To our Milwaukee: I understand I left you in your week of need. Sure, you didn’t need me gonzo-ing adjacent to the RNC, but you could’ve used Barry with a bullhorn downtown to drown out some of the nonsense with song. Instead we escaped via Route 66 to Tulsa, Oklahoma, the home of Woody Guthrie’s and Bob Dylan’s archives. We hoped the road would lead to something better…did it happen? (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4.)

Day 5: Wednesday, July 18, from Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan Center, Tulsa OK

I awake in Tulsa, Oklahoma to sprinklers indiscriminately twisting water through the muggy morning sun as I remember last night’s dream:

I walk side by side through a hedgerow with the Republican Presidential candidate. I look over his frumpy shoulder for secret service protection. I don’t see any but I figure I’m safer than he is. He wants me to join his “messaging” team as a writer. He leaves me with some Donald Rumsfeld-type and indicates to him that I’ve been vetted. Rumsfeld asks if I practice any religion. I give an elusive answer. Rumsfeld agrees and presents their contract. The language is binding and life-strangling. Before I can consider if my plan to take them down from the inside is worth my future, somebody rappels through the window. It doesn’t go extraordinarily well, but it creates chaos for me to start running and I escape via the stairwell.

My subconscious may be set to subterfuge but I am giddy because we’re heading to the Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie Center today. I’m delusional from driving six hours a day, vibrating to the best lyrics of the 20th century whilst jabbering, navigating, eating poorly and drinking coffee far too late in the day, only to write something nonsensical until midnight each night and wake at 7 a.m. to do most all those things all over again only faster. So we head to our Tulsa, Oklahoma destination, filled with fortune from the helpful friends along the road, fueled with fear from Milwaukee and what we’d left behind, ready for hope and history along form and function for the future…

The past isn’t something we run to or away from, it’s something we run with, and there is no end to that road. Guthrie and Dylan carried a heavy weight so we could learn to call out injustices, so we could sing out in joy, or in protest, so we could bury the rag deep in our face when it’s time for our tears, so we could meet the ghosts of electricity and of Tom Joad, and to discover that you’re better than no one and no one is better than you. Dylan sang from the same podium as Dr. King spoke that day in 1963 and Bob evolved endlessly into an equal of Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Allen Ginsberg. Woody Guthrie taught a country to rage against the wicked machinery of fascism, created new words for workers worldwide, and invented Bob Dylan in the process. When you’re a true leader, you lead yourself…

Can We Be Led to Revise Ourselves?

Looking at the variants of “Tangled Up In Blue,” the perspective is slippery (from I to he), and Dylan does, as I do now and again, benefit from straying outside myself to see himself as clear as someone who has had him on her mind. In other words, why can’t WE as Americans revise our understandings, our beliefs and priorities in ways that can intersect and form complex goddamn tapestries like we’ve always imagined America to be capable of weaving? No, I am not suggesting I compromise my views or change my standards for living, but I know I am capable of making more useful connections. Dylan’s and Guthrie’s work inspires me to alter my perspective. For me, connection begins with taking a perspective that’s not my own and trying to imagine the jumbled wire of past, present, and future that created it. If Dylan can convert his ideas by revising, cutting, and adding words from songs that have not only lasted 60 years, but also are occasionally altered depending upon the night of his performance, why can’t we be forever evolving?

Let’s Talk

Our experiences build each upon the last to form a new staircase, some steps take larger leaps to make than others and yet we climb. I wonder if our climbing has us out of breath, missing the scene through the clouds in our heads? Is there a limit to the oxygen we share? Even though I ran from the RNC, I refuse to limit my supply of hope. When I speak of hope I speak not of leaders, or of parties, I speak of ourselves, as individuals. We, the microcosmic warriors of all kinds and beliefs who raise ourselves and our children to say kindness and the high road include room for dismissal and absolute refusal; they’re called boundaries. If you set boundaries ’round your microcosm while accepting that differences don’t mean you must draw daggers, you can find a world that works, a world that has harmony…not perfection, but harmony. Listen to The Everly Brothers or The Jayhawks, The Roaches, or better yet Miles Davis with John Coltrane. There’s room for differences in voice as long as when you speak you do no harm…I guess I said that.