Peaceful Fire Journal

Tomorrow Night

Back in the day when Dylan was young and I was young I frankly did not know who he was. This was in the sixties, and I was a student at OU, and not yet hip. One night I was upstairs at the Union Grill, the hipster bar in Athens, Ohio. There I met this pre Sylvia Plath beatnik with long black hair, glasses and the pitiful, mournful look that only comes with angst; an intellectual. She lost interest when she realized what a total square I was. When she asked me if I liked Dylan, I thought she meant the Welsh poet; I'd never heard of the Dylan from Hibbings, and did'nt realize or apreciate until much later in life, his true stature as a literary genius.

Since then, both Dylan and I have gotten older, and now I know and understand at a whole different level, that he is, though it seems like a cliche to say it, the great poet of the age of the new times that began in the fourties, began to be noticed in the sixties and are blooming in a transformed world only now. I like a lot of the later Dylan, when he began going to seed, as I had been doing much the same, and at much the same time though arguably at a much faster rate.

It is often the case that in the quiet of the evening, I'll go for a drive to sooth my mind with an analytical meditation, then listen to an album, often a Bob Dylan CD. The drive usually takes me down Fairmount and out Gates Mills Boulevard, and back. Some of Dylan's bittersweet love songs, such as "Simple Twist of Fate" on Blood on the Tracks, and "Tommorrow Night" on Good As I Been to You, are sweet as hell. They remind you of where you've been and who you've been with and what you've done or not done that now you regret, or maybe you don't. But all of it, good and bad, proud and shameful, it all has become what you remember, and what you remember has become who you are. You've gotten by, you've done all right, but things could go bad, and your luck could change for the worse, and you could wind up sad and alone. Or things could turn out alright, and your memories will just be old stories that you won't tell, because no one will be around to remember what it was like when you were young. But they'll know who Bob Dylan was.