Berry's Paradox

     Imagine your favorite Bob Dylan songs as the people  you love, those that you've come to adore and admire over years, the people that still manage to surprise you with their ability to change your idea of love and livelihood.  Now, imagine watching these people, these wondrous, majestic people that have shaken so much inside you for so long you scantly remember where it began and pray for it not to end, imagine these people getting methodically raped onstage for twoish hours by a gargoyle creature that slightly resembles Bob Dylan dressed as Southern Gothic Colonel Sanders, with help from his backing band, a misinformed group of Blues Brothers impersonators, and, at the end, everyone claps and you want to die.

     This is what a Bob Dylan concert is like, circa 2009.  Where one would expect the previous century's most anachronistic, polymorphic, and inspired persona, he finds the aforementioned mumbler, a heebie-jeebies factory gargling from behind a Casio, spraying rockabilly Hiyatt lounge music like turret fire.  CP doesn't want to fall into the ranks of the naysayers that sharted themselves when Dylan went electric back in the Sixties, but, come the frak on.  Aging is tough on everybody.  It is difficult to watch the people that you love deteriorate with time's undertow, but with that said we can still cherish our memories of blazing youth and phlegmless laughter, whereas Bob Dylan seems content here to drag his past out into the street and curb-stomp it into unintelligible puree.  As much as Carmen wants to admire BD for always reinventing himself, for doing what he believes his right and not what the public demands, CP can't help but see young, bleary-eyed BD shaking his head, through time.

     But all is not lost, because certain things are beyond tarnishing, certain things even two-hours of celebrated defilement can't defile.  CP can shrink himself and enter the highways of his brain and unpack the wondrous, before times with BD like snow globes, giving them a good shake and forgetting about the chilling badness:  Listening to Blonde on Blonde the whole way through, over and over, perched over his stereo because of wire length restrictions, hearing every intonation and shameless lyric through tarmac worker headphones.  A rain-soaked drive in Willy Z's Jeep to who knows where, set to "Positively Fourth Street."  At fifteen, taking his Dad's car out on "cautious" neighborhood joyrides to a CD that boasted solely "Highway 61 Revisited."  Dead of winter mornings in Sidesea with "Fourth Time Around" and melting breakfast sandwiches with SAR.  The leaden atmosphere that descends upon him every time he hears the skeletal waltz of his favorite BD song, "Ballad of A Thin Man."  Sitting in the stripped, posterless dorm at Water Street, 24 stories up over the BIG CITY, listening to "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" and waiting for his momma to pick him up, shelp all of it back home.