March 27, 2017. A Tinker's Cuss – Bob Dylan in Chattanooga

I did this thing when I woke up this morning, I picked up a magazine and the headline was 'Perceive your utilities provider as a partner.' I'll never do that again. There has to be more to life.

I then switched on the internet and everyone seemed to be clamouring and screaming to be noticed. People were sharing and trading likes. I don't think any of the photos were true and most of the comments were obtuse or left-handed at best. The news certainly wasn't true, but then everyone knows that now.

We are most probably alone and our lives belong solely to us and not to some politician or news outlet. If we were to be lucky, then we would merely play a bad hand very well. And, as they say, expectations are pre-meditated resentments.

On the internet there is a brutal poet and he posts brutish posts and usually about twenty-five a day. He threatens to unfriend people all the time if they don't notice him. I unfriended him. He makes no one's life easier.

It's been a while since I wrote a blog because I just never knew what to say. I tried to watch everything go past me and to not get hooked up in it. I concentrated on loving the people and the doggies that were important to me. After all, that's the only game worth playing.

I went to see Bob Dylan in Chattanooga, Tennessee last November. The show was in a beautiful old and ornate theater, the Tivoli, capacity 1750. During that week Donald Trump had been elected president and both Leon Russell and Leonard Cohen had died. There was a big earthquake in the South Island of New Zealand. It was a very meaningful period of time.

Bob Dylan played the Tivoli without a backdrop and without stage lighting apart from the very basic theater lights. There were no giant videos beside the stage. There were no guitar changeovers and no roadies running across the stage wearing sunglasses. None of the band spoke. No one smiled. No short cuts to success, just the beautiful essence of the songs and the musicians themselves.

At this time, people all over the world were debating whether Bob Dylan was a poet since he'd just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. People were fighting with words. Bob kept his own counsel. This was a matter of dignity.

At this time, Chattanooga was ringed by bush fires that people were deliberately lighting. The city authorities suggested that people wear surgical masks in the streets.

My sister is still alive if anyone remembers my last blog. She has terminal cancer and is on heavy-duty opiates. She can take visitors for about a half hour at a time and then she needs to sleep.

I'm pretty sure I know the voice she hears the most when she falls into a slumber. She hears my mother yelling to her from the bottom of the stairs at our old house on Russell Street in Dunedin in the 1950s.

My dad never yelled, never raised his voice, so I think my sister just waits quietly for him. Some day soon she might hear a lot of his voice. I do, every day. He is my guiding light.

My father never went to high school and yet he quoted Shakespeare all the time. He said that the quality of mercy is ne'er strained or whatever he said. Often, for weeks, the only things he spoke were Shakespearean quotes. I think he knew that it was best to not offer up any thoughts of your own because life was baffling and Shakespeare had already said all that needed saying.

A smile from my father (once or twice a year) was worth a million dollars.

Bob Dylan never comments much either. He hardly ever remarks on that which surrounds him. He doesn't waste words on stuff that will never change. People say what they want to believe.

In Chattanooga, Bob Dylan wore black and he led the band out to the stage after the show was finished. They didn't take a bow, they just looked off into the far roving distance in a yearning and deep way. They stood still for several minutes.

Recently, I got some really nice messages from a woman who knew my mother. This woman was a child when my mother was the housekeeper who looked after her and her family in their home on London Street in Dunedin. My mother was described as a glowing, warm and enthusiastic person who lit up the house as soon as she walked in in the mornings. These messages have buoyed me for a month now.

The older I get, the more I want to be close to my parents. Both of them are dead now of course, but each day I just get to see more of the genuine sense that they made. They didn't see any point in crying over spilt milk, they worked hard and they were as good as they possibly could be to each other and to the world. Nothing about them was a pose and they were simple and unaffected people.

That's worth a million likes.