May 1st: Amazing news: I just found out that Roddy’s new little league coach is none other than music legend Bob Dylan! The times certainly are a-changin’! I guess when you have 10 Grammys, sold over 100 million records, and earned a Nobel prize, the only thing left to do is coach my son’s shitty little league team that can’t win a goddamn game. I have high hopes that Bob Dylan is the one to turn this team around, though.
May 3rd: Coach Dylan’s first order of business was to rename the team from The Bulldogs to The Tambourine Men. Then he made some changes to the uniform. The image of a man dancing beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands is stunningly evocative imagery in a song, but unfortunately, when printed on a uniform, it just looks ugly.
The hats are worse, though. Instead of wearing baseball caps, Coach Dylan has all the kids wearing these weird old hats he found at a garage sale. Every week they’ve got a different one. Last week they had Union soldier hats and this week, everybody is wearing cowboy hats adorned with flowers. Honestly, they would look kind of cool if a single one of these hats was made for a child’s head. Roddy’s is too large and covers his eyes, but it imbues him with a sense of confidence I’ve never seen in him before. It’s intimidating.
May 16th: Today was opening day and my confidence is a bit shaken in Coach Dylan’s abilities. A lot of the parents got upset with how he spoke to our kids. For instance, he keeps pointing to his pencil mustache and saying, “You see this? If you want to be an athlete, your waist should be as skinny as my mustache.” Roddy has been doing 400 crunches a night because he’s afraid his waist is going to start looking wide like Frank Zappa’s mustache. I keep telling him he’s only 10, but he won’t listen; he wants to make Coach Dylan proud.
June 5th: Well, Coach Dylan got ejected from the game again today. Every time Coach Dylan disagrees with the umpire’s calls, he tells them, “Sometimes it is not enough to understand what the rules mean. Instead, you must understand what the rules don’t mean in order to comprehend the nature of things.” No one has any idea what the hell he’s talking about.
He’s also stopped wearing a whistle around his neck in favor of a harmonica. Unfortunately, the kids all love how loud the harmonica sounds when he blows it, and it makes them all start dancing. They have committed 700 dance-related errors and there've only been 3 games this season.
June 13th: Coach Dylan’s practices don’t seem like an efficient use of time. Instead of having the kids catch pop-ups, field grounders, or run the bases, he gathers everybody in the dugout and doesn’t let them leave until someone “exposes a truth previously unknown to even the speaker themselves.” How does that make the kids better ballplayers?
Yet though his methods are unorthodox, somehow the team is thriving. They’ve completely turned the second half of the season around and are on a streak as hot as the 2-year stretch where Dylan released Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde.
June 20th: I don’t like the influence Coach Dylan has had on Roddy. The other day, he stayed up all night high out of his mind on amphetamines writing poetry about Joan Baez. He certainly didn’t learn that behavior from me. I work for Home Depot as a guy that wanders around the store complaining about how badly I fucked up my deck to make the other dads who are shopping feel superior to me, and therefore, spend more money. I know I’m no rockstar, but it’s honest work and there’s no shame in it.
June 30th: Well, Roddy has successfully emancipated from my custody and is now Coach Dylan’s stepson. He had the championship game right after the court made their ruling and he went 4-4 and hit for the cycle to ensure the team’s victory. The worst part is Roddy is now Jakob Dylan’s stepbrother and I keep seeing Instagram posts of him jamming out with The Wallflowers.
Coach Dylan is having an end of the season pizza party today where he has promised to perform some music and I’m crashing it since I didn’t get a formal invitation. Unfortunately, he has made it very clear that he won’t play any of his '60s stuff, and instead will just be playing the original song he wrote for the 2002 dramedy, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Still, how many chances are you going to get to see a private concert from Bob Dylan, the folk icon and stepfather to your biological son? I can’t miss this opportunity.