Just saw this on AP. A variation on a classic Dylan story anyone might have ("Hi, I'm Bob"), but a 21st century redux ("He was acting very suspicious"). Recalls Johnny Cash's visit to Starkville, Mississippi long ago ("Just pickin' daisies"). Maybe Bob will do a show sometime for the inmates at Fed SuperMax.

I looked around the Internets for the story about Dylan being denied entry to the concert hall where he was scheduled to perform at that night. He had no I.D. and no ticket and the security guard didn't recognize who he was.

I have been listening to Bob's excellent radio show on Sirius satellite radio's "Deep Tracks" channel. It is a completely new way to engage his genius.

I am sure he did not raise a fuss about this, but just stayed his usual cool self until the cops figured it out for themselves.

I do object to calling him an "old man", but I suppose he is rather eccentric.

He's 68. That's pretty old.

I wonder if all those years of smoking pot has anything to do with his strange behavior?

Hey now, Jack Bog, we are all tracking towards 68 at some point or another and I don't intend on being "pretty old" when I get there even if you do.

All I can say is you cannot trust anyone under 30, it seems. ;-p

Subtly suggested, LucsAdvo: JackB has verged upon ageism and a pie in the mug.

Meanwhile, let Bob speak for himself:

"I ran right through the front door
Like a hobo sailor does
But it was just a funeral parlor
And the man asked me who I was

I repeated that my friends
Were all in jail, with a sigh
He gave me his card
He said, "Call me if they die"
I shook his hand and said goodbye
Ran out to the street
When a bowling ball came down the road
And knocked me off my feet
A pay phone was ringing
It just about blew my mind
When I picked it up and said hello
This foot came through the line

Well, by this time I was fed up
At tryin' to make a stab
At bringin' back any help
For my friends and Captain Arab
I decided to flip a coin
Like either heads or tails
Would let me know if I should go
Back to ship or back to jail
So I hocked my sailor suit
And I got a coin to flip
It came up tails
It rhymed with sails
So I made it back to the ship

Well, I got back and took
The parkin' ticket off the mast
I was ripping it to shreds
When this coastguard boat went past
They asked me my name
And I said, "Captain Kidd"
They believed me but
They wanted to know
What exactly that I did
I said for the Pope of Eruke
I was employed
They let me go right away
They were very paranoid"

The article's viewpoint: "It was pouring rain, Dylan was soaked and wandering alone, far from the traveling home of his entourage of tour buses."

Bob's viewpoint:

Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains,
I've walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways,
I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests,
I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans,
I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard,
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard,
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

When 30 was old, then 50 was impossibly old; closing in on 60 now, so 68 seems very close indeed, and not that old after all. Perceptions and perspectives change.

It seems to me that it is sad and dysfunctional when perspectives don't change. All these old guys who spiff up their teeth and buy hair pieces so their trophy wives don't leave. You get quite a display of this phenomenom and can almost breathe in the insecurity at places like the Kennedy School. A commenter here once intimated that anyone who would say anything negative about the Kennedy School had to be crazy, but to me it seems the obsession with youth is the craziness. In many other countries, people are appreciated whatever their ages.

He was so much older then, he's younger than that, now.