Due to a schedule change in my harried, overworked world, my cousin and I weren't able to celebrate Dylan's 70th yesterday, so we're doing it today instead!

We'll be watching Scorsese's No Direction Home; we're having "road food' for lunch -- burgers, fries, Cokes. And we're having a little birthday cake with candles in the shape of the number "70" on it! I almost went so far as to buy party hats, but you know -- my cousin suffers me willingly through a lot of stuff, but I didn't think she was going to go willingly down that "party hat" road...

I noticed, though, while I was in the "birthday crap" aisle at the store, that they even have little birthday pirate hats now -- black, with the skull & cross bones (you remember how many pirates of the Caribbean are in that Scorsese documentary, right? ha ha). But then I thought: Okay, Marilyn, now you're getting really far afield here. Just buy the fucking candles and get out of here.

Yes, I love Bob Dylan. I have several photos of Bob Dylan taped to the wall in front of my desk. I think that every one of them was taken in 1965...

Back when I was a wee bonny 15 year-old and confined to a mental hospital for about 5 months, that awesome record Blood on the Tracks was released. Someone brought a copy into the hospital and a small group of us were listening to it rapturously on a record player, and suddenly a staff member came in, really angrily, and said, "Turn that noise off!!!" Christ, it was right in the middle of Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts!!! One of my most favorite songs ever (well, I didn't know it at the time, it was the first time I was ever hearing the song).

I also recall one time, being on a road trip through West Virginia with my adoptive father and Tangled Up in Blue was on the car radio. I was lying in the backseat (seatbelts weren't a law yet -- yes, I'm that old!), and totally digging that song on the radio, when my adoptive father suddenly changed the station really aggressively, saying something about not being able to stand "that noise."

Well, here's something incredible & bliss-filled: When I finally found my biological father, when I was 28 years old, we spent two weeks together in his trailer in the desert in Nevada and we UN-ENDINGLY listened to a cassette tape of Blood on the Tracks the entire time I was there! Over and over and over. He loved that album!! Talk about validation, gang! In the mornings, we'd sit in the little kitchen at the breakfast bar-thingie; I'd drink percolated coffee that tore through my nervous system, while he drank a can of beer and smoked a cigarette, and we'd listen to Blood on the Tracks as the lovely sunny morning in the desert got underway. Some of the best memories of my entire life.

And here's something else. I still listen to that very same cassette tape sometimes when I'm driving around in my car -- twenty-two years later!! (Luckily I have a rusty 1997 Camry, or I wouldn't be able to do this, right???)  My biological father passed away 12 years ago. Isn't it wonderful to have such a treasure, like an old cassette tape, to not only remember people by, but to tell the story of our lives? The stories we really want to tell; not the stories that are thrust upon us!!

Okay, gang, keep that in mind as you boldly sally forth into this awesome Wednesday!! I gotta scoot. Thanks for visiting. Peace & light, gang.