CIA Joan
I have been neck deep in an extended Joan Baez metaphor, and have reached a forbidden, yet unknown level of Joan. My best friend said, nice knowing you…
Lately I’ve been drunk. After walking home from the bars I laid in the yard under the moon with Baez Sings Dylan playing, smoking a cigarette which I said I quit. The grass and the warm night is like nothing else and I let him know this. He said that Bob was crazy for marrying Sara and that he would have married Joan, and went so far as to send me Diamonds & Rust which is practically an insult to steal from me like that. This isn’t Dylan sings Baez for fuck’s sake.
He knows he is Bob. Joan would tell me to not hate Bob, and he said that I will have a hard time with him if I hate Bob, which is the whole point, that I hate Bob because he is Bob and I have a hard time with him. I’m going to let the story tell itself he said, like some shit Bob would say because he was so good with words and keeping things vague. I don’t actually hate anyone, least of all Bob.
I listened to Street Legal the next day and thoroughly enjoyed it. In the morning I thought of my family and fell down a rabbit hole that led me to cold emailing and subsequently scheduling a zoom call with a first cousin once removed. He has spent years researching his own father; in this family the Wikipedia pages are many and the affections few. I stumbled across a declassified CIA correspondence with our name all over it. Of course I sent it to Bob and ex boyfriend #2. This same day I saw ex boyfriend #3 for the first time since the order of last fall, while I was driving with a few friends in the car- I was caught off guard by how little I cared. He always thought I was a spook myself and would be deeply triggered by my discovery. Something about all the men I’ve loved, they are the type to care about this sort of thing.
This cousin’s email back to me touches my heart- he is enthusiastic and suggested a time to talk the day after tomorrow. I am not sure that his own children share his passion for family history. As you get older, family members become real. Not just figures but complex individuals, with reaching adulthood yourself granting a certain authority to be told the truth about these things. My family has a tendency to reveal little about themselves. I’ve found out pieces of family lore through Twitter, and had to trace past my dad and to my grandfather to confirm it. The Dutch Calvinists are a modest bunch; God already knows of their past and future achievements, so what is the point of telling anyone else?