and Theft’ on September 11, 2001). The ten new songs prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he has always contained multitudes.