the new limb

So, I’m sitting here in 18th street coffee shop in Santa Monica waiting for 11 o’clock. They have a wonderful peach oolong. It’s rumored that Bob Dylan secretly owns this fine establishment while others say that’s bunk.  Either way, for me, the coffee aroma floating around here is forever laced with his “spirit”.  In fact, it’s tangible enough that I start using words like “bunk” when I come here.

Just knowing that this was my destination inspired me to look at the city through Dylan-tinted glasses. Santa Monica Boulevard holds it’s own poetry entirely separate from my (or anyone else’s) observations, but today mine were largely negative in scope.

I passed by Beverly Hills and the spine-chill I usually get when passing by those gold-plated streets inevitably hit.  ”Yuck!” is the closest I can get to describe the feeling my brain sent throughout my body.  Instead of fancy-ass places where a person with means can buy over-priced goods, I saw prisons.  Dramatic, I know, but that’s truly the impression I got. They were prisons for the patrons who try to purchase self-worth there. Prisons the employees are happily or unhappily trapped in day in and out, dealing with the highfalutin. Prisons to everyone who puts that place on a pedestal, dreaming that one day they’ll get to spend their money there in some grand right of passage.

That’s what I saw. It doesn’t mean anything.

I’m a consumer too, just like those ghosts.  I just recently had a revelation that expensive jeans are better than cheap ones, for a multitude of reasons that don’t belong in this blog.  Bob Dylan buys crap too, I’m sure. That’s why I mentioned his “spirit” earlier, and not Dylan the man.

The more I read through his autobiography (wow, I guess I really am a Dylan fan) the more I see he was in it for all the reasons everybody who pursues, Music: The Career is.

• He wanted to prove to himself and everyone else, that he could.
• He had a list of people in his head that to him, success would be the ultimate “Fuck you, Pal!”  Or maybe you’d say, “Ha ha, Buddy!”
• He coveted all the things the ancients did and contemporaries do:  affluence, adoration, a Prius (or is that just me?).
• He wanted the ability to support baby Jacob Dylan, walking around in a diaper and daddy’s shoes (I’m not cutting Jacob. He’s the only kid of Dylan’s that I know by name. Much respect. He’s a great musician.)
• He wanted to spend his days writing songs for a living (my personal favorite, believe it or not).

He wanted all the usual things, humble or not, and then accidentally took on oracle status.  He was given the Legend and Icon badges for doing that, which came naturally.

I see him as an observer.  For a time, he saw everything from outside himself, a soul accustomed to standing beside it’s own body and seeing all of it’s ridiculousness… it’s Gucci purse.  What else can you be but a mouthpiece for a generation when you do this regularly?

He was one who was possessed by this “spirit” from time to time, and concurrently cursed to be a human, flawed by all of the usual weaknesses.  He just reported what he saw, and folk songs were his medium.

It’s beautiful. He was the human condition at its best/worst.  Or, maybe it was just great marketing.  We are constantly hypocrites in everything we do, even when in transcendence.

Wow, this is a great coffee shop.

- Joey