Forty Days #1 Bob Dylan fail
Posted by Aaron - 09/03/11 at 11:03:08 pmIn college, I started a tradition that did not catch on at all.
I’m not Catholic and never was good at giving things up, if even only for 40 days during Lent. Plus, all my friends who tried, and in college, it was friends who tried to give up drinking for 40 days, spent the usually three or four days of abstinence complaining and whining. It was, in part, to show off “Look at me, I’m not drinking for 40 days and you know how hard that is” and, in part, suffering, which is the point isn’t it.
Well, instead of giving up something for Lent, I added something. This, like I said, did not catch on, and I think the first thing I added that first Lent had lots to do with it. For that first Lent, I added to my life that when ever anyone mentioned spring break, I had to yell “Spring Break 200(whatever). Woohooo! Show us your titties.” After my friends learned this, spring break (Spring Break 200(whatever). Woohoo! Show us your titties.) became a frequent topic of conversation. Until it became annoying. And sadly, my resolution to add something to Lent lasted only about as long as those who gave up something for Lent.
But the suffering, the suffering under my yells of Spring Break!, it was universal. So, I won.
Now I’m bringing back the Lent addition tradition. For the next 40 days, I am going to write. And what I write, I’ll publish here.
Round 1 … Bob Dylan fail
For a moment I think of all that I’ve failed to become and that is Bob Dylan because Bob Dylan never sat in a carpeted studio apartment with matching furniture and a tiny bed. Bob Dylan had a big bed and that was his only furniture because that was the only furniture Bob Dylan needed because Bob Dylan fucked a lot. Nothing matched.
And Bob Dylan wouldn’t have a guitar with rusty strings, one broken, cased up in the corner like I do. Bob Dylan’s guitar would be out, lying across his coffee table or couch or bed, because that’s the only furniture he really needs, and he would tell his girl to mind the guitar while they fucked. He’d have extra strings too.
He had no use for carpet, or sweatpants, which he might not have even known about because why would Bob Dylan need to know about sweatpants. His bed had rumpled blankets, probably white, and red sheets. None of the bottles in Bob Dylan’s apartment had labels, because, well, fuck labels, and fuck sweatpants, because maybe he knew about sweatpants because it’s fucking Bob Dylan and who knows.
So, with sweatpants on, in a tiny bed, carpet floor with a guitar forever in its case and bottles with labels and no fucking, I’ve failed at being Bob Dylan. I had my bottles with labels lined neatly in my kitchen where clean dishes dried in the dish machine, and the recycling was divided into glass, plastic, aluminum, paper. Maybe I’ll start a garden in the spring.
I love recycling. Going to the long slugs of recycling dumpsters at the fire station near my apartment is like taking a walk in the woods, coming back fresh and refreshed with a new, superior even, glow. I know a secret — recycling — a secret to simple bliss.
******
“What’s the word for Bob Dylan?” she asks, the next night, looking up from the carpet in front of the coffee table where she fumbles with her phone.
“Musician?” the girl sitting next to me on the couch says. Always the basics, the most trusted answer, the simple and the correct, she is rarely wrong.
“Does fucking awesome count?” I say. I don’t know why. I wouldn’t consider Bob Dylan fucking awesome. Top 10, for sure, but not in the fucking awesome stratosphere. I probably say it because the night before, I wrote this stuff in my journal about how I failed at being Bob Dylan and all the ways Bob Dylan was not me or I was not him. How he would not be in my apartment with my things, ever. So maybe, to vindicate myself, the fucking awesome response was more that it is fucking awesome that we’re talking about Bob Dylan because I just wrote about him and now the reality in which I write is merging with the reality in which I live and then … BOOM … I’m a writer.
“No,” she on the carpet says. She’s drunk, has already thrown up in the bathroom. She comes back and continues to drink more. “It’s like wasting beer,” I say, as the other boys, her friends from college, on spring break, feed her more PBR. She is the intern. It’s a Monday night and her friends are down from a college and it’s spring break and I’m there.
I feel old. I am old. Twenty seven. I’m the oldest one there and the soberest and the best at quarters.
“No,” she says. “What’s that word for someone who you don’t know if they are a man or a woman?”
“Androgynous?” I say, hoping she doesn’t ask me how to spell it and hoping that’s not what she was asking in the first place.
“Yeah.”
“Androgynous is the word for Bob Dylan?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
“No. You think Bob Dylan’s androgynous? He’s a guy.”
“Nope. He’s androgynous. Cate Blanchett played him in that movie.”
“And she was awesome,” chirps one of her college friends.
“She did. What was that movie called?” I ask.
“I’m Not Here,” one of them says. “It was awesome.”
“I didn’t like it,” I say. I really didn’t. I’m not just trying to be difficult. “But Blanchett was good. Sort of a reverse Shakespeare.”
I don’t know where this conversation went. The girl on the carpet never expounded on the androgyny of Bob Dylan. Maybe to her, and her friends, and people her age, Cate Blanchett’s performance makes Bob Dylan androgynous. Maybe that’s too bad.
But I don’t, then, feel too bad about failing at being Bob Dylan.
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