Sometimes I fall asleep in church. That probably sounds more middle aged than rebellious but it is not intended to be either. Nor is it intended as any sort of indictment of the people doing the preaching. From time to time I just get tired and God knows I can be cranky when I am tired. So rather than be an asshat, I choose to do some deep meditation during the sermon.
Which I hope does not happen around the time the Subdude has digested our conversation from last night into a homiletic essay. The topic of discussion was ostensibly the appearance of Biblical allusions in Grateful Dead lyrics. It quickly became about Jerry. And going to shows. With some drugs thrown in. Along with some sex. All of which I get not because I was the biggest Deadhead in the room but because the whole world which surrounded the Dead was an alternative society which saved the life of a lot of good people I know.
Which is to say that they were lost souls, people who felt marginalized or isolated in a culture that held values they did not share. They thought they were total goners until they found a like minded group of people at shows. That I have found this experience in other places doesn’t make my group any more valuable than theirs. The original question, however, is one we never quite got around to answering: the one about the lyrics and the Bible.
There are plenty of direct references to choose from, but to be honest my closest association has nothing directly Biblical to recommend it. The song I keep coming back to is “Dire Wolf,” a Garcia / Robert Hunter composition. It’s a song about a possible apocalypse, albeit one of a fairly individual nature. (One might ask if “the apocalypse” is not more a story of one person’s mind than of the whole world.) It’s also almost a folk tune, a simple melody and a simple story. In the end, the Dire Wolf does what dire wolves do. There is not much the narrator can do to change the nature of a natural being, and there does not seem to be too much grief about it. Maybe what I like is the idea that, even though Armageddon is a’comin’, we should not worry too much about something we are powerless over in the first place.