Don’t Think Twice, Turn Right

Few media memes irk me as much as the one that says, “if you write about Bob Dylan, you must paraphrase his lyrics in service of a stupid pun.” But that mind virus is epidemic, so don’t hold my symptom against me.

On to the news. In the span of about 15 years, he went from folk to electric, then country, then fundamentalist Christian. Well, Bob Dylan has packed nearly as much excitement into the summer of 2009. First, he got picked up for lurking around New Jersey, next he put out a Christmas album, and now the coup de grace: Bob Dylan is in negotiations to lend his golden voice to your Global Positioning Satellite machine.

A friend of a friend suggested that this development may lead to driving-while-masturbating fatalities among the Bobhead faithful. I take a cheerier view. Some potential driving instructions from the voice of a generation (of motorists) à la the 1965 benzedrine clown:

You gotta make a choice, man. On one side, there’s…there’s McDonald’s, but if you use the drive-through, you’re not…you’re not driving through anything. It’s a whisper of a tragedy and you’re the one behind the wheeeeeeel. You could turn left, man, but you don’t really know what left is, do you? Left isn’t a direction; you don’t go left. True left is a hobo dropping an enema bag into the collection plate at Our Lady of the Perpetual Grotesqueries. You have reached your destination.