1. It turned into a comfortable, blue sky day today -- a perfect day to make a trip to the transfer station. I've been wanting to get our Christmas tree away from the side of our front porch. Carol and Paul also wanted to dispose of their Christmas tree. Christy had some cardboard I could put in her pickup with the trees and recycle. I got all that done today. One easy trip was all it took and it was satisfying to clean things up a bit here at home and help Christy, Paul, and Carol do the same.
2. Luna has been restless at night. On occasion, I've had to move her from the bedroom to the Vizio room after midnight just so I could sleep. I got to thinking about her restlessness and wondered if it might help her out if I spent more time with her in the bedroom during the day. I did that today and, sure enough, when I lay down this afternoon, she attached herself to me, purred long and deep, and licked me and gave me a few bites of affection. Once it was actually bedtime this evening, I hoped Luna would be more settled through the night. She was. Yes, she and Copper wanted a wet food breakfast at 3 a.m., but that's easy and eating early in the morning always helps Luna relax even more.
I enjoyed a good night's sleep. From now on, when I do things like read books or work puzzles or listen to podcasts, instead of doing them in the living room, I'll retire to the bedroom with Copper and Luna. It's reassuring for them.
3. Last evening, on Blissful Thursday, as I've already written, I listened to Dan Mackay's hour long plunge into Bob Dylan's song, "Stuck Inside Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" on his radio show Hard Rain and Slow Trains: Bob Dylan and Fellow Travelers.
Today, I listened to the entire episode again.
As Dan conducted his guided tour through the nine verses, he left me thinking about Bob Dylan's songwriting in ways I never had before. This is a way of saying that I haven't ever thought a lot about his songwriting before -- and I can't really explain why. Somehow, over the years, I've never found a way in to Dylan's songwriting (poetry?). But, today, Dan talked about "Stuck Inside Mobile . . ." using words like "surreal" and "absurd" and another commenter online described the song as being about an individual stuck in a purgatory.
Since I was first introduced to the theater of the absurd back in 1974 and existentialism back in 1973, I've thought a lot about the inescapable disjointedness of human experience, the chaos we always live in and are always trying to organize, make sense of, impose order upon.
I'm embarrassed to write what I'm about to say. I'm sure my good friends who have been savoring Bob Dylan's work for decades realized what I'm about to write years ago. But, it's common for me to be late to any number of parties, and I'm arriving really late at the Bob Dylan bash, but I'm stoked to be here.
Dan made me think, or helped me see, Dylan as an absurdist (or surrealist). The verses of "Stuck Inside of Mobile . . ." do not connect. Absurdism, existentialism, surrealism, whether expressed in paintings, plays, novels, or poems portray the disconnectedness of existence. Surrealism takes us into dreamscapes (or nightmare-scapes).
Thinking of "Stuck Inside of Mobile . . ." as a disconnected series of short stories in a purgatorial setting made me think of the novel, Pedro Peramo, written by Juan Rulfo, and the experience of its main character, Juan Preciado, traveling to Comala, his deceased mother's home town, in search of his father. Comala is a ghost town -- inhabited by actual ghosts and Juan Preciado confronts a number of spectral figures who exist in the purgatory of Comala. Much like the nine encounters Bob Dylan narrates in "Stuck Inside of Mobile . . .", Juan Preciado's encounters are apparently disconnected, but, in the end, they combine to portray the cruel, vicious, heartless history and deeds of the book's title character, Pedro Paramo.
As I write this, I'm not sure what, if anything, the verses of "Stuck Inside of Mobile . . ." add up to -- unless I think of it as a gallery of pictures or stories portraying, one by one, loneliness, temptation, corruption, alienation, and other elements of the human experience that make life itself purgatorial, that make life itself absurd.
My thoughts about this song are incomplete. No doubt they are flawed. But one of the reasons I write in this blog every day is to write about what I'm uncertain about, to expose what I'm thinking about, flawed as it might be, and have a record of my mind at work.
But, I will say this -- I'm fairly certain that Dan's work with "Stuck Inside of Mobile" during Thurs. night's episode of Rain/Trains has cracked open a dimension of Bob Dylan's songwriting that I'd never taken the time to consider or think about before listening to this episode twice.
I'm grateful for Dan's program and his insights and am eager to continue, after decades of being out of it, to experience Bob Dylans music and songwriting more fully and deeply.
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