Bob Dylan Wanted My Life

CW FISHER Newsweek calls Bob Dylan's just-released autobiography "startling," a curious word until you read the excerpt. Which is startling. What startles first is Dylan's style. It's direct; there's no "sun's not yellow, it's chicken," just good, clean prose in which every sentence is a new and different denial and/or negation of his impact on society or its impact on him. All he ever wanted was a normal life. To live in a town, raise his children there, walk around, blend. Couldn't happen. We would not let the man alone. Somehow we thought he owed us something, or at least he thought we thought he owed us something, but that could have been his psychosis. It wasn't mine. But then I don't figure big in Bob Dylan's story. His book is called Chronicles, but the narrator is unmistakably Job, and this is what startles most: he hated it, hated us! hated his fame and all the phonies that went with it; all the hippies who expected him to lead them somewhere, Joan Baez chastising him in song for not being more of an activist. Dylan despised most the transparency of his private life, the frequent home invasions by the great unwashed, the lack of sympathy from the local police in Woodstock, NY, who advised him that if he shot and killed an intruder, even if they were on his roof, as had happened, he'd be arrested for murder. Bob Zimmerman was just a man with a wife and children, whose primary interest was their welfare. Fame felt like hate, and he hated it back. So he did the obvious. He set out to kill Bob Dylan. He produced horrible albums, sang in a funny voice, laid down lazy lyrics about love, came out tipping a big cowboy hat with Johnny Cash, smiling wide as a Nashville Skyline. Why, Bobby, we, frankly, do find this startling, and wonder if Lay Lady Lay was also one of your cruel little jokes. I never cared for it myself, not to sound smug, but now that I know you didn't like it either, it props me up. I heard the voice came overnight after you quit smoking, which made me smoke more because you sounded like Dudley Do-Right, but I also overheard it was: tonsillitis, Christianity, a new girlfriend, voice lessons, sudden personality change, and traumatic brain injury. Never would I have guessed it was you trying to kill your career. The joke's on me. That whole time of your life was an embarrassment, Bob, but nobody can get through life without one, and certainly no autobiography. But character assassination, Bob? Of your own character? What's that, iconocide? Celebricide? Then to say you did it on purpose to make us go away? It's a little pathetic, on our part maybe, considering that Nashville Skyline was a relative success. Ironic. Poetic. Whether it's true or not. You can never trust a story teller, which is essentially what Dylan's always been. But he's getting more like Dali every day, down to that ittybitty mustache. It's working, Bob, always has, I'll read your book and I'll see you in my own hometown on Halloween. Tickets still available.

Death to Floaters

CW FISHER It's not uncommon for people in their thirties to find themselves under attack by eyeball invaders, nor is it rare for them to hide it. What grown man or woman wants to admit they see paramecia the size of houses descending on their house? Eventually they find out that these creatures are called "floaters," that they're tiny chunks of dead tissue forever trapped, not on the surface of the eye, but inside the eyeball itself, in a warm jelly bath of vitreous fluid. The horror comes in realizing you've only met the first wave. You're like a pilgrim noticing your first few Indians, or an oldtime farmer in the middle of Nowheres suddenly noticing a lot of SUVs in town. With age comes shedding. Your old retina spent too many years in the wash cycle of a closed system without a lint filter. The day comes when navigation gets tricky, when certain floaters resemble curbs, others you'd swear were heat waves; you often think people are waving at you; reading is a process of deciding which lines are the "good" lines and which are the floaters. It is a horrible way to live, of course, but a gift of God still. It prepares us for death by making us sick and tired of dragging around pain, misery, loss and more loss. If we didn't have these irritations, we'd stay forever. This is why I'm against stem cell research, and, now that I think about it, any kind of research whatsoever, including nanofish that can be injected into your eyeball to eat the floaters and the claw their way out. Sure, this kind of health care would be great, but everybody'd want it and nobody'd want to pay for it. The rich would live forever and the poor would live short but productive lives. The Neopoor, tired from working two jobs and too poor to do anything but breed, would spawn babies having babies and walk away fathers. Like today, only more of it. The bigger issue is really one of gardening. If nanotech could eat floaters and stem cells could give us harder erections and wetter vaginas, it only follows that the poor would get in on it eventually, thus permanently wrecking them for work. When stem cells make stem cells, that's when we'll be in trouble. Because then we'll live forever. Selfish, smug, space-taking retirees all complaining about prices and bathroom cleanliness, clogging up traffic with our skateboards, competing for who gets to pick on the paper boy. Choose instead to see your floaters in a different light. It's a lovely gray snowstorm. It's the dance of dust. It's the-- look! That one looks like Lucy! And that one's Charlie Brown!

Suicide Trains

CW FISHER Lady Cop walks in smiling as usual only tonight there's a great sadness in her eyes. Had another one, she says. Immediately we know it's another train suicide. That's four in less than a month. We live in the train suicide capitol of the world we think, though statistics are sketchy on the difference between a train suicide and a trespass fatality. Numbers can play dumb but experience knows. A trespass fatality is an accident, as when a college kid tries to see how close he can get to a moving train and gets sucked in by the vacuum. Or when a kid throws a rock at an oncoming train and the rock bounces back at him faster than a speeding bullet. Trespass fatalities are horrible, but they're accidents. Suicides are also horrible, but they're done on purpose, and the violence gets on everybody, especially the poor engineer who sees the whole thing coming and is powerless to stop it. Chances are the engineer has been through it before, or knows somebody else who went through it while going through this very town. Imagine the terror of being the bullet. It explains why the trains blow their horns all the way into town and all the way out, both directions, all times of the night and day. Behemoths trumpeting to scare away death. Lady Cop says there are two types of suicides. The ones that walk toward the train, and the ones that walk away from it. Ones that put their arms out, ones that kneel and pray. Ones at night and the ones in broad daylight. The ones with their ID and suicide notes and the ones without. The college students, and the folks nobody knew. She remembers the one in her wedding dress, how she stood there calmly after crossing herself. And the guy who laid his head on the track; he only lost a three-inch slice off the top of his head, but it was enough. She feels for the engineers, who have it the worst, followed by the railroad guys who do the gruesome job of clean up. Who are these people, we wonder, and why they do this thing, and in this way, and why here? What's so special about DeKalb, Illinois? The kneejerk answer: it's a college town, grades go down, it's the end of the world, suicide. Except that very few of these suicides seem to be by college students. Then again, it's hard to say. None of them are talked about, whether they leave a note or not. Local newspapers often keep the victims anonymous, ostensibly to preserve the family's privacy, but the real reason is more mundane, and therefore sadder. In this town a train suicide just isn't news anymore. It's like seeing the fiftieth robin. What's to say? Maybe we don't talk about them because we don't want to honor them. Maybe we want to dishonor them. Shunned in death, the so-called suicide "victims" can learn where the glory train brings them: Nowheresville, Anonymityland, the Great State of Oblivion. How do you punish the dead? Don't talk about them. Say nothing. Forget they existed. Short of that, whisper. There's an argument for the silent treatment of train suicides, for putting the focus on the "real" victims: the families, the rail workers, the community. Train suicides are public messes, and attitudes toward them might be shaped by the emergence of suicide bombers. Maybe we think these life and death decisions are made casually, or with revenge in mind. We don't know why people are standing in front of fast trains because we don't ask. Suicide is self murder, yet suicide is rarely investigated with the vigor of homicide. Instead, the determination of suicide is the answer rather than the first of many questions asked of everyone who last saw the victim alive. The act of piecing together the facts might lay to rest speculation that would otherwise rattle like a runaway train down through the generations. It's rarely done. Yet without investigation how are we supposed to know how to spot a person who's about to stop a train? Have they been drinking? Are they in formal attire? Are they zombylike? Are they walking on the tracks? Some say suicide is a momentary mistake, and that's comforting to families, but the truth is that it's a momentary mistake that was a lifetime in the making. There will usually be a long trail of clues leading back to the crib, and, perhaps even beyond. The culprit is depression, undiagnosed or untreated major depression. Depression is the only cause of suicide. It precedes the gun, the poison, the train; unemployment, divorce, alcoholism. But depression isn't always dramatic; it often hides in humor or manifests elsewhere in the body, but it always has to come up for air eventually. Major depression is easy to see by those who know it, and easy to deny by those who don't. But it's the number one killer in America, so it's wise to pay respect. Fortunately it's treatable for the first time in recorded history. Good thing too, since we're approaching an epidemic. The fact that depression is treatable makes ignorance and denial inexcusable. How do you recognize it? It's a bad mood, just a long lasting bad mood. Depression is an illness, dryness in the brain that produces unthinkable thoughts. They say don't speak ill of the dead; if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all, and sadly that's often how it goes for the misunderstood victims of their own chemically deluded brains. It might look like your brother killed himself, but it isn't true. Your brother's broken brain came to that conclusion, and took your brother down with it. And so to turn away from any suicide victim is to kill him twice. In judging the sum of a life by the end of a life, the tragedy doubles. I don't know, says Lady Cop; she buys what she came for and goes home to bed. She might think he talks too much. Two men in grimy jumpsuits get their coffee and come to the counter grimly. Their hats say Union-Pacific. There's no charge.

Jack me up, Britney

CW FISHER Bloggers, in lieu of money, are paid in hits, and never has The Apologist been so wealthy as when blogging on Britney Spears or Janet Jackson or Jennifer Lopez or Alexandria Kerry. Why write about anything else? Jennifer Love Hewitt and Britney Spears. What would mom say? According to The National Enquirer, Britney Spears has a buttload of cellulite, the calling card of obesity! Marriage should add another 15 pounds; acquiescing to her mother's wishes that she return from the darkness, add 60 pounds. She stops touring, goes video only with a thinning lens, whole thing is tragic: 175 pounds. Janet Jackson? What can be said of Janet Jackson, except that the more you repeat it, the more hits you get? Ever notice that Janet Jackson's Greatest Hits sounds exactly like Janet Jackson's Greatest Tits? Jennifer Lopez, here's a dame in need of a career makeover, maybe a name change too. Recommended: Pez, later pronounced pay once she launches her high end stores that feature clothing for women with high ends. Did J.Lo have cheek implants? Then how else did she erupt those bulbous buttocks? Alexandria Kerry gets more hits than her father who's running for president. All she does is wear a see-thru dress. Why shouldn't he wear a see-thru suit? That'd get him some notice, and help get everybody's mind off the war in Vietnam.

This is about you

CW FISHER Somewhere in this town right now there are people who are reading this because they believe it's inevitable The Apologist will depict them eventually and they want to be there to object if necessary or bask should it go better than expected. Although the author asserts that all characters are hybrids with double-crossed backgrounds, genders and ages to ensure that any resemblance to characters living or dead would be strictly coincidental, readers continue to believe they're being discussed. And they may be. Our current subject is an obvious choice: has stories up the wazoo, knows how to get from here to there, helpful and knowledgeable in the field of customer service and has lots of advice for conversing with customers having done this sort of thing once when they were a kid. Not any more, of course. A cashier on 3rd shift at a convenience store? Don't think so. All right, you want to know the secret to customer service? Everything you need to know? Yeah? Because I know. I do. What you do is you make some little comment about something they're buying, like say somebody has a box of donuts, you say, I've never had these donuts, are they any good? They say oh yes such and so. Or maybe they want Marlboro Lights. You say, Oh, you're a Marlboro girl then are you? She says, yep! And you got a conversation. Try it. A young Mexican girl is in the candy aisle, waiting for the man to leave. Seeing this, the clerk waves her to the counter, ready to discuss her purchase, which is... Tampax. Placing his hand directly over the product, the clerk scans it and puts it in a bag, while the customer service expert is in the parking lot, doubled over with hysterical laughter, or coughing, and the clerk, who feels compelled to escort the poor girl to her car, tries to change the subject with commentary on the niceness of the night, then feels a vibe, like a wave, roll past, unmistakable: They're both weird. His name is Noel, an abbreviation for know-it-all, and though he might not know it all, he knows a helluva lot more than you and he'll prove it on any subject before you've even had a chance to open your mouth. Lying thus in your back you are talked at mouth to ear until you say is that so? Fortunately, Noel is brilliant and fascinating, and he appreciates a good compliment. All across town the women sleep peacefully while the men turn and wonder was it me?

Songwriter's Confession

CW FISHER My "truth" is that I've been a songwriter almost all my life. This is hard for me to admit out loud, because if my songs were any good, they would have been recorded by now, they'd be famous by now, you'd know all the words by heart and all my effort would have been worth it. As it is, these songs exist in various media, and many of them only in my memory. Sample: I don't feel much like a hero, more like Nero, you remember him. While Rome was burning down he sat around fiddling on his violin. With the fire flaming higher, up and down the scale he played, and the screaming of the choir joined in the serenade. Outside, an era burning, and Nero said okay; the lesson he was learning was you must have a nice day. Battlesore, 1980 Nobody wants to be the sensitive one. I was asked to write a wedding song for a couple, which I did, and I actually performed it, and they heard it at their actual wedding for the first time, since they rejected the first song the night of the rehearsal, so it was kind of rushed, but they didn't like the second one either, and later on they divorced. Had nothing to do with the song. I've written wedding songs for others couples who claimed they loved it, but then you never know with all the liars they got running around. So I toughened up and wrote cooler songs, and still nothing happened famewise. Don't spend money that you ain't got don't buy a caddy if all you got is a cot don't go to places you don't want to go don't go to pieces if you go too low Don't take all the credit, don't take all the blame don't overedit, don't change your name Don't believe in your own PR believe it or not it ain't what you are And don't blame God if you lose it all Don't give him too much credit if you win a windfall Never forget that in the long haul you're just another walker in a long hall, choosing right or left in a long hall --Long Hall, 1990 I'd put that on my gravestone except I'd be dead and probably nobody else but me is actually reading this, so the hint will go ungot. Plus it would be prohibitively expensive to try to put all that on a piece of marble, or marblelike material. Point is, you pay by the word, so the incentive is to go short. St. Paul had a good one. He said: Love never fails. Not as short as Jesus wept, but makes better sense in the context of a gravestone. You don't want to imply that Jesus wept when you died. Go with the other one. Regarding the songs there are hundreds more peacefully coexisting alongside screenplays and novels and articles and stories, the usual trunk, only this one in digital media, weighing as much as an idea or a soul at the twin moments of life and death.

Cowboy Style Livin'

CW FISHER You wouldn't expect an Illinois boy to know a whole lot about cowboys, but I know enough to get by. I had dinner with the cowboys, watched the bats pour out of the mountain at dusk with the cowboys, tasted cowboy coffee that was ground on a rock and brewed in a sock. I was nine. I've thought a lot about the cowboys since then, not about riding with them -- who wants to be on a horse in a traffic jam of cows? I've thought about the resting part of being a cowboy, the after dinner part, when they sit around and tell stories and pick their feet and pour themselves one more cup of that delicious coffee that they made by dumping the beans into a sock, slapping the sock against a rock to get the right grind, hanging the sock in the pot like a giant teabag. That's what I think about: the ingenuity of using alternative materials like socks and rocks to make a cup of joe. Cowboy style coffee is a great thing to know how to make in case you're ever caught on the lone prairie without a coffeemaker, coffee grinder or coffee filters. As long as you've got coffee beans, water and matches, and cups, and some sort of pot, you can have hot, fresh coffee. I actually tried this method of making coffee while camping, and can report with authority that it produced the singlemost undrinkable pot of coffee ever brewed by my own hands. But it took me two cups to admit it because of how everything tastes better out of doors. Since then I have come to call "cowboy-style" any technique using alternative or available materials to do what could not be done before in places where you wouldn't have thought you could do it. Here are two inventions I've stumbled on. And unlike the coffee, these actually work exactly as advertised. Tooth "brush." You brushed your teeth this morning then had two donuts, a large coffee with cream and sugar, more of the same, followed by a Whopper, fry, Coke, and now your teeth feel like they're wearing winter coats, and you long for a toothbrush. Here it is. Take a piece of Kleenex, toilet paper or paper napkin, ball it up to the size of a quarter, and press it against the outside of your top molars. Allow the paper time to settle into the crevices, so that it makes a good reverse impression. Give it a tiny twist back and forth to work it into the gum line. Now slowly and firmly wipe downward. The sticky stuff on the tissue is plaque. Feel your tooth with your tongue. It's slick, like you just brushed. Repeat if necessary. Do your whole mouth, including the inside tooth surfaces. Chew some sugarless mint gum and you'll swear you just brushed. Your teeth will also look brighter. Breath freshener. Your tongue is white. You have an image in your mind of what that white stuff is microscopically, and you don't like it a bit, you want it gone, out of there, but you don't know how, and anyway you're at work. Get yourself to a coffee bar and grab a wooden coffee stirrer. This is the John Deere of tongue scrapers. For best results, scrape, wipe, scrape, wipe, etc. The napkin provides your brain with documentary evidence of the efficacy of the technique. A mirror will reveal your tongue is pink. You'll smile wider and think better thoughts of The Apologist, and you'll return to this place often, and leave a comment now and then, something nice like, 'Thanks for warning me about that coffee thing! -J. St. John, Boston'

The master was out

CW FISHER It's after midnight. BOOM! A man is yelling at the door, cussing up a silent storm, as if the door should have told him it was a pull door. He yanks it open -- surprised -- and staggers inside, less indignant now, more confused. He studies the store then calls out: "HELLO?" He jumps when he realizes somebody's behind the counter. He's sweaty, wall-eyed and likely more than half crazy. "You got a wrench?" "You don't have a wrench? How could somebody not have a wrench? Of course you have a wrench! Will ya check for me? Is that too much to ask?" The master sums five questions, deduces the following: this man's driving privileges have been suspended for DUI; he's still drunk which is his own business but now a wheel's fallen off a his bicycle and he's still got four more miles to go on a two lane through black corn on and off a muddy shoulder hoping to Christ at one a these drunks don't run him over -- and everything is as was foreseen. The master assures him a wrench will appear immediately, and it is so. Headlights enter the parking lot and continue to the front doors. Hi beams trap the bicyclist like a spotlight. A car door slams. He takes another step backward. Enter the Wrench, just the way the man in the apron said. The bike is fixed, the Wrench comes inside for a pack of Bensen & Hedges Menthol Lights soft. He's a tall man who glows brightly but is surrounded by black fog. How the master knows that this is so is not known but remains so no matter how you slice it. The Big Listen begins, interrupted every few minutes for 20 seconds, and then right back again, as the Wrench covers birth to death across three generations. It's a sprawling chronicle of tragedy and triumph, followed by tragedy and a little less triumph, then finally all the tragedy he could take, at which point came defeat, which brought him here. The master knows this, for now they come nightly, not by appointment, but by other means entire, and still the sandwiches get made, just as soon as the souls are cured. The master waves off the now triumphant tragic man and turns to enter the store. On the door is a prominent sign in in his own hand: BACK IN A FLASH!