Meet Me in the Morning

I'm not a morning person; I'm a fucking amazing morning person.  My first class this semester is at 8:00, and I live 90 minutes away from my job.  Silicon Valley, the overpopulated land of my birth (ugh), lies between me and my paycheck; hence, I'm up well before I would ever want to be.  Want vs. need: sometimes you have to set up your life against your urges.  Hey, but then you learn new things.  One is that I relish the alone time in my little red car, when the sun is coming up, and I have Complete Control (CC) over the sound system.  I get to DJ my life, and the songs that come up, sometimes randomly (thank you ITunes), re-blow my mind*.  This morning, it was Bob Dylan, the man I love to hate.  The terrible angel, in the summer of his art, communicating to me in parallel fashion, from Blood on the Tracks.  It throws me back to another early morning, around 1999, when the demon of boredom + hormones drove me and my co-pilot Miah off to Galveston with the Wrong Boys.  Many boys are wrong, but these two deserved the capital letters.  (Of course, you could have said the same thing about me and Miah in this case: years later, another wrong boy told another to stay away from us, because "those two are trouble."  I totally agree with him.)  Anyhoo, it wasn't so much the Wrongness of the Boys I mean to emphasize here (though sometimes people are so Wrong, they deserve a tip of the hate...I meant hat), but the way the music cleaved to the moment, crystallized it, gave both Boys and music a kind of glow that only finds amplification through art. Whatthefuckever.

If I get more detailed, my husband will burn my dinner.  Anyway, so I'm listening (probably appropriately) to "Idiot Wind" on the way to a totally normal job, through the hills of Central California, still green, with cows a la those compellingly processed Eyvind lithographs, drinking more coffee than is probably healthy out of a mason jar, marveling at the exquisite eastern light and the tule fog lying in the bottom of the gulch running along the freeway, kind of grateful that I survived my 20s, still surprised at where I am now, and wondering excitedly what's ahead (hopefully not a semi-truck).

William Stafford, one of my touchstone poets, routinely rose before dawn to write.  I have often thought of him on my way to work, wishing that I were at home to do the very same thing...though I know that if I were lucky enough to be at home, I would be asleep.  Someday I will be old and insomniac, please?

But back to blood on the tracks.  There is some behind all of my dearest friends and me.  It puts the bitter in the sweet, and during this sweeter time in my life, I (conveniently) have the courage to acknowledge it.  In fact, it's chilling when you are close with someone, and you realize that in spite of it, the relationship wouldn't survive a single fight:  that you end up spending a good deal of time avoiding the conflict because you know what is bound to happen :(  Boo.  Not to glorify conflict, because it truly sucks (thinking of a certain summer in Amsterdam: sorry about that, Rosa), but to acknowledge that when you have recovered with someone, and truly forgiven each other (not always possible, I know), it's a unique kind of triumph.

I think this, anyway.  Bob Dylan is a kind of consolation for the unforgiven, I suppose.  

*Got to stop using this phrase.