Bob Dylan has got me thinking about death again.
Every morning when I check the news I think:
this could be the day. Bob isn't going to live forever.
I imagine the coverage, the tweets,
the outpouring of adoration from those who,
for the last twenty years, have been saying
he can't sing. He's lost a step. Maybe he wasn't
all that special after all.


It's a way of thinking about my own death, isn't it?
I've been doing this more and more lately
particularly since that night last year when I ate
edibles and lay in bed thinking about how
death isn't an abstraction, it's a reality, and that when it comes
it will be like turning off a light and leaving a room in total darkness.
That is to say it will make everything I've ever loved
or worried about not just pointless, really. Meaningless? Negated?
It's not quite that either.

It's that it will end.


Of course, Bob's already sussed all of this out:
he not busy being born is busy dying, and all of that. Or:
Death is Not the End, if you're looking for some comfort.
I think of this whenever the shadow creeps across my mind,
and I push it back, or at least I try to. This latest effort is different, though.
Maybe it's just that it's a new year. There are new possibilities, sure,
but I've been through enough new years to know that nothing
really changes except that we grow a older. If you've got a mind
for science, you know that the world is moving towards high entropy,
the only thing we can rely on is more disorder. This is the 1st or 2nd law
of thermodynamics, I don't recall which. I could Google it
and find out, but I've promised myself that I'd do this less this year.
And if I did google it, maybe I'd see the news: Bob Dylan has died.
If not today, then someday, and probably soon.

And then I'd spend the day watching video of Bob
like I've put his life on fast forward. Here he is, baby-faced
but with a mercurial look in his eye, playing his 1930s
Gibson Nick Lucas Special like the reincarnation
of some poet from the Romantic Period.
Here he is in 1974, the year I was born, singing
Knocking on Heaven's Door with The Band in Toronto
after an 8 year hiatus from touring.
Here, at the end of the 20th century,
only months after nearly dying
from pericarditis, singing
Trying to Get to Heaven like some
biblical prophet
in exile.