What came next? I pulled out HIGHWAY 61 & BLONDE ON BLONDE again when I was 16 or so. Now I was hooked. Harmonica-forward wacky lyric rock & roll. I didn’t know anyone who was into Dylan. It felt like my own little discovery. Ha!

My dear friend Marianne took a listen to one of the albums I was playing in my bedroom. With mild distaste she said something like, “He’s just saying any random words he thinks of.” I shrugged.

I can’t remember if next came BIOGRAPH or the first two albums, the eponymous BOB DYLAN and TIMES THEY ARE A’CHANGIN. All purchased for me by my sweet boyfriend, who could kind of take Dylan or leave him. Though he was a fan of the song “Positively 4th Street” – he was a cynical sort.

BIOGRAPH is a 10-sided compilation, really a fabulous mix of stuff artfully curated & arranged. But it doesn’t have very good representation of the 70s. Mostly it’s awful Rolling Thunder Revue stuff. I liked a few late acoustic numbers like “Every Grain of Sand” and “You’re a Big Girl Now.” But I decided I was firmly a 1960s Dylan fan. I started collecting all the albums and stopped at PAT GARRET & BILLY THE KID.

Did it end there? Oh no…

When I was about 12 or not much older, a neighbor came by with a pile of LP’s he had found in the trash, to see if we wanted any. There were some various late 60s artists; I recall there was some Neil Young and Buffalo Springfield but those didn’t interest me at the time. But there were two Bob Dylan albums, HIGHWAY 61 & BLONDE ON BLONDE. I knew the song “Like a Rolling Stone” from the radio and liked it (I really liked the Rolling Stones at the time and anything remotely tangential to them). I took those two albums for myself. I also knew the song “Rainy Day Women”, but I didn’t know that was the title. I thought it was obviously called “Everybody Must Get Stoned”; so, I didn’t realize I knew one of the songs on BLONDE ON BLONDE.

I put HIGHWAY 61 on the turntable and listened to “Like a Rolling Stone.” Then I let the next song play, which is “Tombstone Blues.” The song opens with, “The sweet pretty things are getting off course, the city fathers they are trying to endorse, the reincarnation of Paul Revere’s horse, but the town has no need to be nervous.” This was far too wacky for 12-year-old me. I took the needle off the record. I put a cassette into the player, put the needle back to the beginning, and hit “record.” With “Like a Rolling Stone” now immortalized on my mix tape, I put the albums aside, for the next four years, and… to be continued.

When you asked me how I was doing, was that some kind of joke?

They say, sing while you slave, and I just get bored.

Don’t you understand, it’s not my problem?

This was a fantastic concept from The Master and His Emissary – I’m not sure if it’s original to the author, or if it’s something from Hegel or Popper or elsewhere:

“Whatever is out there that exists apart from us comes into contact with us as the water falls on a particular landscape. The water falls and the landscape resists. One can see a river as restlessly searching out its path across the landscape, but in fact no activity is taking place in the sense that there is no will involved…

The landscape cannot make the river. It does not try to put the river together. It does not even say ‘yes’ to the river. It merely says ‘no’ to the water – or it does not say ‘no’ to the water, and by its not saying ‘no’ to the water, wherever it is that it does so, it allows the river to come into being.”

On a smaller scale, I apply this to sleep. It’s often seemed cruel to me that, while we have the ability, to a large extent, to will ourselves to NOT sleep by exerting effort to stay awake, we have no ability to will ourselves TO sleep. But this is the key. We either say ‘no’ or we do not say ‘no’ to sleep; we do not say ‘yes’. You can’t say ‘yes’ to sleep, you can only not say ‘no’.

I’ve totally grown disgruntled with modern scientific approaches to insomnia and sleep. Medical science doesn’t know butkis about sleep. But of course they pretend they do. They give you all these dumb sleep hygiene rules with no basis in fact. One of the top 5 ‘wellness’ (hate that word!) pieces of advice in WaPo for year end was “Avoid alcohol for better sleep!” Look, last night for New Year’s Eve I drank like a fish; I also had one of my rare nights where I didn’t need Ambien.

Treating consciousness and sleep as the mysteries they are gets you closer to the truth. This is part of my 2025 ‘resolution’ to rein in my left brain a little.